Attention, Pro-Aborts: Here Are Two Arguments You Can't Make Anymore

Abortion is the highest sacrament in the Church of Liberalism.

The killing of children is considered even holier and more sacred to its disciples than gay marriage or genital mutilation. Like the primitive pagan cultures before them, liberalism looks upon the sacred rite of child sacrifice with a deep reverence. The liberal has a cult-like, religious devotion to sacrament of infanticide. Liberals will venerate it for the same reason Catholics venerate the Eucharist and Muslims the Koran -- because it is the centerpiece of their worship, the core, the soul of the thing.

Once we understand this, we should not be surprised by the events of these last few days. To the outside observer -- someone mercifully unfamiliar with the teachings of the liberal church -- it might seem surprising, even remarkable, that the nation's largest abortion provider was caught on tape selling the dismembered body parts and organs of dead children, and that liberals immediately and passionately defended the practice. The behavior on the part of Planned Parenthood shouldn't shock us, as I said yesterday, but neither should the nauseating response from the media and various liberal pundits.

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I say "response," but naturally the response from much of the media was nothing but a blaring, deafening silence. Aside from Fox News, most of the cable and network channels dusted off their patented blackout strategy, last employed during the Kermit Gosnell trial, and ignored the scandal completely. In fairness, CNN did have more important things to talk about, like Kylie Jenner's hairdo.

Meanwhile, liberal bloggers and commentators rushed to rescue the damsel Planned Parenthood from the evil clutches of the right wing conspiracy. In a moment of sheer dementia, Slate called the selling of dead baby organs "fluff," and insisted that the real issue is simply that abortion is kind of "gross" -- but no grosser than heart surgery or child birth.

Yes, giving birth to a child is as gross as crushing its skull and hawking its parts for cash.

Citizens, this is liberalism. Look upon its revolting face and weep.

[sharequote align="center"]Citizens, this is liberalism. Look upon its revolting face and weep.[/sharequote]

Feminists at Jezebel and Cosmopolitan chalked the whole thing up to a big, irrelevant yawner. Gawker declared definitively that Planned Parenthood is not selling baby parts, offering the proof that A) Planned Parenthood said so, and B) conservatives are mean.

Screen shot via YouTube

Media Matters repeated the popular talking point that the video was "deceptively edited." They say the official, Deborah Nucatola, specifies that the money for the baby parts is only meant to help Planned Parenthood "break even." Fine, but that claim is undermined by a few things:

First, when she says the conversations must take place "behind closed doors:"

At the national office, we have a Litigation and Law Department which just really doesn’t want us to be the middle people for this issue right now. But I will tell you that behind closed doors these conversations are happening with the affiliates.

Second, when she admits to harvesting the organs specifically to meet market demand:

I’d say a lot of people want liver. And for that reason, most providers will do this case under ultrasound guidance, so they’ll know where they’re putting their forceps. The kind of rate-limiting step of the procedure is calvarium. Calvarium—the head—is basically the biggest part.

We’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I’m not gonna crush that part, I’m gonna basically crush below, I’m gonna crush above, and I’m gonna see if I can get it all intact.

Third -- and this is really, really important -- when, even in the part of the transcript quoted by Media Matters to defend against the charge of Planned Parenthood making a profit, the Planned Parenthood official explicitly says they'd like to make a profit [emphasis added]:

I think for affiliates, at the end of the day, they’re a non-profit, they just don’t want to—they want to break even. And if they can do a little better than break even, and do so in a way that seems reasonable, they’re happy to do that.

Do you know what we call "doing better than breaking even"? Making a profit.

Profit: the monetary surplus left to a producer or employer after deducting wages, rent, cost of raw materials, etc.

Case closed.

But once we've established beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt that Planned Parenthood not only wants to make a profit off of dead baby parts, but kills the baby in a particularly torturous way so as to preserve its most valuable pieces, that obviously doesn't mean liberals will relent and concede. The next move, as many have done over the past 24 hours, is to say it doesn't matter if they sell the parts or not.

As one liberal on Twitter put it: What else are they supposed to do?

Good point. Surely, I can't conceive of any other option besides smashing a child from the legs up, ripping out its liver, selling it to a medical researcher, and then pocketing the remaining cash. I mean, certainly treating the child with respect and dignity isn't an option. Being ethical isn't a possibility. So, yes, harvest the fully developed infant human for parts like she's a broken down Buick and toss the remaining bits in a trash can. It's the only choice you have.

Or, you know, you could display even the faintest shred of basic damned human decency and treat these deceased people like deceased people, not roadkill. I suppose there's no practical advantage to being a decent person, but I do consider it preferable to being a vulture who picks through the corpses of dead babies and then gabs about it over salad and wine. Although I suppose you've already forfeited your humanity when you kill the child in the first place, so why not harvest them? That appears, anyway, to be the chilling rationale here.

Indeed, with this gruesome logic, I don't think we'll convince liberals to oppose the sale (or "donation with reimbursement," which is totally different) of baby parts. To oppose it means admitting the child has some kind of human worth and dignity, and to admit that it has worth and dignity is to contradict the entire pro-abortion platform, which is to commit the worst sort of sacrilege in their religion. If they are determined to be "pro-choice," they will never raise a protest no matter what happens to the dead "fetuses." Donate them, sell them, flush them down the toilet, burn them for fuel -- whatever. The liberal, if he is to remain a liberal, cannot question any of it.

But one thing we can do in light of this scandal and the reaction from pro-aborts, is establish a couple of new ground rules for the continued abortion debate in this country. These aren't my rules, but just a reiteration of what Planned Parenthood and the pro-abortion camp has clearly stipulated. Through everything that's happened in the last day or two, the pro-abortion side has officially forfeited two arguments -- or really slogans, which is the same thing as an argument in the liberal universe -- and here they are:

1) "It's just a clump of cells!"

See also: blob of cells, lump of cells, ball of cells, globule of cells, etc. This has been perhaps the favorite line of the pro-aborts for quite some time, but now it is no longer available to them. They have forfeited it. It's gone. Goodbye.

The fact that body parts are being "donated" clearly indicates that the child has a body with parts. It is not a blob nor a lump nor a ball nor a clump. It's a body. With organs. And limbs. A body. A body that is living. A body belonging to a member of the human species. A body that must be caused to stop living through a method that is commonly referred to as "killing."

Photo credit: Shutterstock

The "clump of cells" line was never coherent, but now that Planned Parenthood has announced quite explicitly that these are human bodies, pro-aborts cannot continue using it. It must be retired. Hang it on the rafters alongside other famous Democrat talking points, like the one about blacks only being three-fifths of a person.

Granted, in one sense, the babies with arms and legs and livers are "clumps of cells," but it's also in the same sense that all people are clumps of cells. A clump is a mass, and cells are those little tiny things of which we are all comprised. We are all masses of cells, in other words. Saying "it's not a person; it's a mass of cells," is like saying, "it's not a dog; it's a furry thing with legs and paws." Restating the definition of something in a more reductive and childish way is not the same as creating a distinction between the thing and itself.

But this is all liberals do. The "cells" of their pro-abortion argument consist entirely of coming up with weirder ways of saying the same thing.

"It's not a child; it's a fetus!" 

Yes, and "fetus" is Latin for "offspring," and a child is an offspring.

"It's not a child; it's a blob of cells!" 

Yes, and it's a blob of cells that make up a child.

Next are you going to tell me that Cleveland isn't a city, it's a Cleveland?  Or elephants aren't elephants, they're large mammals with big, silly ears?

Now all that's left for the liberal is to insist that the fetus -- which is an offspring, which is a child -- is more blobby and clumpy than older humans. The difference between life and death now hinges on a measurement of a human's clumpiness. This is what passes for thought in liberal circles. It's also not even accurate on its own terms, considering that, arguably, the average Cinnabon patron is far clumpier than the average unborn human.

Of course, before this reasoning leads to mass abortions at our nation's food courts, it will first and most inevitably result in the euthanizing of the sick, infirm, disabled, deformed, and elderly. Putting aside any effort to quantify an individual's blobbiness, what is really not-so-cleverly hidden in the "it's just a blob of cells" argument is the notion that a person's humanity, or in this case a human's personhood, can be determined by, first, its physical resemblance to other humans, and second, by extension, its physical development.

But if a human at an early stage of development, or at any stage before birth, is reduced to nothing more than "cells" (and limbs and brains and kidneys and a random assortment of other features that coincidentally add up to the sum total of a human being) merely because it doesn't look completely like a born person, and isn't developed to the same physical extent, then why would the matter suddenly be settled upon birth? What pro-aborts are contending is that we acquire our humanity in degrees. It is not absolute. It does not materialize at the same time we do. We exist, for a time, as humans without humanity, or with a portion of humanity, while the rest of it will be endowed at the exact rate that we un-clumpify (again, remember, liberals are all about the science).

If this is true, if personhood is a gradual acquisition and contingent upon our physicality, why do we grant an arbitrary reprieve once the clump/human exits the birth canal? Infants don't look like adults and aren't developed as much. For God's sake, their skulls aren't even fully formed -- that's got to subtract at least 3 or 4 points from their Personhood Index, doesn't it? And what about people born without an arm or a leg? What about the mentally handicapped? If a baby without fully developed limbs is not a person, what about an adult without fully developed limbs? And what of an old man who has limbs but lost his command of them over time? Is he now an elderly clump?

Logically, if the pro-aborts are correct, these individuals cannot be considered people, or at least they can't be considered as people-y as the rest of us (once again, this is science, folks -- try to keep up).

You are left, then, with only one other option. Either advocate for the mass execution of the disabled, or accept that humans are humans, and humans are people, regardless of their physical development. It's really one or the other. You side with the slave owners, eugenicists, and Nazis of history, or with the people who defeated those tyrants. We are all human, or not. Pro-aborts say not, and it's time they confront exactly what that means.

You are not defending the killing of clumps and blobs, but of humans. And in so doing, you are using logic identical to the sort that has been used to justify nearly every human atrocity in the history of mankind.

2) "I'm pro-choice; not pro-abortion!"

Call me presumptuous, but when I hear a group of people scream that they want a particular thing "on demand and without apology," I generally assume they must like that thing, whatever it is. They must be pro- it.

Yes, I am aware that you prefer the term "pro-choice." But I'm afraid we cannot use that name when referring to you, due to the fact that it's a preposterous lie. You are not pro-choice; nobody is. No group of people on Earth, aside from lunatics and toddlers, actually think "choice" should be totally legalized and sanctioned. No rational adult would seriously assert that every choice is justified simply because it was a choice. We all believe there are good choices and bad choices. Legal choices and illegal choices. Ironically liberals have an even longer list of unacceptable choices, which is why Christians are often fined for choosing not to bake cakes for homosexuals.

"But a woman has a right to choose!"

Pro-choice activists hold placards during a rally outside of the Supreme Court January 23, 2012 in Washington, DC. Activists on both sides of the abortion issue are rallying on the 39th anniversary of the landmark Roe vs Wade case. AFP PHOTO/Mandel NGAN

That means nothing, friends. It is a nonsensical statement. Of course we all have choice. We have the intellect to discern one thing from another, the conscience to determine right from wrong, and the will to act upon these calculations, for better or worse. But you are conditional in the choices you believe we should act upon, or should be allowed to act upon. And that's OK -- we are all pro-choice conditionally. Your conditions may be bizarre, macabre, and grotesque, but the fact that you have conditions means you cannot universally declare yourself "pro-choice."

On the other hand, you defend abortion unconditionally. You are unwilling to accept any limits or constraints on it. You are opposed to any form of restriction placed on the practice. You are so wholeheartedly invested in abortion that you won't even tolerate laws that regulate abortion clinics to the degree that the government regulates your kid's orthodontist. You suspend your normal zeal for government oversight and taxation, insisting that Planned Parenthood be subject to neither.

Your pro-abortion sentiments are so pure and absolute that, as we've seen this week, you will defend an institution that cuts humans into slices like pizza and "donates" them to scientists. A "pro-choice" person would not feel the need to shield such an institution from criticism, particularly because, no matter if the mother consented, I sincerely doubt the child signed the release form.

No, this is the kind of horror you only condone if you like abortion, not if you like choice.

And you like abortion. Like, you like like abortion. You like abortion more than the average person likes cake or sunsets.

You are pro-abortion. You are a pro-abortion person who believes people aren't people unless they look like you. That's what you are. Look in the mirror.

Scary, isn't it?

Well, the truth can be that way sometimes.

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