Human beings have always had an extraordinary capacity for self-delusion. We justify horrible things by telling ourselves that we are acting in the service of a noble cause, or by dehumanizing the victims of our unjust actions. History is littered with the corpses of innocent men and women who died in the name of their persecutor's depraved ideology. Josef Mengele is perhaps the most famous example of this principle.
One of the chief physicians at the Birkenau concentration camp, Mengele performed cruel and gruesome human experiments on Jewish twins in an attempt to prove the supremacy of the Aryan race. He was known by the children he selected for his experiments as "Uncle Mengele" because he treated them kindly and gave them sweets. These same children, however, were subjected to terrifying and painful procedures and often killed with impunity when they proved no longer useful. Quite simply, Josef Mengele was a monster. He was a sadist who enjoyed inflicting pain on others. He lacked empathy for the suffering of the Jews at Birkenau because in his mind – and in the mind of Adolf Hitler and his followers – Jews were subhuman.
During the time of the American founding, a large portion of the southern economy relied upon slave labor. So entrenched was the slave tradition that it took a civil war and over half a million dead Americans to eradicate it. Our Constitution, that venerated document crafted by brilliant men, originally valued African American lives at only three fifths the worth of European American lives. Slave owners often split up families, selling off mothers and fathers separately from their children. Slaves were beaten, sometimes killed, women were raped. Today, it seems unimaginable that there was a time when it was considered normal for one human being to own another – to buy and sell a person as if they were a piece of farm equipment. That it happened in America, a country that prides itself on being a land of equality and opportunity for all, only adds to the shame.
In Hitler's Germany, however, and in the early American south, the prevailing attitude towards Jews and Blacks, respectively, was seen as normal. People either knew what was happening and approved of it, or they simply went along without questioning it because it was "just the way it was." This same mentality exists today with regard to abortion. Over the last 43 years, the American people have come to accept that part of a woman's constitutional liberty includes the right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. As the years have passed and the procedure has been more widely embraced, all vestiges of shame have fallen away. In America today, we have as little regard for the lives and dignity of unborn children as did slave owners had for the lives of blacks in the pre-war south, and no organization embodies this shameful attitude more than Planned Parenthood.
Another uncover video has been released by the Center for Medical Progress, and it's truly horrifying. In it, a former employee of StemExpress describes an episode of "specimen harvesting" in which she and a colleague cut through the face of an aborted baby in order to extract his brain, all while the child's heart still appeared to be beating.
It turns out that "intact fetal cadavers" are something that companies like StemExpress are willing to pay top dollar for, and Planned Parenthood has been happy to accommodate this demand. The more developed fetal organs are, the better research potential they have. This means later and later term abortions explicitly for the purposes of harvesting organs. Babies are being delivered as intact as possible and their tiny bodies scavenged for parts, like a stolen car in an inner city chop shop.
This is what it's come to: The culture that has embraced the Roe v. Wade decision as a ruling on behalf of human liberty has become a culture that trafficks in the blood and body parts of unborn children. Like Mengele's twins at Birkenau, it is done in the name of "research," and like the slaves of the American south, it is done in the name of profit. And we the people are unable to muster the collective outrage to put a stop to it. Instead, we have judges issuing injunctions to stop the Center for Medical Progress from releasing more videos (http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jul/29/planned-parenthood-judge-blocks-pro-life-group-rel/). We have the organization in charge of the butchery waging a PR campaign to combat the so-called "War on Women." We have congressmen and candidates wringing their hands, trying to parse out the fine moral nuances of fetal killing and dismemberment.
If anyone wonders whether or not America has finally fallen down the rabbit hole, I think the answer is clear. The federal government never should have gotten in the business of funding Planned Parenthood in the first place, but it certainly should have no hesitation about cutting ties with the organization now. And yet, despite the ongoing revelations about the macabre work being done, it's likely that no substantive action will be taken. On the contrary, we have congressional Democrats calling on the Department of Justice to investigate the Center for Medical Progress on the grounds that taking unauthorized video footage was a violation of the law. These people are unmoved by the sight of tiny baby appendages scattered in pie tins and footage of officials horse trading "fetal cadavers" over lunch but outraged by the so-called violation of Planned Parenthood's "privacy rights."
If America was truly a civilized society, then our response to these revelations would be immediate and unambiguous. Those responsible for these barbarous acts and all who support them should be treated as the ghouls that they are, as sadists who traffick in human carnage. If we can't muster the collective outrage to stop such practices, if our elected officials insist on continuing the public financing of this butchery despite widespread objection, then our future as a nation is in jeopardy. A nation that can't agree on basic notions of right and wrong – a nation bereft of a collective moral compass – cannot be a bastion of liberty and justice, and will not long endure.