Cells and Sales

It was once claimed in science texts that the cell was the smallest unit of all living organisms.  I have no idea what the school books say now, but it seems as if the old definition is continually ignored in favor of what’s ironically touted as “women’s health.”  The death of a cell or a few cells in exchange for the life of an actual person is what we’re to believe is the moral case for abortion.  Well, as a scientist, I have a few questions about this rather interesting argument.  Regarding an endangered species, the black rhino for example, if scientists had the last living zygote or embryo in a lab and there were no more actual rhinos alive; would the species be considered extinct?  Or, if we threw out that last living black rhino embryo would they then be extinct?  If a deadly disease caused by a bacteria was nearly eradicated except for one cell of the death-dealing bacterial species; what if that cell were introduced into a human host?  The power of one cell can be the difference between life and death.  Scientists know this.  Though, it seems the validity of empirical knowledge is selective based on one’s world view.  I know we Christians are accused of this (sometimes justifiably) all the time.  The destruction of a human embryo is the destruction of a human being.  There is absolutely no scientific or logical argument against this statement.   Some even admit this is true and still say there is a ‘justification’ for abortion.


–Mary Elizabeth Williams

Let’s talk about the virtues of slavery, shall we?  An institution in which one human owns another.  It’s despicable.  Right?  But a mother is always the boss of the human being inside of her merely by virtue of… well, what exactly??  Autonomy?  You people realize that the question of free will is still philosophically and scientifically unconfirmed, right?  Just throwing that out there.

Racism is an ever present cause of tension, but it always seems to float under the radar that Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was a racist and eugenicist.

The Negro Project was initiated in 1939 by Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood. It was a collaborative effort between the American Birth Control League and Sanger’s Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau.1For a eugenist, it wasn’t controversial, it was integral to the implementation of eugenics to eliminate the ‘unfit’. Eugenics is “a science that deals with the improvement (as by control of human mating) of hereditary qualities of a race or breed”.2 Negative eugenics focused on preventing the birth of those it considered inferior or unfit. This was the foundation of Sanger’s Birth Control Policy and advocated throughout her writings, speeches, and her periodicals including “Pivot of Civilization”, “Plan for Peace” and countless Birth Control Review articles.


We desperately want to purge all historical symbols of racism and slavery while upholding them in abortion.

“In 1963 when Martin Luther King Jr. shared his dream with the nation, he never envisioned an America where ”reproductive justice” would end 56 million innocent human lives.  His dream never pictured a nation where black boys and black girls would never be able to join hands with white boys and white girls, as sisters and brothers, because “freedom of choice” determined some humans are simply not equal.  …in NYC, more black babies are aborted than are born alive! The NY State Department of Health reports that in 2011 (latest year for available NYC stats) for every 1,000 black babies born alive, 1,223 are aborted. Compare that to 265 abortions for every 1,000 live births among whites and 614 live births for every 1,000 Hispanic live births.”


Even more disconcerting is the fact that in the wake of the release of damning video evidence that Planned Parenthood is selling aborted “products of conception” the media refuses to recognize it as a legitimate news story, and the DOJ is planning on investigating the group who released the undercover video. Meanwhile, these “products of conception” are called livers, extremities, hearts, and lungs.  But those names must just be codenames for clumps of cells in the shape of the referenced body part.  What kind of nonsensical, upside down cloud cuckoo land are we living in?

In one of the most powerful articles written after the release of these videos Rosaria Butterfield writes:

“In 1818 Shelley, the 17-year-old child wife of poet Percy Shelley and the classically educated daughter of natural philosopher William Godwin and first feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, wrote a novel on a dare. Deeply influenced by natural philosopher and English physician Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles),Frankenstein is about a bachelor who learns how to create life in a laboratory. The protagonist scientist, Victor Frankenstein, is raised by a progressive family, one that protects him from the foolish superstitions of organized Christian religion and affords him the best education in the natural sciences. He’s therefore unafraid to collect body parts from a church graveyard by dismembering bodies. The novel records how night after night he returns to the graveyard and hacks away until he has the bloody parts he needs. It’s base and gruesome work done in the name of higher-minded science. Frankenstein works hard to extract intact internal organs. He skimps on the skin, though, creating a creature whose skin doesn’t stretch to cover all his internal organs. Frankenstein’s “monster,” in spite of having natural science as its mother and receiving the very best Rousseauian education, is literally falling apart at the seams, his internal organs spilling out for the whole world to behold and ridicule.


Like Dr. Deborah Nucatola, senior director of medical services for Planned Parenthood, Dr. Victor Frankenstein understood the need for intact hearts. 


Like Dr. Deborah Nucatola, Dr. Victor Frankenstein believed there’s no higher calling on the human body than the donation of tissue for scientific research…


…Before committing suicide, Victor Frankenstein’s “monster” diagnoses his problem. He laments, “I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on.”


Frankenstein is an abortion novel. The “monster” declares he is an abortion—a present-tense, walking-and-talking, breathing-and-reading embodiment of a culture that values intact hearts but not the children who need them, and that values the all-cleaned-up Proverbs 31 woman but not the Mary Magdalene who precedes her.”

In the name of human health we abrade our own humanity.  In the name of women’s rights we upend and demolish the meaning of womanhood.

The care of women and definition of womanhood should be of great importance to all who are anti-abortion.

A friend and pastor in Richmond, VA writes:

“The conditions that make abortion seem like a good idea are also heartbreaking: extreme poverty, bum husbands, absentee fathers, organizations cloaked in lies and misinformation, crooked politicians, and our culture’s collective worship of convenience. These factors must be addressed—they have to be—or else we’re carbon copies of the Pharisees who place heavy burdens on others without lifting a finger to help them (Matt. 23:4).

But as a friend of mine said the other day: whatever needs to happen to help poor women, overworked women, underpaid women, single moms, and mothers in abusive relationships, we must find a way to do so without helping them kill their children. Two wrongs will never make a right.”

Doug Ponder

This other side of the argument that often gets overlooked is imperative.  If, and this is a big if, Planned Parenthood were defunded we would undoubtedly celebrate.  There are, however, numerous women who would feel left alone as if no one cared about them, kicked aside in favor of fetuses who have never breathed air.  We, the church, cannot, cannot, CANNOT leave these women just to fend for themselves.  We hate government mandates for healthcare, but we need to realize that the church (local churches) need to love these women.  I’m not talking about praying for them.  I’m not talking about writing a check and then forgetting about them.  I’m talking about being there for them.   It’s tough.  I have three small children, I know.  I struggle to muster the motivation just to leave the house.   But we cannot sit behind our keyboards posting links and writing blogs knowing that a lot of women go to Planned Parenthood because they feel they have nowhere else to go.  Feeling cornered is never a good feeling.  If we proclaim the freedom of Christ, then we need to tell of it and display it.  I write this to myself most of all.   There is a great quote of William Wilberforce that others and myself have posted:


–William Wilberforce (speaking about slavery)

This could very well apply to the anti-abortion lot ignoring the plight of women.  But only if we let it.


1 Comment

  1. very well written .excellent point on the cutting of funds for planned parenthood.

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