OPINION:
In response to the recent controversy surrounding the sting videos discussing Planned Parenthood’s harvesting of fetal tissue, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat claimed that abortion exists in America because we refuse to look at it. Look at the nice doctors, not the horror of what they do. An honest gaze cannot bear the horror of what abortion is and what it does.
Consider the work of two very different people: Pope Francis and “True Detective” writer Nic Pizzolatto. What, you ask, can the bishop of Rome and an HBO show-runner possibly have in common?
The answer is that Pope Francis views abortion as a grave evil, and an act that ruptures the order of creation and relationships between people. And in the current season of “True Detective,” Mr. Pizzolatto depicts a world in which the consequences of abortion are laid bare for all the world to see.
In his much discussed encyclical Laudato Si, Pope Francis asks, “How can we genuinely teach the importance of concern for other vulnerable beings, however troublesome or inconvenient they may be, if we fail to protect a human embryo, even when its presence is uncomfortable and creates difficulties? Is it not the same relativistic logic which justifies eliminating children because they are not what their parents wanted?”
Abortion teaches that the weakest have no rights. Instead of being protectors, parents become their children’s worst enemies. Fathers urge mothers to kill their children because a baby would be a burden. Instead of protecting their children, mothers arrange for them to be killed.
In “True Detective,” Mr. Pizzolatto depicts the poisonous effect abortion has on human relationships. One couple has been trying desperately to get pregnant, an endeavor apparently rendered almost hopeless by what the wife haltingly calls her “operations.” A young cop’s girlfriend tells him that she’s pregnant and that she doesn’t believe in abortion.
When the cop finally tells his nightmarish mother that he’s going to be a father, she reams him out for wasting his potential on family life, urges him to get his girlfriend to have an abortion, and finally finishes her tirade by screaming, “You could have been a scrape job!”
I doubt that Mr. Pizzolatto is a pro-life crusader, and as Sonny Bunch writes at the website Acculturated, he may merely be provoking his audience. Regardless, abortion figures prominently in the show, and in such stark fashion that the audience recoils.
Alas, truth can sometimes be stranger, and more gruesome, than fiction.
In one of the videos released by the Center for Medical Progress, Dr. Mary Gatter, the president of Planned Parenthood’s Medical Director’s Council, recorded a buyer looking at “tissue” to find usable specimens, reminiscent of Dr. Frankenstein at the charnel house. Dr. Deborah Nucatola, Planned Parenthood’s senior director of medical services, describes reviewing the gestational ages of the babies scheduled to be aborted each day to determine which little bodies can be used to supply which parts. At the end of the latter video, Cecile Richards, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, says Dr. Nucatola is “amazing.”
The American public is horrified, and rightly so. And yet, if you met any of the three women featured in the videos — Dr. Gatter, Dr. Nucatola and Ms. Richards — they probably would seem quite charming, someone with whom you would enjoy having lunch. Dr. Gatter and Dr. Nucatola don’t seem like monsters as they munch their salad and joke about Lamborghinis. They are oblivious to the horror of what they are saying. Likewise, the public is mostly willfully blind to the horror of abortion.
The public may say, “We should try once again to stop the sale of fetal parts, because that really is rather unsavory. But other than that, well — it’s a tough issue, isn’t it?”
Nice women facilitate the killing, and we think little of it and move on, because after all, reasonable people can disagree about abortion. How the bodies are disposed of should be a secondary concern, though.
The more serious problem is that a child was killed, usually just because her birth would burden her parents, not even for medical reasons or because of rape or incest. In a survey commissioned by the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, 74 percent of women said they were getting an abortion “Because having a baby would dramatically change my life” and 73 percent said they could not afford a baby.
Mr. Pizzolatto’s handsome, tormented cop could have been a scrape job. So could every person born in America after 1973.
And the babies whose bodies Planned Parenthood sold for parts — they were scrape jobs. But had they been allowed to live, they could have become you, or me, or Pope Francis, or Nic Pizzolatto. They are us, and we are them.
• Carissa Mulder is a Leonine Fellow at the Catholic Information Center and a Catholic Voices USA Associate.
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