“And the second commandment of the Teaching; you shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is born.” – Didache (A.D. 80-140) ch. 2
Last week, on July 31, 2015, my oldest daughter, Patience, and I held signs at the Planned Parenthood: Fort Collins Surgical Center across the street from Colorado State University. One day prior, on July 30, David Daleiden of The Center for Medical Progress released undercover footage showing “Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains’ Vice President and Medical Director, Dr. Savita Ginde, negotiating a fetal body parts deal, agreeing multiple times to illicit pricing per body part harvested, and suggesting ways to avoid legal consequences.” PPRM (Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains) is a “wealthy, multi-state Planned Parenthood affiliate that does over 10,000 abortions per year. PPRM has a contract to supply aborted fetal tissue to Colorado State University in Fort Collins.”
The Center for Medical Progress has released a series of undercover videos documenting Planned Parenthood’s sale of aborted fetal parts. For example, in the above mentioned video, “Planned Parenthood VP Says Fetuses May Come Out Intact, Agrees Payments Specific to the Specimen”:
actors posing as representatives from a human biologics company meet with Ginde at the abortion-clinic headquarters of PPRM in Denver to discuss a potential partnership to harvest fetal organs. When the actors request intact fetal specimens, Ginde reveals that in PPRM’s abortion practice, “Sometimes, if we get, if someone delivers before we get to see them for a procedure, then we are intact.”
Since PPRM does not use digoxin or other feticide in its 2nd trimester procedures, any intact deliveries before an abortion are potentially born-alive infants under federal law (1 USC 8).
“We’d have to do a little bit of training with the providers or something to make sure that they don’t crush” fetal organs during 2nd trimester abortions, says Ginde, brainstorming ways to ensure the abortion doctors at PPRM provide usable fetal organs.
When the buyers ask Ginde if “compensation could be specific to the specimen?” Ginde agrees, “Okay.” Later on in the abortion clinic’s pathological laboratory, standing over an aborted fetus, Ginde responds to the buyer’s suggestion of paying per body part harvested, rather than a standard flat fee for the entire case: “I think a per-item thing works a little better, just because we can see how much we can get out of it.”
The sale or purchase of human fetal tissue is a federal felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison or a fine of up to $500,000 (42 U.S.C. 289g-2). Federal law also requires that no alteration in the timing or method of abortion be done for the purposes of fetal tissue collection (42 U.S.C. 289g-1).
Ginde also suggests ways for Planned Parenthood to cover-up its criminal and public relations liability for the sale of aborted body parts. “Putting it under ‘research’ gives us a little bit of an overhang over the whole thing,” Ginde remarks. “If you have someone in a really anti state who’s going to be doing this for you, they’re probably going to get caught.”
Ginde implies that PPRM’s lawyer, Kevin Paul, is helping the affiliate skirt under the fetal tissue law: “He’s got it figured out that he knows that even if, because we talked to him in the beginning, you know, we were like, ‘We don’t want to get called on,’ you know, ‘selling fetal parts across states.’” The buyers ask, “And you feel confident that they’re building those layers?” to which Ginde replies, “I’m confident that our Legal will make sure we’re not put in that situation.”
As the buyers and Planned Parenthood workers identify body parts from last fetus in the path lab, a Planned Parenthood medical assistant announces: “Another boy!”
As voices for the unborn, we held signs with a number of other people outside of Planned Parenthood in Fort Collins, Colorado, across the street from CSU. Our signs read, “Abortion is murder,” and, “A person is a person no matter how small.” Others were with us including Kevin Williams, the producer of Conceived in Rape & Other Exceptions (a documentary edited and distributed by Holy Bible Prophecy). Another held a sign which said, “Babies are murdered here.” And yet another man wore a shirt which said, “I support a woman’s right to be born.”
But pro-lifers are now being called “militant anti-abortion extremists” and being compared to murderers. Planned Parenthood President, Cecile Richards, accused the Center for Medical Progress as being “part of the most militant wing of the anti-abortion movement that has been behind the bombing of clinics and the murder of doctors in their homes and in their churches.” She says that the videos are “highly doctored” and “selectively edited” (even though the entire videos have been made available). While I cannot endorse the methodology of actors posing as representatives from a fake human biologics company or lying to gain access to clinics, the evidence for Planned Parenthood’s human trafficking of human body parts is undeniable from the recently released videos.
Pro-lifers being compared to murderers is calling evil good and good evil (See above video: Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards This Week ABC). Like Richards, there were many who accused us of being evil women-haters as we stood outside Planned Parenthood. We faced much opposition and some support; we saw middle fingers and thumbs up; we heard curses and cheers. One man rode his bike past us and shouted in anger that men didn’t have the right to protest abortion because they aren’t women (in more profane language). We asked him to come talk to us. He crossed the street and loudly repeated his criticism that the men had no right to speak. So I called upon my daughter to answer his fallacious argument, though I had no idea what she would reply. In the middle of half a dozen men, she said softly to the man, “I appreciate that men are here showing their support for women because other men force women to abort their babies. I’m glad to know that there are men who care.” She also told him that it is loving to warn people. The man was shocked to find out that our motivation for being at Planned Parenthood was love for mothers and love for the unborn. He learned something that day. An elderly woman shook hands with this man and said, “I’m glad your mother chose life.”
Also in recent news (the very same day we were at Planned Parenthood) was George F. Will’s op-ed in the Washington Post, “Planned Parenthood and the barbarity of America” (also cited in the video above with Cecil Richards). Will writes:
First came the video showing a salad-nibbling, wine-sipping Planned Parenthood official explaining how “I’m going to basically crush below, I’m going to crush above” whatever organ (“heart, lung, liver”) is being harvested. Then the president of a Planned Parenthood chapter explained the happy side of harvesting: “For a lot of the women participating in the fetal tissue donation program, they’re having a procedure that may be a very difficult decision for them and this is a way for them to feel that something positive is coming from . . . a very difficult time.”
“Having a procedure” — stopping the beating of a human heart — can indeed be a difficult decision for the woman involved. But it never is difficult for Planned Parenthood’s abortionists administering the “procedure.”
Speaking of this “procedure”, I couldn’t help but envision what these young women were about to experience after deafening their ears to our voices and blinding their eyes to our signs. Kevin was pleading with a young couple walking into the building for an abortion. The young man opened the door for his girlfriend, gave us the middle finger, and followed her inside. I thought of what a wonderful experience it has been for me to hold the hand of my wife in the midst of her labor and birth, and the joy that follows when a baby is born. But this young man was going to be by the side of his girlfriend during the hellish experience of abortion which would consist in one of the following procedures:
- Dilatation and Extraction, D&X, (Partial Birth Abortion) – The baby is delivered feet first. The head is left inside the birth canal. A sharp instrument is used to puncture the rear of the skull at the base, and the brains are sucked out. Once dead, the baby is fully delivered.
- Dilatation & Curettage (D&C) – Abortive procedure where the abortionist inserts a curved knife into the placenta and cuts the baby up into pieces before it is suctioned out. Done in the first trimester.
- Dilatation & Evacuation – An abortive procedure where an abortionist inserts a pliers-like instrument into the uterus. The abortionist then grabs whatever part of the baby it comes in contact with. Then, by twisting and pulling, the baby is dismembered, killed, and pulled from the womb.
- Mifepristone or Mifeprex (RU-486) – A pill taken after conception that stops the absorption of Progesterone, a hormone necessary for sustaining pregnancy. Taken with misoprostol, it causes the uterus to contract and eject the newly conceived baby.
- Partial Birth Abortion – An abortive method where all the baby is delivered except the head. With its body outside of the vaginal canal, the doctor then uses a sharp instrument to pierce the back of the skull of the baby and scramble the brains–killing it. Then the baby is fully delivered.
- Pregnancy Reduction – An abortive method of reducing the number of babies in the womb (twins, triplets, etc.,) by injecting a poison into the heart of one or more of the babies while still in the womb.
- Saline Amniocentesis – An abortive method where a highly concentrated salt solution is injected into the placenta. The baby takes the salt into the lungs as well as swallowing it. After more than an hour, the baby dies, and the mother delivers the body a day or two later.
Will comments on partial-birth abortion:
In partial-birth abortion, a near-term baby is pulled by the legs almost out of the birth canal, until the base of the skull is exposed so the abortionist can suck out its contents. During Senate debates on this procedure, three Democrats were asked: Suppose a baby’s head slips out of the birth canal — the baby is born — before the abortionist can kill it. Does the baby then have a right to live? Two of the Democrats refused to answer. The third said the baby acquires a right to life when it leaves the hospital.
During our time at Planned Parenthood, a young man joined us on the sidewalk . . . but he was not on our side. He was wearing a shirt with an upside-down cross and taking pictures of us. I approached him and asked him why he was here and what he believed. I asked him if he thought abortion was wrong and he responded, “No.” I asked him if he thought it was wrong for a person to molest children or to murder people and he said, “Yes.” He seemed to re-think his position on abortion when I explained to him that life begins at conception and that he also started out as a fetus. As long as he thought of human life in terms of “after birth”, he could not understand abortion to be murder. As George F. Will noted, “The abortion industry’s premise is: At no point in the gestation of a human infant does this living being have a trace of personhood that must be respected. Never does it have a moral standing superior to a tumor or a hamburger in the mother’s stomach.” He continues:
In 1973, the Supreme Court, simultaneously frivolous and arrogant, discovered constitutional significance in the fact that the number nine is divisible by three. It decreed that the status of pre-born human life changes with pregnancy’s trimesters. (What would abortion law be if the number of months of gestation were a prime number — seven or 11?) The court followed this preposterous assertion with faux humility, insisting it could not say when life begins. Then, swerving back to breathtaking vanity, it declared when “meaningful” life begins — “viability,” when the fetus is “potentially able” to survive outside the womb.
When life begins is a scientific, not a philosophic or theological, question: Life begins when the chromosomes of the sperm fuse with those of the ovum, forming a distinctive DNA complex that controls the new organism’s growth. This growth process continues unless a natural accident interrupts it or it is ended by the sort of deliberate violence Planned Parenthood sells.
From a biblical and rational perspective, it is always wrong to kill a person. The unborn is a person. Therefore, it is always wrong to kill the unborn in abortion. In Exodus 21:22-23, the penalty of “life for life” is commanded if an unborn baby is killed in the womb as the result of two men striving, thus signifying that the unborn are truly human persons. In the verses below, observe how the Bible uses personal pronouns to describe unborn children, the unborn possess personal attributes such as joy, and Jesus was considered a baby at conception:
My frame was not hidden from You, When I was made in secret, And skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed. And in Your book they all were written, The days fashioned for me, When as yet there were none of them. (Psalm 139:15-16)
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you; Before you were born I sanctified you; I ordained you a prophet to the nations.” (Jeremiah 1:5)
For indeed, as soon as the voice of your greeting sounded in my ears, the babe leaped in my womb for joy. (Luke 1:44)
But while he thought about these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take to you Mary your wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit. And she will bring forth a Son, and you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins.” (Matthew 1:20-21)
One of the most important conversations I had that day was with a professing Christian woman who was protesting abortion. We appreciated her courage, her signs and much of what she had to say over the megaphone to the young people going in and coming out of Planned Parenthood. When talking with her, she explained how she was recently assaulted by a Planned Parenthood employee, how she dug her nails into his skin while he was attacking her, and why she carries a pistol in her purse. I said I wanted to challenge her on something. She already suspected that I was going to exhort her about self-defense. I pointed out how Jesus teaches us to love our enemies (Matthew 5:32), not to resist an evil person (Matthew 5:39), to be harmless as doves (Matthew 10:16), etc.
She said that there are many kinds of Christians with many different beliefs. She also expressed her suspicion that I didn’t agree with the way in which she was dressed (in tight form-fitting clothing and short shorts). I explained that I believed it was counterproductive to plead with women not to abort their babies while displaying an example to them which is in total alignment with the feminist movement, immodesty, and the spirit of fornication. She told me that modesty and prayer veils for women was Old Testament, not New. So I proceeded to show her in the New Testament that a godly woman is to be modest (1 Timothy 2:9; 1 Peter 3:3-6), and cover her head with a veil (1 Corinthians 11:1-16). It is good for women to speak out against abortion, but abortion is an end result of the feminist movement which seeks to abandon the biblical roles of mothers in the home and sisters in the church (modesty and head coverings included). I told her that if she was curious about what was modest, she should ask a godly man. So she turned and asked Kevin about his thoughts on modesty. I was glad that he could point to my daughter as an example of what he considered modest.
It is good and right to call out women as wrong who choose abortion. But are you building up an example of godliness for these women to follow? It is good and right to demand that unborn babies not be denied the most basic individual human right–the right to life. But are you also willing to adopt that baby as your own? It is good and right to morally resist abortion by speaking the truth in love–abortion is murder. But do you murder by justifying self-defense and killing for the military? Though the screams of the unborn are unheard, the truth cannot be tuned out. Be a voice for the unborn, and be a true follower of Jesus Christ.
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