Planned Parenthood and Men's Uteruses

Some men have a uterus. And some trout have beards. When ripe, pineapples get about on their four legs. If you keep a pineapple as a pet, it is inhumane to declaw it.

This triangle has four sides:

Say it, bigot. Triangle. Four sides.

Repeat. Triangle with four sides. Some men have a uterus. 1 + 3 = 5. A ripe pineapple gets about on its legs. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia... etc., etc.

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Cf. also:

Dreher on "Peak Trans"

LGBT Rights--Or Else!

Check out my Idiocy, Ltd. and begin the long, hard reckoning.

Bill Nye's Abortion Argument is Ethically Hollow

Just watched the recent short clip of Bill Nye the "Science Guy” lecturing people on why they should support abortion rights. Nye shows, yet again, the amazingly shoddy ethical understanding these “science guys” often have. It's almost embarrassing to listen to him. (I’m not going to link the video. Go find it on Google yourself if you like.)

Nye argues that we shouldn’t insist an individual’s humanity begins at conception because, consider, many fertilized eggs don’t attach to the wall of the womb and thus don’t survive anyway. Nye apparently thinks this fact of human reproduction carries ethical weight. His point seems to be: “See, if these fertilized eggs die, why not just give ourselves the right to kill those other fertilized eggs that do in fact attach to the womb and begin to develop?”

The "Science Guy's" easygoing demeanor in this clip shouldn’t obscure the obvious: His ethical logic here is appalling.

That many fertilized eggs don’t attach to the womb is merely an accident of nature. It does not carry ethical weight of any kind and cannot direct us at all in assessing the ethical status of abortion.

One can see Nye’s logic in all its glory if one merely applies it to a test case.

Suppose there is a mountain village in Guatemala that suffers a landslide which kills 85 of its 102 inhabitants. Earth tremors triggered the landslide, burying most of the village in the predawn hours. The traumatized survivors wait for rescue.

That landslide, like Nye’s point about fertilized eggs that don’t attach to the womb, is an accident of nature. That 85 of the villagers didn’t survive tells us nothing about the value of the survivors or how we must treat them.

How would Nye’s “humane” thinking apply in this landslide case?

In fact, according to Nye’s brilliant ethical sense, we might give ourselves the right to go in and kill those survivors rather than rescue them. After all, they 1) could easily have been among the victims and 2) it will be difficult to rescue and care for them.

At the end of the day, Nye might argue, we should “leave it up to the rescuers” to decide, because, after all, it’s their country.

If you think this kind of ethical logic deserves respect, well, you’re living in the right century. Welcome to the “scientific” understanding of ethics.

Nye’s ethics is not ethics at all, but merely a smartish guy talking out of his bow tie, if not out of some lower area of his person. This is the problem with so many science types when they attempt to speak on ethical issues. They don’t recognize that ethics is a branch of philosophy that requires serious questioning of premises and logical implications. They think they can just make it up as they go along, which is to say: They are no more qualified to speak on such issues than any old drunk on the street.

Bill Nye: Proving again that “science guys” have precisely nothing to tell you about what is right or wrong.

Eric Mader

Planned Parenthood? What about PLANNED RETIREMENT?

Imagine the year is 2035. And imagine that in most American cities one can find branches of a new national organization called Planned Retirement.

Planned Retirement has many defenders, and many detractors.

The organization’s policies are progressive. With help from the federal government, they provide low cost housing, food and limited medical care to people over 65. When a resident has reached the ripe age of 77, the organization sends a doctor to the resident’s room with the medical equipment needed to crush the resident’s head, thus ending his or her life. Any salvageable organs are sold to research institutes, and residents’ bodies are buried in landfills.

Many Americans, especially Christians, are strongly opposed to Planned Retirement’s practices. They argue that killing the elderly in this way is a form of murder and that the difficulty of caring for elderly people is no excuse to end their lives. They also argue that mass burial in unmarked graves and the marketing of the dead’s organs as “research material” is an obvious ruse to avoid facing the painful truth--namely, that each of these elders was a unique human being with the inalienable right to life.

In Congress there is a new effort to defund the organization because of its snuff policies. But liberals are up in arms in support of Planned Retirement. They want to focus the debate on the health care and housing Planned Retirement offers elderly people, thus diverting the public's attention from the issue that led to the push to defund, namely: Planned Retirement's practice of terminating human lives.

And so: “This is just another attack on elderly health care!” the liberals scream.

Besides being an obvious attempt to change the subject, there's a second element of dishonesty in this cry. Liberals actually mean to imply that those seeking to defund Planned Retirement are somehow motivated by a disrespect for elderly people. Which is interesting, to say the least.

But consider another detail of Planned Retirement policy: If the family of an elder resident chooses to terminate Mom or Dad or Grandma or Grandpa’s life before the age of 77, they can provide written consent for such termination.

The reasons people give for wanting their parents’ termination are various: “We don’t have time to visit her any more.” “We have a right to live our lives as we choose!” “The fees to keep Mom there are too much for my budget.”

In a widely shared rant in defense of Planned Retirement, liberal senator Elizabeth Warrick argues: “How can we dare interfere with these families when they are making what is probably the single most difficult decision of their lives? How can we dare?”

Senator Warrick seems think that the moral difficulty individuals might face in deciding to kill their parents or grandparents should carry more weight than the lives of those whose heads are to be crushed.

Again: Interesting argument.

My point:

If in the current American debate about defunding Planned Parenthood you’ve found yourself arguing that “This is an attack on women’s health care!” or “Abortions only account for 3% of Planned Parenthood’s services!” or “It’s a difficult decision! We shouldn’t presume to judge!”--well, congratulations: To me, as a Catholic, you sound precisely like those future liberals above arguing in support of “Planned Retirement”. Your arguments ring equally hollow are are equally beside the point.

The fact is that Christians and others are not opposed to Planned Parenthood because of some vague lurking misogyny. No, they are opposed to Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers because of one obvious truth: Just like the unfortunate elders in the above future scenario, the unborn are each unique human beings.

This is not merely Christian teaching, or some religious teaching, it is a scientifically demonstrable fact. Each unborn person has an integral human body and unique human DNA. As such, she or he is a unique human person and deserves the defense of the law, regardless of whether or not she or he has a name.

In terms of the ethics involved, my above dystopian tale of “Planned Retirement” offers a precise parallel to what the real organization Planned Parenthood is doing right now. Planned Parenthood serves the “health” of young mothers and their children in the same way that my fictional Planned Retirement serves the “health” of the elderly and their families. In both organizations, when people are judged to be inconvenient, they are snuffed.

Because of Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers, we already live in a dystopia. Defunding is the least they deserve.

What kind of wool is it, of what thickness, do American liberals have to keep pulling over their eyes to avoid seeing this? It must be morally exhausting to have to defend, for decades on end, such an Orwellian vision of humanity. Women's "health care"?

Last year Planned Parenthood ended the lives of an estimated 165,000 women, tossing their broken bodies, or at least those parts that couldn’t be sold, into the trash bin.

American liberals really don't get it. That wool must be damn thick.

Eric Mader

Human Tissue and the Meaning of sell

Planned Parenthood doctor Mary Gatter needs a new car.
Your child can help.
First, take a few minutes to watch the newly released video from the Center for Medical Progress. It’s embedded in an article at Breitbart, along with some transcripts.

What is going on here? Or rather: How can anyone continue to deny what's going on here? In their public pronouncements Planned Parenthood insists they don’t “sell” tissue from aborted children, that the clinics and their directors are making no profit from what they call “transfer” of tissue. But in the video, a senior Planned Parenthood figure talks about prices for human body parts being enough to make it “worthwhile for me”, and charmingly ends her discussion by saying “I want a Lamborghini.”

Critics of the first Center for Medical Progress video argued that the featured doctor’s remarks were taken out of context and that the video was pure spin. But who is doing the spin here?

Planned Parenthood’s has defended their practices so far by claiming that any money acquired for human tissue has been to cover the costs of “storage” and “processing". But consider the scenario being discussed in the video. The buyer comes to the clinic and takes what he/she wants, then pays the clinic per sample, $75 to $150 being ballpark figures. Planned Parenthood affiliated clinics are not “transferring” or “storing” tissue beyond a bit of refrigeration until buyers arrive.

A distasteful, but unfortunately accurate, analogy comes to mind. Any butcher could likewise claim that his business is not “selling meat”, but that his fees are simply to cover the cost of “storage” while the meat is “transferred”. For the butcher, as for the Planned Parenthood clinic, the “storage” referred to is the same cheap method you use in your kitchen: refrigeration.

And how much does an ounce of pork liver go for now? Is it 35 cents an ounce or 45 cents? Compare this to a human baby’s liver as per Planned Parenthood prices: 75 dollars per liver (being about $30 an ounce). That’s a business at least 100 times more profitable than the one the butcher is engaged in. And sorry, but profitable is the correct word here, because the clinic doesn't have to do anything but put these human body parts in a cooler for a day or two.

Here I can already hear the Planned Parenthood defender standing up to say: “You can’t talk about it that way! It's not just meat, it’s human tissue being stored. It’s for scientific experiments.”

To which I would answer: “Voilà! Now you’re starting to get it. It is human tissue; it is developed human tissue. And in this case a person was killed to get it. And the tissue is being sold for a profit.”

If Planned Parenthood's selling of aborted children's organs doesn't generate a profit, how exactly does it relate to this doctor's "wanting to get a Lamborghini"? Again, I think we're dealing with something painfully obvious.

Eric Mader