Columnists

What’s wrong with us?

Mary Beth Bonacci

I realize that, in polite society, it is considered hyperbolic and disrespectful and just downright bad form to compare any of our current social evils to the atrocities of Nazi Germany. Whatever misdeeds we in America may commit, they cannot possibly compare to the horrifying evil that Hitler and his minions inflicted on Europe before and during World War II. In general, I have tended to agree with that. They killed innocent human beings by the millions. They used their bodies for medical experimentation and their skin for lamp shades.

But seeing transcripts from the Center for Medical Progress in which Planned Parenthood executives cavalierly discuss the destruction of human babies and the subsequent sale of their “parts,” I’m thinking perhaps it’s time we started recognizing the parallels.

We have long wondered why the German people didn’t speak up. The trains were running past their back yards, for Pete’s sake. How could they not know what was going on? How could they not say something? How could they not speak up and defend their Jewish neighbors?

I’m starting to get it.

Here in 2015 America, a medical professional, employed by an organization that receives half a billion dollars in taxpayer money every year, is caught munching on salad and sipping wine while describing how she can “crush from above” and “crush from below” to kill a living human person and preserve his or her organs for sale. We see the dead bodies of late-term prenatal babies lying in buckets, waiting to be parted out. And instead of investigating the organization that crushes these babies to death, our Justice Department announces an investigation of the organization that released the video. We can’t even muster the Senate votes to retract that federal funding. Our president, and the Democratic front-runner in the next presidential election, both announce that they “stand with Planned Parenthood.”

What’s wrong with us?

I have been appalled by the reality of abortion since I first learned about it as a teenager. I knew about fetal development. I knew that this human child has brain waves and a heartbeat and developing organs even at very early stages of development. I knew that a woman in a difficult situation needs and deserves solutions that don’t involve the destruction of her child inside her very own body. I saw no better way to spend my life than to do what I could to prevent abortion – to help those women and their unborn children. I spent more than 20 years traveling the world speaking on chastity, in part because I realized that, legal or not, there always would be demand for abortion as long as we treated children as merely unwelcome side-effects of what was supposed to be consequence-free sexual activity. I did my part.

And then I got sick. I had to quit the full-time speaking circuit. I got a job and nieces and nephews and parents who increasingly needed my help. I got busy.

And, apparently, I got used to the reality of abortion.

Abortion – essentially through all nine months of pregnancy – has been legal in this country for more than 40 years. We have all grown accustomed to it. We still may oppose it, of course. We hate what it does to unborn children and to women. We grieve with our friends, the women who run from the memory, who are traumatized by the “choice” that haunts them years later. We want it to end.

But we have lost that fire in our bellies, the sickening realization that human lives are being cruelly snuffed out by the thousands every day in our own back yards.

Let me be very clear. I don’t care how these videos were obtained. I don’t particularly care at what profit level the transfer of these tiny little human organs becomes legal or illegal. Those are all distractions. What I care about is what these videos have revealed, in graphic detail, to a complacent America. It is legal – and commonplace – to crush the most innocent of human persons to death, from above or below or wherever, to suction brains and smash heads, to kill babies in early or late stages of their development and to throw their tiny little corpses into freezers to part out for profit or science or research or whatever.

For years, we have heard that these smallest little beings really are not persons, that they are not yet fully human. And yet, the very fact that their organs are human gives them a dollar value on the open market.

What’s wrong with us?

Yes, we need to investigate Planned Parenthood. Yes, we need to stop giving them taxpayer money. But we can’t stop there. God has given us a tremendous opportunity. He has ripped away the curtain that hid the reality of abortion. He has shown us the gruesome procedures behind the euphemisms of “reproductive freedom” and “choice.”

We need to reach out in love to anyone hurt by abortion. And we need to do everything in our power to show the world these videos – to show them what abortion really looks like. And to stop it.

Because some day, the world will recognize with horror that our society routinely crushed the bodies and skulls of living, defenseless human persons.

And they will ask what we did about it.

Bonacci is a syndicated columnist based in Denver and the author of We’re On a Mission from God and Real Love.

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