It's definitely not news that Planned Parenthood is anti-science. There is, of course, this video, in which a group of individuals affiliated with and trained by Planned Parenthood, in an actual debate, declared that they were "not going to try to use science or evidence," and that the science is all opinion. Oddly enough, at a pro-life outreach I once asked a Planned Parenthood affiliate who was counter-protesting what she would say if I told her that the earth is actually 6,000 years old and that an old earth was just her opinion? She didn't have an answer to that. Funny that an old Earth and evolution are scientific fact, but suddenly when you're talking about when human life begins, the science is "unreliable" and "science has been wrong before." (Note: I'm not interested in debating evolution; I am merely using this as an example of Planned Parenthood's inconsistency when it comes to science.)
There's also this video, in which a representative of Planned Parenthood actually endorsed infanticide. If a baby is born alive after an abortion, it is, apparently, up to the will of the parents whether or not to snuff out the child's life. This is a born child. She feigns ignorance throughout the video, but the two gentlemen understood completely what she was justifying and they couldn't believe their ears. Funny how people who believe it is a woman's right to an abortion apparently are completely ignorant of what it is they are killing. And if they are ignorant of what they are killing, they ought not kill it.
The latest in anti-scientific and morally repugnant statements uttered by a Planned Parenthood employee or representative was from Cecile Richards, herself, who contends that human life begins when the mother says it does. This flies in the face of obvious scientific facts. In fact, Alan Guttmacher wrote in 1933, a full forty years before Roe v. Wade was even passed, that the fact that human life begins at fertilization "...all seems so simple and evident that it is difficult to picture a time when it wasn't part of the common knowledge" (Life in the Making: The Story of Human Procreation, New York: Viking Press, 1933, p.3). This also flies in the face of common sense. A simple reductio will show the moral repugnance of this belief. If the mother chooses when life begins, then there's no reason to stop at birth. If the mother can choose when her child's life begins, then she should be able to kill her toddler, her adolescent, her teenager for stepping out of line. The fact, alone, that the child is still attached to the mother does not give her carte blanche to just arbitrarily decide when her child's life begins.
There are many reasons why Planned Parenthood needs to be opposed and held accountable for actions, the most important of which is that they are killing innocent human children en masse. In order to justify killing these children, they are forced to make themselves believe all sorts of ridiculous things about science, about the human person, and about ethics. I don't think pro-life people have anything to fear. The science is clearly on our side.
They ridicule science because they completely misunderstand the meaning of that great attribute, human freedom. As political philosopher Jacques Maritain has written, only those "properly equipped for the exercise of freedom" will not be threatened by "intelligence and science”. An obedience to the authority of truth provides a legitimate boundary around the exercise of human freedom: “One of the gravest lesions afforded us by the experience of life is that, in fact, in the practical conduct of most people, all those things which in themselves are good and very good- science, technological progress, culture... all these things, without love and good will, serve to make men all the more evil and the more unhappy...without love and charity, man turns the best in him into an evil that is yet greater.” (The Social and Political Philosophy of Jacques Maritain)
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting that the pro-life movement is attempting to rely more on secular arguments than religious ones. If you go back on the Internet and look up some debates from pro-lifers 20 years ago, you'll see that often the arguments employed against abortion were often religious (it's a sin, the relevant Bible verse, etc).
ReplyDeleteGoogle "secularization in christianitys opposition to pornography/" for interesting take on the same thing that is happening with opposition to pornography:
Thomas calls this “outsourcing moral authority”: religious leaders are relying on other authorities to back up their points of view. This suggests that even religion is undergoing secularization. (FTA)