I want to take a break from N.T. Wright, and take some time to comment on the recent scandal involving Planned Parenthood and their harvesting of organs from aborted babies for profit.
Obviously, one of the key things N.T. Wright emphasizes is the idea of the New Creation and the redemption and transformation of human beings to fulfill their vocation to be image-bearers of God who care for His good creation. What that means is there is a sacredness to all of God’s creation, especially human beings who are created in His image. That is what lies at the heart of the abortion debate over the past 40 years: what should we as a nation value more, the right to choose to end the human life of the unborn, or the right to life of the unborn?
Now, it’s very easy to immediately get entrenched in one of two ideological views: that of the extreme Right that opposes all abortion of any kind whatsoever, and that would charge women with murder if they had an abortion, and that of the extreme Left that opposes any kind of restriction whatsoever on abortion. Most Americans, I believe, fall into neither of those camps, but it is the heated rhetoric of those two extremes that dominates the issue and prevents any kind of resolution from being achieved. A few weeks ago, progressive Christian Rachel Held Evans wrote about this very issue on her blog. I’m leaving a link to her blog here:
http://rachelheldevans.com/blog/why-progressive-christians-should-care-about-abortion-gosnell
In it, Evans makes this very point: the extremes have made it impossible to address the issue in any meaningful way.
My view on the subject is basically this: in the past, before modern medicine and technology, nature had a way of, for lack of a better phrase, “killing off” many human lives that were conceived. Miscarriages, disease, etc. routinely wiped out probably half of all babies and children. With the advances in modern science though, we as human beings have been able to not only “fight back” against nature’s deadly agenda, we have the ability to actually prevent conception from happening in the first place. For the most part, through modern medicine, we have been able (to use Genesis terminology) to “gain dominion” over nature in this area.
As image-bearers of God, we have a responsibility and vocation to protect human life and hold it sacred—that would warrant against the extreme Left’s demand for abortion on demand. But at the same time, we have the ability, through birth control, to give women the right and ability to not get pregnant in the first place, and thus prevent the need for most abortions to begin with. Given the reality that we live in a secular culture, and that not everyone is a Christian and therefore should be expected to adhere to Christian morality, I’d like to propose this solution: make birth control, contraception, and even the “morning-after pill” readily available to everyone, and by doing so, eliminate the need for the surgical procedure of abortion completely, except in extreme cases such as when the life of the mother is at stake. Neither extreme position completely gets what it wants, but the very need for the abortion procedure is largely eliminated.
Regardless of the specific issue of abortion, though, what Planned Parenthood is clearly doing is beyond the pale. Regardless of your particular stance on abortion, you have to admit that the harvesting of aborted baby organs is bone-chilling. To hear doctors from Planned Parenthood talk so cavalierly about how they crush certain parts of the fetus to ensure healthy organs to harvest is Nazi-esque. And I’m not over-exaggerating: it is the chilling and logical conclusion to a mindset that completely devalues human life.
It does not surprise me at all that the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, was a militant eugenicist who wanted to use forced sterilization and abortion to “purify the race.” She was also a racist who wanted to have her clinics set up in black neighborhoods, so the “human weeds” could be dealt with. The eugenicist program she advocated was the same mindset that Hitler used, and it had the same goal: purify the race. In both instances, the blatant disregard for the sanctity of human life is nothing short of evil.
What is perhaps even more chilling is that, in light of the recent revelations about Planned Parenthood, there are those who actually are attacking Fox News for covering it, the group that got everything on camera, and are actually defending what Planned Parenthood is doing. “What they’re doing is perfectly legal,” they say. Even if it is, that doesn’t make is moral. The gassing of 6 million Jews was “perfectly legal” in Hitler’s Germany too. It still was the work of evil men. The same holds true for Planned Parenthood.
I believe that the majority of level-headed Americans, Christians and non-Christians alike, will eventually say to both extremes, “Enough is enough,” and resolve the issue of abortion. But when it comes to the harvesting and selling of fetus organs for profit, I don’t see how you can have a conscience and still endorse or defend such a practice. If we as a country look the other way and refuse to address such a horrible practice, we will be in the same position as the German people who looked the other way while the Nazis made soap from the fat of its Jewish victims.
