Friday, July 17, 2015

Video exposes abortion and that makes us uncomfortable

In light of an undercover video showing Deborah Nucatola, Planned Parenthood’s senior director for medical services, cavalierly discussing how she aborts children with the goal of saving specific organs to provide to researchers, both Tim Carney and Timothy Stanley write how the video washes away the euphemisms pro-abortion groups use and the general public often accept when talking about abortion. 

In a CNN column, Stanley writes,

Planned Parenthood is sensitive to us getting the wrong idea about what it does. But we're sensitive about not having to find out.

Whoever thinks about the reality of abortion unless they actually have to participate in one? Whoever considers the crushed organs: the hearts, lungs and livers? We all prefer to mask this truth behind euphemisms, of which Planned Parenthood is simply the market leader. Reproductive health centers. Medical services. Procedures. Anything but calling it what abortion really is -- the obliteration of a fetus.

Now, we may argue that sometimes abortion is necessary or a matter of privacy between a woman and her doctor. But that shouldn't stop us from being honest about it. On the contrary, what's troubling about modern society is its habit of dressing up difficult things in comforting language -- discouraging people from dwelling too hard on the realities of what they are doing.

In his column for the Washington Examiner, Carney writes,

If you consider literally that euphemism for a human baby's body parts — "the products of conception" — it describes President Obama, the reader of this column, Dr. Nucatola, and all her corporate partners just as accurately as it describes the flesh the abortionists are selling, whether it be at cost or for profit.

But that sort of euphemism points us toward the reason much of the major media has steered clear of this story as much as possible (it will get far less press than it deserves). Abortion is grisly and barbaric. When we talk about it in detail, we are reminded that it involves taking a human life with a scalpel, scissors or forceps.

When an abortion is over, the abortionist has extinguished a life. Inconveniently, the body remains — a head, two hands, kidneys, a liver and a heart.

Many in our society have come to accept abortion as something which should be legal because they are willing to avert their eyes from what abortion really is and what abortion does to the body of a developing human being.