On July 14 a video was released of Dr. Deborah Nucatola, the senior director of medical services for Planned Parenthood, discussing the harvesting of fetal body parts while sipping wine and eating a salad. The video went viral and part of the fallout has been a call to defund governmental support of Planned Parenthood that gets an annual paycheck of about five hundred million dollars from taxpayers every year. Presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton initially called the video “disturbing” but quickly regained her political composure making a video defending Planned Parenthood. She said, “When politicians talk about defunding Planned Parenthood they’re talking about blocking millions of women, men and young people from life-saving preventive care.” Dr. C. Everett Koop, Surgeon General of the United States during the Reagan Administration, made it clear there is a difference in aborting a pregnancy, and aborting a baby. He said, “Protection of the life of the mother as an excuse for an abortion is a smoke screen. In my thirty-six years in pediatric surgery I have never known of one instance where the child had to be aborted to save the mother’s life.” Most abortions “are performed just for convenience.” Koop goes on to say, “When a woman is pregnant, her obstetrician takes on the care of two patients, the mother-to-be and the unborn baby. If, toward the end of the pregnancy complications arise that threaten the mother’s health, he will take the child by inducing labor or performing a Caesarian section. His intention is still to save the life of both the mother and the baby. The baby will be premature. The baby is never willfully destroyed because the mother’s life is in danger.”
Like Dr. Koop said, aborting a baby to save the mother’s life is a “smoke screen” and is done for “convenience.” Planned Parenthood is not offering “life-saving preventive care” as Hillary Clinton claims; they are contributing to the slaughter of the unborn at the rate of about 1.5 million each year. In Roe v. Wade the Supreme Court of the United States feigned ignorance of when life begins, but it takes a live male sperm impregnating a live female egg for conception to occur. We know that within thirty seconds of conception half of the father’s genes and half of the mother’s genes unite in the zygote to create a unique nascent human being. We cannot say we do not know when human life begins with the knowledge medical science reveals. The Psalmist put it this way, “Your eyes have seen my unformed substance; and in Your book were all written the days that were ordained for me, when as yet there was not one of them,” Psalm 139:16. Will the recent revelations end funding for Planned Parenthood and bring the demise of abortion on demand? As long as conception continues without conscience there will continue to be a demand for convenience. Planned Parenthood is far from being dead; I wish I could say the same for the unborn.