"And another boy!"
It’s a cry that has been echoed countless joyous times as parents, doctors and midwives have welcomed newborns, viewed ultra-sounds and placed happy, excited phone calls to jubilant friends and family. I’ve said it myself, pumping my fist wildly in the air and trying not to be too exultant. But those memories will be forever darkened for me now. Because now I've heard it said by a medical assistant with quiet enthusiasm and subtle self-satisfaction that was impossible to reconcile with the off handed and almost bored way that he was picking through what remained of the tiny body that was spread between two petri dishes on the counter in front of him. "I can’t find the legs," he had said with mild curiosity and even milder interest before being able to conclusively identify the dismembered little body in front him, "And another boy!" Did you read that? He could tell by looking that this was a baby boy. "Do you want an eyeball?" asked the doctor next to him. That means the baby boy’s eyes were already formed. This was no faceless, soulless tissue mass. The doctor affirmed that herself when she showed her visitors the petri dishes, "It’s a baby," she said with a flourish, and that baby had eyes and he was a boy. This wasn't a scene from a sick horror movie. It didn't happen in a Nazi concentration camp. This didn't spring from the diseased mind of some horrible person doing unspeakable things in secret. This happened in a brightly lit room, in the presence of witnesses and under the guise of medicine in a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado. You can watch the video here. The news has been full of this story since it broke. All of the usual players have rushed to their corners and they are all making the same claims and moves that have ultimately never changed anything so far. I resisted watching the Center for Medial Progress investigative videos targeting Planned Parenthood for some time. I did not want those images in my mind. I did not want to feel the intense emotions and the helplessness that would follow. Our world can already be so ugly and barbaric that I hesitated to ingest anymore. And it’s not like it would change anything. I have believed my whole life that abortion is an abomination and an indelible stain on our nation, one that we will pay dearly to have blotted out. I couldn’t change that and watching those videos was only going to upset me. It was a line of reasoning that cowards have used to justify inaction for all of time. It doesn’t sound very convincing when you watch a doctor push a baby boy’s eyes around a petri dish and cautiously price them in $50 - $75 range. She added in his brains and kidneys and estimated the sum total of that baby boy’s value to be $200. She defended pricing the child by each organ as an incentive to efficiency. "I think the per item thing works a little better because we can see how much we can get out of it," she observed. She looked that little dead boy in the eyes and offered to sell what was left of him for $200, ostensibly for the conduct of life-saving research. She offered to sell this child she had most likely killed herself for "life-saving research." The irony wasn’t lost on her though and she apologetically admitted it was a subterfuge by explaining that, "…putting it under the research gives us a little bit of a, a little sort of overhang over the whole thing." "And another boy!" I keep remembering one of the times that I uttered that phrase myself. My wife and I were staring at an ultra-sound monitor. We had just learned that we would soon be receiving another son. I was exultant. This would give me one more son than my father, a silly thought but one I enjoyed. As we looked at the tiny body on the monitor he turned and looked right at us. We had a clear view of his face and we both were shocked. There in that grainy, standard, black and white ultra-sound we recognized the face of our older son. And that wasn’t just some kind of hysterical new parent fantasy. Even now people will ask us if the boys are twins. My wife remembers seeing the ultra-sound of one of my step-daughters and being amazed at much she looked like her father. These ultra-sounds are taken at twenty weeks, in the middle of the second trimester, the approximate age this nameless baby boy was when he was ripped apart in his mother’s womb, suctioned out and dumped in a petri dish to have his eyes sold for $50-$75. You could already see what he would look like. When that doctor looked that child in the eyes she could have said if he looked like his father or his mother. Or at least she could have if he had not have been subjected to a procedure that left his head, in her words, "Blasted out." Recognizing that the baby’s brain would not be useful for "life-saving research" in that condition, she hypothesized that a child further along would be easier to extract, "So I don’t think it would be so war torn." Of course Planned Parenthood maintains that they have broken no laws, an indictment less of them than of our laws. Imagine the perversity of ripping a child apart with forceps, nonchalantly picking through his remains and then quibbling about whether you are selling his organs or being reimbursed for them. If the brutal dismemberment and horrible ending of that tiny life is not immoral then why would we balk at the price? Can that really be what separates this child’s death from being illegal, how we allocate his organs? That doctor looked into that baby boy’s eyes and told those around her, "Here’s some organs for you, they’re all attached. Here’s a stomach, kidney, heart and adrenal…" but somehow we’re supposed to take comfort in the fact that those organs weren’t for sale, they were just available for donation after the payment of a reasonable fee. How can that possibly make a difference? If we can justify drawing and quartering that baby in a manner not seen in medieval torture chambers then why would it matter how we dispose of his parts? That doctor should have been able to ask if the buyers were going to pay with cash or credit and whether they preferred paper or plastic bags. If you can justify what happened to that baby boy in your mind then why should it matter if he was sold or donated? The chances are that, like me, you were not going to watch those videos. Like me you knew what you would be seeing. Like me you don’t want to think about it. But you have to. It’s being done in your name. Your tax dollars are flowing to these clinics. Donations made to Planned Parenthood are tax exempt. When that baby boy was shredded in that clinic his death certificate might as well have been stamped U.S.A. in red, white and blue. Currently there are over a million abortions a year in America. There have been over 57 million performed since the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. That’s roughly an abortion every 30 seconds. Every 30 seconds we kill another child, some of them as old as 24 weeks, viable outside the womb. Every 30 seconds a child with organs, a face, fingers and toes that can be counted is killed, usually because they were inconvenient to their mother. Every 30 seconds a callous medical assistant will intone, "and another boy." Every 30 seconds a doctor who has sworn to do no harm will gesture cheerily to a petri dish and announce, "It’s a baby." And they’re doing it in your name and with your money. If you stand by and do nothing then they are doing it with your blessing. The least you can do is ask Congress and the president to stop giving your money and your sanction to this barbarity. The least you can do is ask some hard questions about why roughly 20 % of American pregnancies are aborted. We kill 20% of our children before they ever see the light of day because they might inconvenience us. This can’t continue. We can’t go on like this. No society can kill its children and survive. I can’t even bring myself to ask God to have mercy on us. All I can do is ask that He protect the innocent and punish the guilty for His name’s sake for how can He claim to be a righteous Judge before the nations if He lets us spill so much innocent blood? There is an online petition you can sign here. Its the least you can do.
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AuthorThe Revolting Man lives at the end of a dirt road at the bottom of a hill at the top of a valley in the foothills of the Appalachians. Archives
December 2016
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