On Abortion – I Used to Look Away Too

Sooo, Planned Parenthood.

I’ve been sitting on this post for almost a week, trying to decide whether or not to hit publish. There’s so much out there about this right now. I wasn’t sure I wanted to throw my voice into the mix. But I see people defending Planned Parenthood and dismissing the videos from the Center for Medical Progress, and I couldn’t help but think about myself, and how I used to do the same thing.

See, I used to think Planned Parenthood was great. I used to defend the organization staunchly against people who said it was bad. I thought it did great things for women and provided important “health services” for women who couldn’t afford to get them elsewhere.

I also used to be pro-choice. I thought a woman should have the right to do whatever she wanted with her body. I thought that the government and “those” religious groups had no right to interfere with what should be a decision strictly between a woman and her doctor. I said that I was personally against abortion, but I defended a woman’s right to “choose.” In my thinking about abortion, somehow I never, ever thought about what was actually happening during the procedure. That a tiny baby was being crushed or vacuumed or poisoned to death.

A lot of people I know have a very hard time understanding how anyone could possibly believe abortion is okay. Or how anyone could defend Planned Parenthood, even now when the videos are being released showing how callous they are about killing babies and that they are selling the body parts of these babies.

But I understand. I understand exactly how someone could think it’s okay, because I thought it was perfectly acceptable, up until about two years ago.

People can think it’s okay because when we talk about abortion in our society, it’s kept very vague. When we talk about abortion in our society, it’s presented as something that every woman has a RIGHT to. Mainstream society makes it clear that to suggest abortion is anything other than a personal medical decision that every woman should be able to make about her own body makes you a woman hater, or religious zealot, or heaven forbid, a right-wing conservative nut job.

If you talk about the other person involved in an abortion, the one most directly affected, the baby, you are being insensitive to the women who choose abortion. No one wants to talk to about the babies. They call them fetuses, as if that makes them any less alive and important.

I even saw someone post on a friend’s Facebook page just the other day that “fetuses, by definition, are not humans.”

That. Is. Insane.

And by the way, not true.

People can think that abortion is okay, because they associate the pro-life movement with conservative craziness. The mainstream media shows us “Christians” like the Westboro Baptists, and then everyone seems to feel like it’s okay to dismiss the “religious right” as a bunch of bigoted, narrow-minded, anti-progress losers who have no relevance in our current society.

I used to do this.

I used to drive by the billboards with the pictures of the tiny developing babies and the slogans like, “Abortion Stops a Beating Heart” and I’d scoff, “Geez, these religious crazies will go to any lengths, won’t they?”

I was so entrenched in my own way of thinking, that when I’d see something that challenged my beliefs and my certainty that access to abortion was a good and necessary component of any civilized society, I mocked it or simply dismissed it as the product of radical conservative loonies.

Our society discredits Christians and Christian beliefs as crazy and backwards and extreme.

I’ve been there, done that. I used to simply dismiss, without a second thought, all conservative viewpoints simply because they were conservative, and right-wing, and, I thought, crazy.

So I decided to go ahead and publish this post, because I can see this same thing happening right now with the videos that have been released by the Center for Medical Progress featuring high-ranking women from Planned Parenthood.

People are trying to automatically dismiss these videos because they don’t want to acknowledge what they are showing. People are trying to explain away the disgusting fact that Planned Parenthood is selling baby body parts by complaining that the videos were obtained secretly and that the undercover people who filmed them were goading the Planned Parenthood people into saying what they said. People are saying that the videos aren’t valid because they have been “heavily edited.” A judge has actually issued a restraining order to prevent any more videos from being released!

I have to wonder if the people who are saying these things have actually watched the videos. If they’ve even thought about what the doctors in them are saying. Because that first doctor, Dr. Nucatola, talked about crushing little babies’ bodies in just such a way as to avoid damaging the organs that would be wanted for research.

She’s talking about crushing a baby’s body.

That wasn’t made up. They didn’t dub the video to make it look like she said something she didn’t say. She said that. Who cares how the question was asked or if she wasn’t aware that she was being filmed?

Some people are trying to explain away the videos by saying that they aren’t selling the body parts, only accepting payment to “defray costs.” If that’s true, why don’t they have a specific policy in place stating exactly how much should be paid for each organ? Why do we see Dr. Gatter haggling over prices and trying to see what other people are getting so she doesn’t get “low-balled”?

Others’ are trying to spin the videos as “not that bad” by saying that it’s always gross to hear doctors talk about medical procedures, and that doesn’t make it wrong. They compare Dr. Nucatola’s statements, describing a baby with a tiny body, containing tiny organs, and how she’s going to crush it, to those of a surgeon describing a heart transplant.

Can we all just stop a moment and see how twisted that is?

Listening to a doctor explain a life-saving medical procedure is not disgusting at all. It’s fascinating and thrilling. A life-saving surgery is a beautiful thing. An abortion, which kills a living being, is a terrible tragedy. If I saw a video showing a diseased organ removed from a body with doctors looking at it and poking it in a dish, I would probably think that was a little icky, but I would not gasp in horror, as I did when I saw the tiny baby parts being pushed around in a dish. A little leg. A hand.

I know exactly how someone can avoid this truth by turning away. By following the herd of the mainstream media in glossing over what abortion actually is and thinking of it only in terms of women’s rights.

I understand it because I used to do it, but that doesn’t make it okay.

It doesn’t matter if you’re Christian, Muslim, atheist, or Buddhist. Killing is wrong. Abortion kills a human baby.

Can we please stop looking the other way? Can we stop dismissing what abortion is because pro-life messages might come from people with whom we tend to disagree?