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An Everyday Scandal

The slaughter of the unborn needs no hidden cameras for condemnation.

Abortion, forever lurking beneath the currents of American life, sometimes roars to the surface. In recent months, the rumble of political realignment and the siren of scandal have combined to reawaken the slumbering giant.

Buoyed by November's gains at the state and federal levels, pro-life legislators have unleashed a flurry of ambitious proposals. Legislation drafted in Nebraska, Kansas, and Ohio looks to topple Roe v. Wade by using new research on fetal development. In Washington, resurgent House Republicans hasten to fortify restrictions on federal abortion funding and to strip taxpayer subsidies from Planned Parenthood. The GOP also seeks to prevent last year's health-care overhaul from harming the unborn.

As these battles rage, new revelations have exposed, once again, a sleazier side of the abortion industry. First, a colossal grand jury report detailed the depredations of Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell. His alleged peddling of the painkiller Oxycontin put investigators onto the scent. His clinic reeked of cat urine. It was staffed by unlicensed apprentices, spattered with bloodstains, and cluttered with unsterilized instruments and a stockpile of fetal body parts. Prosecutors have charged Gosnell with murder for overmedicating a Nepalese refugee and snipping the spinal cords of seven fully delivered infants.

Yet Lila Rose, the intrepid young activist whose undercover operations have bedeviled Planned Parenthood in recent years, may have inflicted deeper wounds to the abortion industry than the Gosnell story. Her organization, Live Action, recently released covertly captured footage of clinic workers behaving very badly. The videos show a Live Action associate, disguised as the proprietor of an underage prostitution ring, requesting and receiving advice on accessing abortions, treating venereal disease, evading reporting requirements, and doctoring medical forms.

Unlike Gosnell's investigation, which duly appointed authorities conducted, many have questioned the ethics of Live Action's clandestine techniques. Many pro-lifers excuse the recourse to deception and cheer every exercise that exposes Planned Parenthood's depravity. Here and there, though, one hears groans of conscience, especially among conservative Catholic intellectuals like Robert George, Christopher Tollefsen, and Gerard Bradley. The strongest weapon in the pro-life arsenal, they argue, is truth. There are grave consequences when people tolerate deception. So, unease over Live Action's methods has embittered what might have been reckoned a sweet triumph.

The mix of media spotlight and pro-life adulation intoxicates us, but we should discipline euphoria with introspection.

In such debates, evangelicals can find habits both profitable and unrewarding. The heady mix of media spotlight, pro-life adulation, and fumbling pro-choice embarrassment intoxicates us, but Live Action's evangelical allies should discipline euphoria with rigorous introspection. We need to continue to contemplate the right relation of means and ends—not so much in the context of "bearing false witness" (the usual course), but rather through the more central theme of love: how our words and deeds reflect love of neighbor, born and unborn.

Most importantly, evangelicals ought to ask whether Live Action's flirtation with ethical shortcuts relies too heavily on a strategy to tarnish the abortion industry through explosive, headline-grabbing scandals. Weary of contending for a culture of life—despairing of the laborious, protracted struggle to transform hearts and minds—we long to deliver a single, crippling blow. We crave a millennial confrontation, a pivotal moment at which to announce that here, at last, is abortion's cancerous quintessence, the unveiling of which must discredit its apologists immediately and irreparably.


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Comments

Displaying 1–3 of 58 comments

Jerry Lucknow

April 18, 2011  10:46am

It's a perennial problem, I'm, afraid: http://translationjournal.net/journal/18bible.htm

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Steve Skeete

April 18, 2011  8:48am

I agree wholeheartedly with the basic position of the editor. Those who support life for the unborn should not stoop to subterfuge and cheaps tricks to demonstrate that the unborn should have the "right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". After all, when you take the right to life from the unborn you deprive them at the same time of all other "rights". The "pro-life" movement needs to always take the moral high ground. And like the editor intimates, when you expose a hundred butchers, you leave untouched thousands of murderers with much more finesse, but committed to the same goal - killing the unborn. It will obviously take a while, and it may not occur in my life time nor yours, but eventually people everywhere will see abortion for exactly what it is - a crime against humanity. Who knows, there may even be a special court established in the Hague, and one hundred other places, to try accused abortionist and the persons and institutions who funded their nefarious work.

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Dan H

April 18, 2011  7:12am

And Peter was a fishweeder man? Really?

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