O’Reilly’s is great!
Whatever part for my car or truck I need, the helpful, friendly folks at O’Reilly’s will have it in stock or they can order it. Considering that my truck, a daily driver, is 36 years old and my car is 50, O’Reilly’s has been a lifesaver on countless occasions.
As an auto supply store, they’ve got all kinds of parts.
So does Planned Parenthood.
Even staunch pro-choice advocates had to grimace at the breezy, nonchalant discussions recently caught on undercover video. Officials of Planned Parenthood talked about harvesting tiny body parts of unborn babies as if they were making after-dinner plans.
Or stopping by O’Reilly’s
Even the liberal Washington Post conceded the videos were “hard to watch”.
Planned Parenthood’s senior director of medical services spoke of the desirability of a “17-weeker” because he or she was “more likely to yield what we needed.” By the second trimester, the baby had grown big enough to offer “the tissue that you want”. A fourth of the agency’s abortions in Los Angeles are performed in the second trimester.
The overwhelming majority of Americans believe abortions in the second trimester should be illegal. But they are not.
And so over drinks in a restaurant Planned Parenthood folks talk about using “less crunchy” techniques when pulling a baby from the womb of its mother so as not to damage key organs. Someone observes that “intact fetal cadavers” can be had by altering the abortion procedure.
This is so tragic and sickening that it is indeed “hard to watch”.
We all should sympathize with young women with unexpected or problem pregnancies. We should support medical research in the relentless pursuit of cures for dreaded diseases. Fetal tissue, the argument goes, is invaluable to this laudatory medical effort. Less commendable is the greed and callous ethics that lead to the despicable trafficking of infant body parts for money. A doctor once remarked that this profitable business was like “the goose that lays the golden eggs”.
When the United States Senate, in response to the videos, debated a bill to defund Planned Parenthood, the predictable arguments were heard. This agency offers a wide-range of services to improve women’s health, including contraception that prevents unwanted pregnancies and abortions. The legislation, however, would have shifted resources to other health care providers that don’t specialize in harvesting body parts.
The bill was defeated in a close vote but the deep moral concerns are left unresolved.
When a society begins to devalue the lives of its weakest and most defenseless members, its collective conscience, in the biblical term, is seared. Abortion has become so commonplace for so long that it was inevitable that the bodies of unborn babies would become commodities, means to a greater end, useful instruments of medical research and experimentation.
Fetuses not babies; tissue, not people.
Morality never exists in a vacuum, nor does it remain unaffected by choices and opinion.
That which is at first objected to, if seen frequently, becomes in time tolerated and, if it lasts long enough, can be approved of. Familiarity too often breeds a cavalier moral indifference.
The Planned Parenthood videos jolted our awareness of what abortion on demand is and what it involves.
Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts accused abortion opponents of wanting to take our country back to “the 1950s or the 1890s”. But if it’s a historic parallel the senator seeks, it would be the 1850s.
On March 6, 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its infamous decision in the Dred Scott v. Sandford case. Dred Scott, a former slave, had escaped his master and sought legal recognition of his freedom and citizenship.
But according to Chief Justice Roger Taney and a majority of his colleagues, the authors of the Constitution had viewed all blacks as “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect” (emphasis added).
Black people weren’t people at all. They were common chattel property, just like a wagon or a cow.
Democratic presidents Pierce and Buchanan and presidential nominee Stephen A. Douglas all shared this view.
When it comes to the rights and personhood of unborn children in the 21st century, Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton and others in their party are the natural and direct political descendants of Pierce, Buchanan and Douglas.
The trafficking in the body parts of murdered infants in the womb conjures up the diabolical heartless experiments of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele at Auschwitz. His favorite experiments were on twin children, without regard to pain or consequence. After all, this was for medical science and these children were only Jews.
As you and I prepare ourselves for another presidential election, when abortion will again be debated, let’s remember and courageously affirm the preciousness and beauty of all human life. It’s precious to us because it’s precious to the God who made us.
“You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body,” the psalmist marvels before his Creator, “and knit me together in my mother’s womb” (Psalm 139:13, NLT).
You and I are “fearfully and wonderfully made”.
We are God’s work of heart.
So is every unborn child.
May God bless you and your family.
A Word of Grace 