Truth-Telling and Big Abortion

For over a half-century, what styles itself the “pro-choice” movement has thrived because of its extraordinary ability to mask what it’s really about—the willful taking of innocent human lives in abortion—through various rhetorical deceptions.

Planned Parenthood clinicians ask frightened and often ignorant young women, “Would you like us to restore your period?” Legislators in thrall to Big Abortion dollars vie to keep sidewalk counselors away from abortuaries, in order to maintain the pretense that what goes on inside those chop-shops involves no more than unwanted “tissue.” The governor of New York celebrates the passage of a bill that would legally permit abortions up to the moment of birth because this is all a matter of “women’s reproductive health.” The governor of Virginia babbles about letting children who survive abortions die, thinking himself humane because he insists that the victims will be kept comfortable. Last month, a Georgia state senator decried legal protection for unborn children who display “what some call a heartbeat.”

George Orwell, call your office.

Forty years of pro-life argumentation have dented the armor of euphemism surrounding this slaughter of the innocents, which, while still appallingly high, is now at its lowest rate in decades. Thoughtful pro-life veterans will acknowledge, however, that what made a considerable difference to our cause was the invention of the sonogram: the technological marvel which proves that a picture is more powerful than a thousand lies about blobs of tissue. Now comes a hit motion picture, Unplanned, which takes the war against euphemism in the abortion debate to another level.

Unplanned tells the story of Abby Johnson, a former Planned Parenthood clinic director and onetime Planned Parenthood employee-of-the-year, who became a pro-life activist after being called from her safe, euphemism-ridden director’s office to assist in a “procedure.” Watching what was indisputably a human creature trying desperately to avoid the instruments of impending intrauterine murder, Abby Johnson saw the truth of what abortion does, as what she described as a “perfect baby” was sucked out of the womb. She then had the honesty, and courage, to acknowledge what she had learned, leave her remunerative Planned Parenthood job, and try to teach others the truth that had seized her imagination.

Read more at First Things.