Saturday August 22, Feast of the Queenship of Our Lady and Nationwide Protest Against Planned Parenthood.

In St. Paul Minnesota:

St. Paul 

Planned Parenthood, 671 Vandalia Street (map)

When: This protest will be held Saturday, August 22, 2015 

Sponsor: Pro-Life Action MinistriesContact the local leader

Other locations in Minnesota and across the country here.

If you are unable to attend, pray, fast, or do some sort of penance, but pray.  Attend Mass and adoration, into the night, if possible.  Pray for an end to abortion, lobby and petition for the de-funding of Planned Parenthood, and please try to spread the news of the atrocities committed by the abortion industry.  The dissection of living newborns and the selling of body parts and 'tissue' for medical research is intolerable. 

Don't let these crimes continue to be assimilated into the culture, taken in stride, or denied and simply ignored.  These are living infants destroyed through abortion, including partial-birth abortion, as well as newborn infants, kept alive to harvest intact specimens.  We now have documentary evidence - the most recent example here.  

Planned Parenthood documentary videos and serial killings.

The child in the womb, the newborn has no choice.

Don't abandon them.


The latest horror story of cutting through a newborn's face to access and remove the brain while the infant is still alive reminds me of FBI crime scene profiling accounts of how serial killers disfigure and dismember their victims.  The PP story here.

Please do not avoid these stories - do not let them go - do not shield yourself from the truth.  Please pray and sacrifice in reparation for these heinous crimes against babies and children.  Feel the pain - pray and do all in your power to remind people of what has been happening, and work to eliminate PP and the abortion industry.

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I'm in the middle of the monthly novena to the Infant Jesus, and yesterday I considered the mystery of the Holy Name of Jesus and His Circumcision.  Jesus suffered and shed His blood the first time when He was circumcised.  Through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, in union with St. Joseph, I offer the merits of His most Precious Blood for the little ones who suffer the cruelty of abortion and infanticide.  Blood of Christ, pledge of eternal life, save us.

Dead babies for sale - we need an intervention. A big one.

photo source

Please - stop the killing.

Stop dismembering and selling infant body parts.

Stop.

Forget all the other distractions taking our attention away from the horror, the terrorism that has been allowed to grow and prosper - because we ignore the killing of unborn children ... including those just born.

We could have known, we might have known, and we should have known.  There has been a concerted effort not to offend the sensibilities of mothers, women who have aborted children, and you and I - who just can't stand looking at a dismembered newborn infant.

Stacy Trasancos, mother of seven and a former research scientist turned homemaker, writer, editor, and educator, makes it clear that the use of fetal and embryonic body parts and tissues is nothing new.

From her post at Catholic Stand:

Maybe the undercover investigation conducted by the Center for Medical Progress needed to happen so people could see and hear the gruesomeness of Planned Parenthood’s harvesting and sale of fetal body parts. Maybe it was too easy to ignore without video-taped evidence in plain, gory language. Maybe it is not enough to be outraged at abortion on its face because, I don’t know, killing is somehow worse if body parts are sold.

But anyone who has followed the Human Genome Project, cloning, genetic, evolution, and stem cell research knows that the use of fetal and embryonic body parts and tissues is nothing new. I am not complimenting myself for knowing about this. I have been interested in reading science papers for decades. Now I am urging more people to pay more attention because, while I remain unsure how to stop the horrific conduct in some areas of the scientific community, there is no doubt that information is a fundamental necessity. You cannot change what you do not know about.

[...]  

Now that we know ...

What do we do about it? Well, I assure you that getting angry over a sensational video from an undercover investigator will not make this end, but maybe it is a start to getting people to pay more attention.

In no way do I mean to scold anyone for not reading scientific papers before. What I hope I have done is encourage you to be confident that you can read them. You can see why it is important in this particular matter, but reading scientific papers is also a useful skill for any area of science you want to follow. If you are not a researcher doing the work, then reading the papers is the next best way to know what is done.

There will need to be pleas from us for the harvesting of fetal organs to stop, pleas to stop the research, pleas to stop funding the research, pleas to stop publishing the research, but the pleas will be ineffective if a case is not made that the knowledge gained from the research about human origins and human development is not worth donated fetal human lives. The people engaged in research using fetal body parts for decades think it is perfectly ethical. They have based entire careers on it. They are probably wondering why pro-life advocates are just now acting like they care because of the sensationalism of a few videos. I imagine their reaction is to shrug and get back to work.

We have to start making the case that research using fetal body parts is wrong and needs to stop, and there is only one way to know how to make that case if you are not the actual researcher. You have to know about the research by reading the papers. - Trasancos

Please be shocked.  Please be sickened.  Please be upset.  Please feel guilty, feel miserable, suffer - suffer the little children.  Don't ever get over it.  Don't take anti-depressants to keep from feeling depressed.  Don't distract yourself from the horror.  Stop it.

Stop killing babies.  Stop abortion. 

Finally, reality sets in: Harvesting organs of vulnerable prenatal children.

Planned Parenthood's senior director of medical services 

mentions multiple times that they will take the organs from 

babies as old as 20 weeks. This is a photo of what such a child looks like. -CC

It should shock us into admitting we kill the most vulnerable of human beings for financial profit.

And convenience.  We get rid of the unwanted in the same way the Nazis did - but it is more clinical, more sanitized and socially-economically-medically necessary.  It is a process of dehumanization.  Those of us who are pro-life, anti-abortion know that the victims are human beings, vulnerable children - prenatal children are unborn babies.  Vulnerable means defenseless.  They are children - crushing the head of a child is not unlike decapitating a person - in fact it is quite similar to what ISIS does to terrify the world.

'As important as the legal questions are, the moral questions are even more important.' - Camosy


That said, I found something on Fr. Martin's Facebook page which speaks to this issue - for me it clarifies the significance of the Planned Parenthood revelation that party parts are harvested from prenatal children.  Baby body parts on the market.  We should have known this - especially with the controversy surrounding the push for embryonic stem cell use.  The Chinese harvest organs from adult prisoners - doesn't affect our bottom line or stop trade with them.  As the author I link to observes, noting the Pope's reference to abortion in Laudato si: "Pope Francis laments a view which "sees everything as irrelevant unless it serves one's own immediate interests" and "treats others as mere objects." Our "use and throwaway" culture:

"leads to the sexual exploitation of children and abandonment of the elderly who no longer serve our interests. It is also the mindset of those who say: Let us allow the invisible forces of the market to regulate the economy, and consider their impact on society and nature as collateral damage. In the absence of objective truths or sound principles other than the satisfaction of our own desires and immediate needs, what limits can be placed on human trafficking, organized crime, the drug trade, commerce in blood diamonds and the fur of endangered species? Is it not the same relativistic logic which justifies buying the organs of the poor for resale or use in experimentation, or eliminating children because they are not what their parents wanted?" - Laudato si

I can't express it better than what Charles Camosy says in his article, so I will post an excerpt - I apologize for the length, but sometimes readers just don't want to finish reading at a different site.

'If there is a silver lining in this horrific story, it is the possibility that our culture will be forced to confront the moral reality of vulnerable prenatal children.' - Camosy

This beautiful formulation of the consistent ethic of life is an important lens through which to look at the "baby body parts" story. The moral reality of the child is erased from the scenario, with the only thing left being a mere object to be crushed, used and thrown away - especially when there is a financial profit to be made. Our own immediate interests dominate such that we become unable to see the vulnerable person who is (quite literally) objectified by our behaviour. The dignity of such persons is simply too inconvenient for us to acknowledge and thus must be ignored if we are to get on with the business of pursuing our interests.

If there is a silver lining in this horrific story, it is the possibility that our culture will be forced to confront the moral reality of vulnerable prenatal children. In the video, Planned Parenthood's senior director of medical services mentions multiple times that they will take the organs from babies as old as 20 weeks.

For most of our history, vulnerable persons like these were hidden from view such that those with power over them were rarely forced to confront their reality. But the current controversy over distributing aborted baby body parts brings the focus squarely onto their reality. Over and over again, this story includes references to the various human organs of the child: heart, liver, lungs and so on. We've received horrific but telling descriptions of how, in an attempt to acquire these organs during an abortion, the best practices involve crushing the feet and legs of the child first, leaving the bodily organs largely intact, with the final part being the evacuation of the baby's head. 

This reality, in all its gruesome detail, resists any Orwellian euphemism which might disconnect us from the reality of the child. In other contexts, we might be able to get away with calling a baby a "foetus" or the "product of conception." Or, as the video transcript mentions, calling the body a "thorax" and the head a "calvarium." Not in the context of this controversy. With these kinds of images and descriptions, it becomes clear that what we are talking about is a human baby - a baby whose reality, dignity and vulnerability cannot be euphemized away.

Can our culture maintain the focus necessary to move to protect our prenatal children? News cycles are notoriously short-lived, and the reality of what Planned Parenthood does to these babies is very difficult to face for any length of time. The major media in the United States, to the extent they have seriously covered the story at all, have already attempted to push our focus away from babies and onto other things: the motives of the people who took the video, what the legal definition "selling" means and so on.

But Pope Francis challenges us to resist these distractions - and the throwaway culture they end up serving - by consistently lifting up the dignity of the most vulnerable. Even (and perhaps especially) when it is difficult and inconvenient for us to do so. How we will respond to his challenge remains to be seen.

Charles Camosy is Associate Professor of Christian Ethics at Fordham University. His most recent book is Beyond the Abortion Wars: A Way Forward for a New Generation.