"There are things that you will only be able to learn [from] the weakest among us. And when you snuff them out, you are the one that loses....What sort of people are you going to be?"
~Gianna Jessen, abortion survivor
Since 1973, there have been 54 million children aborted legally in America.
Over the last few weeks, I've been meditating quite a lot on those missing 54 million. I thought of the half-full services in mountain churches around my home. The dying congregations. The two-child millennial families. The elementary school that closed because there weren't enough children to keep it running. I imagined my college classmates blinking out of existence one by one - until 20% of each generation had disappeared. Celebrities and politicians and doctors and abolitionists and world-changers...blink - gone - blink - gone. Who would die? Who would live? Who were they? What were they like?
If they could speak to us - what would they say?
I know, of course, exactly what they would say. Gianna Jessen is a 38-year-old abortion survivor, and she is anything but silent.
Gianna Jessen grew up believing that she was born with cerebral palsy because she had been delivered prematurely in a particularly traumatic birth. That was the story told to her by her adoptive mother and it was not until she was 12 years old that she discovered the truth about what made her different from the other children at school.
"I had an innate wondering," Miss Jessen says. "I wasn't satisfied for some reason, so I kept asking why I had this disability.
"She tried to break it to me gently and then, just as she was about to tell me, I said 'I was aborted, right?' She said 'Yeah, you were.' And my reaction was 'Well, at least I have cerebral palsy for an interesting reason.' "....
She was bullied at school and recalls crying at the taunts of other children. When she was 16, a stranger came up to her and told her that children with disabilities were a burden on society. "I just looked at her, smiled and knew she was wrong," Miss Jessen says....
"It's more comfortable for people to think of abortion as a political decision, or a right. But I am not a right. I am a human being. I am the reality. Gently I put the question, if abortion is about women's rights, then where were mine? There was no radical feminist screaming for my rights on that day."
Jessen tells her story, bringing emotional common sense crashing back into a sterilized debate:
"I’m hoping to be hated by the time I die....I know I’m already hated, because I declare life.
"I say: 'You didn’t get me. The silent holocaust didn’t win over me.' And my mission, ladies and gentlemen, among many things, is this: to infuse humanity into a debate that we have just compartmentalized and set on a shelf and said it is an 'issue.' We have removed our emotions. We are becoming harder.
"Do you really want that? How much are you willing to take and how much are you willing to risk to speak the truth in love and graciousness and stand up and at least be willing to be hated?"
It is the most powerful speech I have ever heard.
Here in this country, we have come to a similar crossroads. So far, there have been two exposé videos revealing that Planned Parenthood harvests and distributes baby organs. It's entirely legal, and much like soap-making in 1940s Germany, is surely a respectable, profitable, and pragmatic business.
I have two hundred forty-five friends on Facebook. About five of them have posted something about this. To them, and to the rest of the silent, I say this: Are you willing to be hated? Or will you look the other way while the gas chambers are filled and the ovens spew human smoke into the gray sky?
Things you can do:
1. Contact your congressman.
2. Tell people about this - both on- and off-line. Share the videos.
3. Sign a petition. Go here and search for "planned parenthood." Or sign this current petition.
4. Support a crisis pregnancy center.
5. Join a protest. While the national protest day was on August 22nd, I'm sure there will be others. Don't picture a mob, picture this:
Sneak peek of the Planned Parenthood protest this morning. Keep a lookout for a blog post within the next couple days about our experience. So proud of this guy for standing for life!
Posted by My Kids' Favorite Mom on Saturday, August 22, 2015
With 1.5 million abortions per year, the total number is probably closer to 60 million. Can you imagine the lack of specificity if we were talking about death penalty cases?
ReplyDeleteResearching this post, I found the ambiguity startling. How do you not know something like that?
DeleteI'm not so sure that the soap-making our of human corpses was so profitable or pragmatic in Nazi Germany. It seems there were more rumors of the soap-making than the actual production: while it almost certainly took place, I know of no proof that it was a widespread practice. As for whether it was respectable, I think how whispered or rumored about it was indicates that this might not be so. For all the evils that pervades German culture at the time, I don't think we have reason to conclude that washing oneself with soap made out of the remains of Jewish human beings would have been considered part of German polite society. If anything, it may have been deemed by some (perhaps somewhat mislead by exaggerations of its occurrence) to be an economic or wartime necessity.
ReplyDeleteI do not make these observations in order to be nitpicky. Rather, I think we have started to become a bit loose with Godwin's Law lately, and I don't think these Nazi comparisons are apt enough to warrant using them. Eva Mozes Kor, whom I follow over on the Twitter, was, along with her sister, tortured by Dr. Josef Mengele. His work was personal. He and his assistants spoke to their victims. They observed living, grown human beings capable of intelligent communication and unambiguous and meaningfully expressed feeling. Abortion is evil. Murdering human beings of any age or level of development is evil. The state of mind, however, and the perversion of perceived human relations involved in condemning an entire "race" and personally and intimately exacting their torture while they talk to you, cry to you, and so forth, which is what the Nazi doctors did, has an enormity beyond what the abortion doctors in this Planned Parenthood controversy are doing.
Besides, as I once saw it artfully described on a TV show, the first day of medical school, they drop a human cadaver in front of you and off you go: being trained as a medical doctor has a way of giving one a "clinical" view of things. So, when we hear human babies being discussed in medical and impersonal terminology, to at least some extent it is doctors doing what doctors do. It's not inconsistent with my experience, anyway. I've seen a few members of my own family leave this crummy world, and a number of the doctors in critical care had some rather disturbing ways of talking about my loved ones who were about to die: and these doctors unambiguously thought that my family members were human persons.
Anyway, good post. I'm glad to have found it. Hope others find it too.
It's entirely possible I used the comparison too loosely. The thought just kept occurring to me as I became more and more angry at the apathy of friends. I was struck by the similarity of two businesses - both attempting to use the products of mass murder for something useful. My point was mostly that while fetus's organs are useful, so is soap, but we moderns would never dream of using soap from concentration camps. Shouldn't we have a similar nicety with these organs? But I've heard the "these organs are a useful product of an unfortunate situation" argument several times.
DeleteStill, I should have thought it through a bit more, especially as I've done enough research to know many of the grimmer details of Nazi torture. (A book I wrote a few years ago led me to learn about Oskar Dirlewanger, and that was plenty, but I have also been following Eva Mozes Kor for a little while.)
Historically, the situations are not entirely unalike. Nucatola and co. are certainly less inhuman than those Nazis, but on the other hand, you have characters like Kermit Gosnell, who are sheltered by the Nucatola's of this world. Not all Nazis were Mengele; not all abortionists are Gosnell. And yes, Gosnell was not as bad as Mengele, but I tend to suspect that's merely for lack of opportunity rather than any moral considerations.