Bioethics

The Seventh Planned Parenthood Video: Ordinary, Everyday Evil

Author Amy K. Hall Published on 08/20/2015

The latest Planned Parenthood video is so evil I’m having trouble handling it.

A former StemExpress tech tells of her supervisor playfully making an aborted baby’s heart start beating again. Of having to cut the baby’s face open in order to get the prized brain ordered by researchers. Was the heart still beating when they did that? Maybe. It’s unclear. Thankfully, there’s no video of either of these things. But you do see a live baby moving on a tray, and that’s enough.

Or, at least, it should be enough.

I can’t stop thinking about the people doing these jobs day in and day out. And of those who watch the videos and either yawn or continue to defend Planned Parenthood. And of how entwined this industry is with the medical community. I just heard that parents who go through IVF can sign a consent form to donate their leftover embryonic children to research. Now that I’ve seen what Planned Parenthood is doing, I can’t help but think: Are IVF doctors getting compensated by researchers for providing them with embryonic human beings? Are they pushing parents to create more children so they’ll be able to provide researchers with more and get more benefits in return? This doesn’t seem like an outlandish speculation anymore. There’s money to be had selling human beings.

How far does this go? How much of our entire society is connected to this barbarity? What are we letting happen all around us, every day?

It’s a horror to realize what I should have always known to be true: There was no special evil in Nazi Germany. The human heart is evil. Either the norms of a society keep the evil human heart in check, or they give permission for that evil to be unleashed. But it’s there. In every society. Waiting.

The doctors in the Planned Parenthood videos seem like normal people because they are normal people. It’s normal for human beings to take their cues about proper behavior from the people around them. Everyone around you is cutting babies’ faces off like it’s no different morally from using the copy machine? Well then, it must be normal and okay! How did people shuffle papers for Nazis in thousands of offices? This is how. This is how an entire culture loses its ability to see the evil right in front of its nose. All it sees are regular people, working in ordinary offices, doing something everybody knows about, and surely something so commonplace couldn’t be evil, right? Meanwhile, the evil spreads its tentacles into multiple areas of life (economics, medicine, etc.) until we’re convinced we can’t manage without it. We have so many reasons to keep it around, you see. Like slavery.

We need to rip this evil out of the fabric of our society. Because it’s so intertwined with our way of life, it may rip some things we’ve come to regard as comforts out with it. We may lose some opportunities for research. We may have more children than we were expecting. We may have less control over designing our dream lives. But take a step back for one minute and look at the baby moving on the tray. Look at it! This is the moral cost of those “comforts,” and it is dark and ugly evil. I pray we are not yet too far gone to see it.