{"id":1351,"date":"2015-08-03T17:21:29","date_gmt":"2015-08-03T21:21:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/?p=1351"},"modified":"2015-08-03T17:21:29","modified_gmt":"2015-08-03T21:21:29","slug":"bi-partisan-confusion-over-the-planned-parenthood-scandal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2015\/08\/bi-partisan-confusion-over-the-planned-parenthood-scandal.html","title":{"rendered":"Bi-Partisan Confusion Over the Planned Parenthood Scandal"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As many (but not enough) people now know, for quite some time, Planned Parenthood has been designing their abortion services for purposes of harvesting and selling the organs of the human beings that they routinely kill.<\/p>\n<p>It would appear that this has gotten folks from across the political divide pretty upset.<\/p>\n<p>But the outrage raises questions.<\/p>\n<p>Either abortion is morally reprehensible or it is not. If it is reprehensible, then it is so presumably because abortion is the unjustified killing of an innocent, defenseless human being. The fate of the <em>corpse<\/em> is either of no moral relevance or, at the very least, of far less moral significance than the fact that a corpse was <em>produced <\/em>to begin with.<\/p>\n<p>If abortion is not morally reprehensible, then the fate of the aborted human being that\u2019s been separated from its mother should no more concern us than should the fate of a wart, cyst, tumor, or a skin tag that\u2019s been removed from a patient concern us.<\/p>\n<p>In both cases, the shock and indignation expressed by both Republicans and Democrats, \u201cconservatives\u201d and \u201cliberals,\u201d to the latest revelations regarding Planned Parenthood are morally confused.<\/p>\n<p>Some Republicans, like presidential contender and Kentucky senator, Rand Paul, now advocate on behalf of defunding Planned Parenthood. They <em>now <\/em>call for this. Indeed, Planned Parenthood most definitely should be deprived of government monies. It\u2019s a disgrace that taxpayers were ever forced to subsidize it.<\/p>\n<p>But if Planned Parenthood should be defunded, it is because it has been routinely slaughtering the most vulnerable human beings for decades. Do Senator Paul and his cronies mean to suggest that it is only because of what Planned Parenthood does <em>after <\/em>it has killed a human that it deserves to be denied government funds? And since everyone has known that this organization has been killing human beings for years and years, are not Paul and his colleagues now implying that it is permissible to fund abortion services, as long as the corpses are disposed of, rather than harvested?<\/p>\n<p>The Republicans\u2019 demand to defund Planned Parenthood is the right one. Yet given their timing, this sounds more like politics and less\u2014much less\u2014like sound, moral reasoning.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, those Democrats, like Hillary Clinton, that now claim to be \u201cdisturbed\u201d or \u201cconcerned\u201d about this Planned Parenthood scandal also sound disingenuous.<\/p>\n<p>The Democratic Party has been America\u2019s official \u201cpro-choice\u201d party since the early 1970\u2019s. According to the party line, mothers are morally entitled to kill their offspring\u2014as long as their posterity remains in their wombs. This has been Democrats\u2019 position, a position that they have spared no measure in defending.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, Democrats never frame their view in quite these terms: They defend not \u201cmothers\u2019\u201d rights, but \u201c<em>women\u2019s<\/em>\u201d rights. And it certainly isn\u2019t a right to \u201ckill their offspring\u201d that Democrats advocate, but the right to \u201c<em>choose,<\/em>\u201d or the right to \u201c<em>abort the pregnancy.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n<p>All talk of a child or baby or even a human being is conspicuously\u2014intentionally\u2014absent from the vocabulary of the proponents of \u201cchoice.\u201d Instead, there is the \u201cfetus.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Are we now expected to believe that these same Democrats are bothered to discover that agents of Planned Parenthood are selling the body parts of \u201caborted\u201d \u201cfetuses?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Democrats can\u2019t even bring themselves to refer to abortion as a form of killing at all. Thus, they insist upon speaking\u2014and have been remarkably successful in convincing others to speak\u2014of \u201c<em>abortion.\u201d<\/em> There is and can be no talk of \u201c<em>killing,\u201d <\/em>lest it become suspected that the object of abortion is human.<\/p>\n<p>But this being so, on what grounds could any proponent of \u201cchoice\u201d be troubled by the trading in body parts that\u2019s occurring at Planned Parenthood?<\/p>\n<p>No one should be surprised that those who support the killing of human beings in the womb would be unperturbed by using their <em>remains<\/em> for ostensibly noble purposes\u2014or any purposes: If it is permissible to extinguish \u201cfetuses\u2019\u201d lives, then why should it matter, morally, what one does with the dead?<\/p>\n<p>But neither should those who regard as a moral evil the killing of human beings in the womb be all that troubled by the purposes to which their <em>remains <\/em>are put, for the grave moral evil here <em>is<\/em> the killing of human beings in the womb.<\/p>\n<p>Again, either abortion is immoral or it is not. In terms of moral relevance, whatever happens <em>after <\/em>the abortion comes in a distant second to the abortion\u2014if it even registers at all.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As many (but not enough) people now know, for quite some time, Planned Parenthood has been designing their abortion services for purposes of harvesting and selling the organs of the human beings that they routinely kill. It would appear that this has gotten folks from across the political divide pretty upset. But the outrage raises&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Bi-Partisan Confusion Over the Planned Parenthood Scandal<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2015\/08\/bi-partisan-confusion-over-the-planned-parenthood-scandal.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Bi-Partisan Confusion Over the Planned Parenthood Scandal\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"As many (but not enough) people now know, for quite some time, Planned Parenthood has been designing their abortion services for purposes of harvesting and selling the organs of the human beings that they routinely kill. It would appear that this has gotten folks from across the political divide pretty upset. But the outrage raises&hellip;\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2015\/08\/bi-partisan-confusion-over-the-planned-parenthood-scandal.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"At the Intersection of Faith and Culture\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2015-08-03T21:21:29+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Jack Kerwick\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Bi-Partisan Confusion Over the Planned Parenthood Scandal","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2015\/08\/bi-partisan-confusion-over-the-planned-parenthood-scandal.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Bi-Partisan Confusion Over the Planned Parenthood Scandal","og_description":"As many (but not enough) people now know, for quite some time, Planned Parenthood has been designing their abortion services for purposes of harvesting and selling the organs of the human beings that they routinely kill. 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I teach philosophy at several colleges in the New Jersey and Pennsylvania areas.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.jackkerwick.com"],"url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/author\/jkerwick"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/399"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1351"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1351\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1352,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1351\/revisions\/1352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}