abortion

Why Our Medical Elite Support Planned Parenthood

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Source: Ancient Faith Radio

By Wesley J. Smith

It’s not only fetuses and babies that are viewed broadly in bioethics as “killable” and perhaps even “harvestable.” There is increasing advocacy, although it is important to emphasize that this is not yet happening, for killing those with profound cognitive impairments for their organs. I could adduce many samples of this advocacy, but space only permits one typical example, published not irrelevantly in The New England Journal of Medicine.

If you think it is respectable to consider babies, whether born or unborn, to be an inferior stage of human life, you can easily come to think that they have few rights that fully developed persons are bound to respect.

Listen here:

Transcript

The New England Journal of Medicine recently published a scathing editorial about Planned Parenthood’s harvesting of fetal tissues. No, the editorial didn’t criticize the organization for discrediting scientific research by killing fetuses in a “less crunchy” manner, as one executive put it, to obtain intact organs. Rather, using the highly emotive language of ideological pro-abortion activism, it attacked the messenger as “radical anti-choice” for supposedly engaging in a “campaign of misinformation” for vividly revealing the cruel practices and attitudes of top Planned Parenthood abortionists.

The New England Journal of Medicine is supposed to be an evidence-based journal, but the editorialist didn’t even try to grapple with the actual contents of the video’s release by the Center for Medical Progress, and indeed forgot to mention in their charge that the tapes “twist the truth” that the unedited originals were all released concomitantly with the edited versions, allowing for full scrutiny. Instead, the editorialists resort to the usual bromide that fetal-tissue research could lead to cures as they simply assert that Planned Parenthood follows proper ethical guidelines—all without offering any truth to rebut the contrary evidence on the tapes. They conclude:

We thank the women who made the choice to help improve the human condition through their tissue donation. We applaud the people who make this work possible and those who use these materials to advance human health. We are outraged by those who debase these women, this work, and Planned Parenthood by distorting the facts for political ends.

Technical point: The tissue in question isn’t that of the woman. It is—was—the fetus’s. Whatever one thinks of fetal-tissue research, obtaining the specimens isn’t the same as creating a cell line from an excised tumor. Moreover, utility does not justify all things. Good ethics and respect for the intrinsic value of human life are integral to a science sector supported widely by the public.

The journal’s editorialist is just one small example of how highly ideological our medical intelligentsia have become and how increasingly accepting of morally objectionable practices. To understand why this might be, why venerable medical and bioethics journals are generally supportive of controversial policy agendas such as assisted suicide and medical rationing, we have to explore the ideas that now animate the field of bioethics.

Most bioethicists, at least those without a modifier like “conservative” in front of the term, are reluctant to clearly define the boundaries that designate when human life becomes morally relevant. That leaves some of the most extreme voices in the public advocacy driver’s seat. Thus a predominant view in bioethics endorses an invidiously discriminatory approach to valuing life based on each individual’s measurable cognitive capacities.

In this view, those who are demonstrably, say, self-aware over time or able to value their own lives are deemed “persons.” Those insufficiently mature—embryos, fetuses, infants—or those who have lost those capacities, due to illnesses or injuries such as Terry Schiavo or Alzheimer’s patients, are denigrated as “non-persons.” Making matters worse, so-called human non-persons are held to have lesser worth than the rest of us.

Not only that, but under this philosophical construct, non-persons don’t have the right to life. Thus, the right to abortion is not only about protecting a woman’s right to do as she pleases with her own body; rather, abortion is also acceptable because the fetus is not deemed a person. And, indeed, for many in the field, this means that infanticide should also be allowed, and for the same reasons as abortion.

Here’s just one example. A few years ago, an article published in the Journal of Medical Ethics caused a public furor when it advocated for the propriety of what it called “after-birth abortion.” The authors inflate the scope of personal autonomy that protects what is often blandly called the “woman’s right to choose”—choose what usually goes unsaid—to a putative right not to be personally inconvenienced by an infant or the child she will later become. Thus, since an abortion can be obtained for convenience purposes and since newborns are no more persons than are fetuses, babies should also be killable, and one presumes harvestable, just as the unborn are abortable.

Here is how the authors describe their argument:

Abortion is largely accepted, even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus’s health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual status as persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant, and (3) adoption is not always in the best interests of actual people, the authors argue that what we call “after-birth abortion” (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.

Since a baby isn’t a person, the authors opined, not only personal aims, but also well-developed plans of parents, sibling, and—get this—society “should represent the prevailing consideration in a decision about abortion and after-birth abortion.”

It’s not only fetuses and babies that are viewed broadly in bioethics as “killable” and perhaps even “harvestable.” There is increasing advocacy, although it is important to emphasize that this is not yet happening, for killing those with profound cognitive impairments for their organs. I could adduce many samples of this advocacy, but space only permits one typical example, published not irrelevantly in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Many will object to transplantation surgeons cannot legally or ethically remove vital organs from patients before death since doing so will cause their death. Whether death actually occurs as the result of ventilator withdrawal or organ procurement, the ethically relevant precondition is valid consent by the patient or surrogate. With such consent, there is no harm or wrong done in retrieving vital organs before death, provided that anesthesia is administered.

So now we can see why those who presume to possess the greatest ethical expertise in the biomedical field are not leading the charge against Planned Parenthood’s crass attitudes towards and dismemberment of fetuses to obtain salable parts.

If you are interested in exploring these themes from an explicitly Orthodox perspective, I highly recommend the writing of Fr. John Breck. My Twitter address is @forcedexit. I also invite you to check out the Center for Human Exceptionalism at the Discovery Institute, of which I am the co-director. We can be found at www.discovery.org, where I can also be contacted.

Wesley J. Smith

Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism. A revised and updated version of his award winning Culture of Death: The Assault on Medical Ethics in America will be released by Encounter Books next year.

Ancient Faith Today: David Daleiden – The Man Behind the Planned Parenthood Exposé [AUDIO]

Transcript

Mr. Kevin Allen: Thank you for joining me on this special edition of Ancient Faith Today. You know, there are few stories with greater current significance and more “legs,” as we say in media, in the U.S. right now than the seven recent exposé videos that the pro-life activist organization, the Center for Medical Progress, released beginning in July, showing Planned Parenthood officials, the nation’s single largest provider of abortion and women’s health issues, and some of their affiliate organizations discussing, sometimes quite brazenly, reimbursement for donations of fetal tissue—organs, body parts—as well as “intact fetal cadavers,” with a non-existent biomedical research company called “BioMax Procurement Services.”

Secret recordings, as many of you know, of seven meetings using professional actors were produced and released with Planned Parenthood and Planned Parenthood officials, and these videos, especially the seventh, which features testimony from a Holly O’Donnell, a former procurement technician at StemExpress, a California company that until recently acquired aborted baby parts from Planned Parenthood, in which she alleges witnessing that Planned Parenthood committed infanticide of a baby with a heartbeat outside the womb so as to extract that baby’s brain. Well, that and all of the others have powerfully reopened the national discussion about the legal and moral implications of abortion.

Subsequent to the release of this series of videos, five states have now defunded Planned Parenthood—Louisiana, New Hampshire, Alabama, Utah, and Arkansas—and I’m only assuming that others are considering it. Six additional states are investigating Planned Parenthood, and even in the progressive state of California, Melissa A. Melendez, a Republican in Lake Elsinore, has officially requested to the joint legislative audit committee a state audit of Planned Parenthood, and the house commerce committee just announced it’s expanding its investigation of Planned Parenthood and several other Planned Parenthood affiliates about their practices relating to fully intact aborted babies, which, if guilty, these organizations could be violating federal law, known as the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act.

However, and as we know with our political process, Democrats on the House of Representatives oversight committee are just launching an investigation, not on the abortion giant Planned Parenthood, but on the Center for Medical Progress, the group behind the series of exposé videos.

Well, I’m privileged to have the director of the Center for Medical Progress as my guest in studio today. David Daleiden is the director of the CMP, the Center for Medical Progress, and has long been a pro-life activist. He’s only 26 years old, and considered a hero by many in the Christian and pro-life community. I’m pleased and honored to have David Daleiden as my guest on the program today. David, welcome to Ancient Faith Today.

Mr. David Daleiden: Thank you so much for having me on, Kevin.

Mr. Allen: Our privilege and pleasure. First, before we get into specifics and background and all of the issues that we’ll cover in this extensive interview, did you ever think or imagine that this video exposés that you were planning would have the significant impact that they are having on the national and perhaps international discussion, both legal and moral, on abortion?

Mr. Daleiden: Well, we certainly thought that the project itself, that the information that we were documenting and illustrating about how Planned Parenthood sells the body parts of the babies that they abort, that that was information that was going to be shocking to the public, and that that was going to be big news. I don’t think anybody realized that it was going to be “ten presidential candidates commenting on the first day” big. That’s a sort of volume of discussion that I don’t think that you can necessarily plan for or completely expect. So we knew it was going to be big, I hoped that it was going to be big and have a big impact and that a lot of people would enter that discussion, but I really had no expectation that it would be as large as it’s become.

Mr. Allen: And as we were briefly discussing, there’s been a lot of political as well as legal push-back. Were you surprised by that and prepared for that?

Mr. Daleiden: You know, actually I kind of take a different perspective on that than I think a lot of people do, from the outside looking in; more from the eye of the hurricane looking out actually feels a lot calmer in there than some people might think. So I was surprised it took for there to be any kind of significant push-back from the abortion industry, led by Planned Parenthood. I think that that’s an indication and a symptom of how off-guard this project took them. The baby-parts trafficking was the last thing that Planned Parenthood and their allies were expecting to have to talk about, the last thing that they were prepared to talk about, and the last thing that they were prepared to talk about in public, and that’s why they are kind of desperately trying to change the conversation to anything else that they possibly can.

Mr. Allen: Well, let’s begin, because I know my listeners are going to be interested in this, with a bit of personal background. I understand you’re a traditional Latin Mass Tridentine Catholic. Is that correct?

Mr. Daleiden: That’s correct, yeah. I like to just call it Catholic.

Mr. Allen: Okay, and I’ve heard you have some Orthodox connections in your ancestral background?

Mr. Daleiden: I do, yeah. My maternal grandfather was Greek, and I believe that he was baptized and chrismated Greek Catholic, but definitely, ethnically, historically, that connection is there.

Mr. Allen: Interesting. And you wrote to me in an email as we were kind of ramping up for this wonderful conversation we’re having and going to have this. You wrote: “The ancient prayer and rituals of the Orthodox Church, including the Divine Liturgy, are some of the biggest spiritual influences on my work.” So how has Orthodoxy in this context influenced your work?

Mr. Daleiden: Definitely. So I think, first of all, we know that the Church is—the Catholic and Orthodox churches were united for the first thousand years, so the ancient Roman Mass that I usually attend on Sundays was the Mass of the Orthodox Western world for a thousand years while the churches were united, and the Divine Liturgy of the Eastern churches is still said in many Catholic churches around the world, and was the prayer of the Eastern Catholic Church for the first thousand years. So that connection is very strong and has always been there.

But also Orthodoxy, specifically as it is today, back when I first started doing pro-life work, when I was in late high school, college, I would frequently go to Orthodox vespers on Saturdays at the Greek Orthodox Church in Sacramento, which was where I grew up. And the Jesus prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner,” is still one of the cornerstones of my prayer life. It’s something that we said many times undercover at different abortion meetings with different abortion doctors.

Mr. Allen: Wow.

Mr. Daleiden: Yeah. So, Orthodoxy is… I’m really someone who really just sees things like that as two sides of the same coin. And the Orthodox Church, to me, is just as much of a spiritual fountain of grace as what I find from my Catholic Church.

Mr. Allen: David, can you summarize, as we start to get into the issues of these exposés, can you summarize for our listeners the major new news points about Planned Parenthood that you feel that your videos have uncovered, that the public media and even the government—although they don’t appear to be willing to admit it right now—might not have been aware of?

Mr. Daleiden: You know, I think the biggest thing that almost everybody seems to say after starting to watch the videos is: “I had no idea that this was going on.” And it’s sad, because the harvesting and sale of aborted baby parts has actually been going on for decades, and Planned Parenthood has been involved in it in a major way for decades, and government money has been involved in it for decades. And even many politicians, many government people, officials, have been shocked to find out that this is taking place. And the public has been absolutely shocked and outraged, because this really… Fetal trafficking is really the capstone of the abortion industry. It’s what comes beyond abortion, and it’s what comes when you have abortion clinics led by Planned Parenthood that are well-established, that are successful, that are high-volume, and that aren’t being challenged. And this is sort of the logical next step for them to start to take, so it really is the capstone of the industry, but it’s also the dirty little secret that they’ve kept buried down so far that nobody else would find out about it.

Mr. Allen: I want to come back in a little bit to funding, because you mentioned that, but I want to ask you this first. Some of our listeners have asked me this question: Were the actors that you used in the exposé videos, were they pro-lifers committed to this work, or were they simply professional actors you hired?

Mr. Daleiden: It was kind of a mix. I wouldn’t call anyone a professional actor, so to speak, but we used and trained investigators who were, all of them, committed pro-life people, some to varying degrees to others. Not everybody had an activist background, but everyone was very creative and intelligent and a good fit for the sort of investigative acting they were going to do.

Mr. Allen: Gotcha. So they could think on their feet and respond.

Mr. Daleiden: Exactly.

Mr. Allen: Yeah, gotcha. Because that seems to be what drew a lot of the information out, the fluidity of the conversations. David, some observers have argued that the filming of the video might have violated California’s strict recording laws. What do your lawyers tell you?

Mr. Daleiden: So the California recording law actually has two really important exceptions to it. Number one, it only applies to what are called “confidential” conversations, so if there’s a conversation that’s happening in public, something that people are walking by, they can overhear it, it’s not considered a confidential communication, so the California recording law simply doesn’t apply.

Mr. Allen: Interesting.

Mr. Daleiden: So all of the restaurant business lunch meetings that you’ve seen, those are fully in compliance with the California law, and there’s plenty of case law where actual news organizations have done investigative journalism stings in exactly the same format—public conversation at a business lunch meeting—and the courts have upheld that.

So there’s that, and the second big exception to the California recording law is if you are gathering evidence of violent felonies, of crimes against people, the recording law also doesn’t apply in those situations. So when you have situations of born-alive infants, which is technically infanticide and homicide under even California state law, those are also situations where the recording law doesn’t apply. And we’ve surprisingly gotten some admissions from Planned Parenthood and the leadership of some of their proxies as well of policies that indicate there’s born-alive infants in the whole fetal tissue world.

Mr. Allen: Especially in the seventh exposé. That just…

Mr. Daleiden: Yeah.

Mr. Allen: It was so shocking, I didn’t really know quite how to respond to that. By the way, I’m speaking with David Daleiden. He’s the director of the Center for Medical Progress and the man behind the exposé videos that have rocked the abortion industry.

So, David, did you have prior knowledge before you did the videos about what would likely come out that you were trying to draw out? And why did you suspect that Planned Parenthood allegedly was violating tissue donation and possibly other laws?

Mr. Daleiden: Sure. So, like I said, a lot of people have been shocked to find out that this is going on, and almost nobody realized that Planned Parenthood was harvesting and selling aborted baby parts, because unfortunately it’s been at this point 15 years since this whole issue was ever a part of the national discourse. It was 15 years ago that my friend, Mark Crutcher, and his organization, Life Dynamics, out in Texas, actually did the first big exposé of how Planned Parenthood harvests and sells aborted baby parts. And nobody had really talked about it much before then for many years. Mark did a big exposé in 2000-2001.

It was in the public discourse for a certain amount of time at that time, and then it just kind of got buried by the mainstream media by Planned Parenthood’s political allies and cronies, and nobody revisited it literally for 15 years. I found out about it about five years ago and was really disturbed by it, really troubled, and I thought that this is something that everybody needs to know about because I don’t think that you can fully appreciate what the abortion industry is in America without understanding that baby parts sales are the capstone of it. So that was sort of the tip of the iceberg, was what I knew about, but it was almost like the more you could find out about what information was available just two years ago or five years ago, the more you wanted to know. It was stuff that raised many more questions than it answered, so I wanted not only just to revisit that topic of baby part sales, but I wanted to do something that would be more in-depth and go right to the heart of it, to the source, to the suppliers, which are the Planned Parenthood clinics, and try to answer a lot of the questions that were left unanswered last time.

Mr. Allen: Did you find in your doing these exposé videos, which have been called “sting” videos, but I like “exposé” better, did you find new information that you weren’t necessarily even expecting, given the history that you had accumulated in your pre-investigation work?

Mr. Daleiden: Oh, yeah. Definitely. What we discovered this time around that was not discovered 15 years ago was that the knowledge and approval and support of and even the participation in harvesting and selling aborted baby parts is something that happens at the top levels of Planned Parenthood. It goes literally to the very highest levels of their national organization and percolates on down from there. 15 years ago, all we knew about were certain local Planned Parenthood affiliates that were involved and maybe on the level of certain doctors, certain physicians. Today what we know is that the senior director of medical services of Planned Parenthood, their top abortion doctor who writes their training manuals, who trains their abortion doctors…

Mr. Allen: This is Deborah Nucatola?

Mr. Daleiden: Deborah Nucatola, who oversees all of their clinical practice all over the country, she herself has been implementing and orchestrating and developing their policies, their national policies, on aborted baby organ harvesting for many, many years. She practices it herself at the big Planned Parenthood surgical facility in Los Angeles. So it goes to the very top of their organization, and that’s definitely new information.

Mr. Allen: Interesting. Now to be fair and balanced, as such, I have to give you some approaches from a critical perspective, and as you know critics have pushed back by arguing that the editing of the videos might have skewed the true content of the conversations in which, and especially the first, as we’ve been talking about her, Dr. Deborah Nucatola, the PP executive, says things that they claim you edited out that might have contradicted earlier statements that she made that would have minimized the drama or the impact of these later statements. How would you respond to that?

Mr. Daleiden: The Center for Medical Progress always includes with me undercover the video release that we do, we always include the full footage of the conversation along with what’s basically a summarized version of it that’s just the highlights, so people can watch the summarized highlight version, because most people aren’t going to have the patience to sit through three hours of abortion business meeting conversation. And people can also watch the full footage of the conversation, and they can make their own conclusions about what the highlights are and how they feel about our presentation of that.

As far as the stuff with Dr. Nucatola, specifically in that business lunch meeting with her, we actually… Some of the… Many of the statements that we didn’t include simply because we didn’t have time to include them, many of them I think back up our case and help to tell a fuller picture of it, including one of her most honest statements [which] is that some Planned Parenthood affiliates may want to “do a little better than break even” on their so-called fetal tissue donations, i.e., turn a profit, and if they can make it seem reasonable the way that they do that, they’re happy to do so.

Almost all of Dr. Nucatola’s statements about the actual remuneration, the actual money that Planned Parenthood gets from the so-called donations of aborted fetal tissue, almost all of her statements are phrased in a way talking about the appearance of the fetal tissue donation or what it looks like, what the perception is, but the one time that she actually talks about the actuality, what’s really going on, she says the clinics would be happy to do a little better than break even.

Mr. Allen: You know, David, I’ve heard commentators and politicians allege that a great percentage, even as high as 95% of Planned Parenthood’s services are abortion services. However, according to the 2013-2014 Planned Parenthood annual report, which I have reviewed, they claim that only 3% of their total services were for abortions. This still amounts to approximately and reportedly 327,653 abortions, or 30%ish of the 1.05 million abortions in the U.S. That accounts to close to 900 abortions per day. So my questions are: do you dispute that 3% number, and, if so, on what grounds?

Mr. Daleiden: Yeah, the 3% number that Planned Parenthood puts out is entirely fabricated. It was really sophistry about the talk about the percentage of services, because for Planned Parenthood, passing out a condom or filling a new birth control prescription, that counts as an individual service. Even given an abortion visit, you have an ultrasound, you have pre-op bloodwork, you have a counseling session. All of these could be counted as different services, so you can artificially inflate the number of other services that Planned Parenthood does while artificially deflating the number of abortions in services, and that’s how they arrive at the so-called 3% number.

A much more organic and accurate way to look at it is to say Planned Parenthood has 2.7 million patients that they see every year, and they do 327,000 abortions every year. So you divide the number of abortions by the number of patients, and you would arrive at an approximate number of about 13% of Planned Parenthood clients are abortion clients in any given year. So that gives you a better sense of the foundational aspect of abortion to their overall business.

Then you look at the actual revenue that the clinics bring in. In their annual report, they divide up their revenue into basically three different streams. One is private donations, one is government money, and the third is the actual fees for services that their clinics bring in, operating as a business, and for that third category of clinic income, 50% of it comes from their abortion procedures.

Mr. Allen: Wow.

Mr. Daleiden: Yeah.

Mr. Allen: And Abby Johnson, as you probably know, the former clinic director of a Planned Parenthood office in Texas, has said publicly that her branch, for whom she worked, made about $120,000 a month selling aborted fetus tissues and organs. That’s well over a million to a year in one clinic. And I wonder: Has Planned Parenthood ever been officially audited, so that people would understand, if they could really investigate whether this 3% number is true or not?

Mr. Daleiden: There has never been a comprehensive, official government audit of Planned Parenthood’s abortion services, ever.

Mr. Allen: I didn’t think so.

Speaking of federal and state taxpayer funds, because you mentioned that before, the Hyde Amendment, which was put into law in 1976, made the use of federal funds for abortions illegal. And according to a report by The New York Times—and I want you to comment on all of this—they claim that only Medicaid patients, in cases of rape, incest, and the mother’s life being threatened, can use federal Medicaid funds for obtaining abortions. So my question is: Are federal and state taxpayer funds being used for abortions?

Mr. Daleiden: Absolutely, and here’s the problem: it’s that money is fungible, so the only thing that Hyde Amendment really prevents is it prevents taxpayer funding from being used to fund, to reimburse the procedure cost of an abortion, the same way that you would reimburse the cost of any other medical services.

Mr. Allen: With the paper trail.

Mr. Daleiden: Right, but what the government money still pays for, is it pays for the rent that the Planned Parenthood clinic is paying, it pays for the salary of the medical director who’s doing most of the abortions anyway, it pays for the electricity that turns the lights on in the abortion room, it pays for the electricity that powers the vacuum suction machine that suctions the baby apart, it pays for the water and the soap that they use to sterilize the instruments—when they do sterilize them—it pays for all of the operational aspects of the clinic that allow it to continue to run and get 50% of its clinic funding from abortions.

Mr. Allen: David, as you’re well aware, a portion of Title 42 of the U.S. Code reads thus:

It shall be unlawful for any person to knowingly acquire, receive, or otherwise transfer any human organ for valuable consideration for use in human transplantation if the transfer affects interstate commerce.

And the law includes fetal tissue in its definitions, but it says that the term “valuable consideration” does not include reasonable payments for removal, transportation, preservation, and other associated costs. So this particular question is obviously more of a legal than a moral issue, but I do want to ask it: What side of the line, that is, covering costs is legal or profiting is illegal, do you think Planned Parenthood is on this legal point?

Mr. Daleiden: Planned Parenthood’s absolutely on the wrong side of the law on this point, and they know it, and that’s why they’re working overtime to try to cover that up and to distract from the whole issue. There’s also… So the law that you just quoted is the federal law on human organ transfers in general.

There’s also a federal law on human fetal tissue specifically, and that’s Title 42, §289g-2, and that explicitly prohibits any payments for fetal tissue, and the definition of “valuable consideration” that establishes that certain reimbursement payments for certain costs of facilitating a tissue or organ donation, that section is actually narrower in the specific fetal tissue law than it is in the organ donation law. Yeah, the qualifier about “removal” has been taken out of the fetal tissue one because of specific legislative intent there that Congress wanted to make sure they closed off any possible loophole that an organization like Planned Parenthood might use to justify payments on a per-specimen basis for aborted fetal tissue.

But ultimately the interpretation of citizen-journalists like myself, interpretation of the public and of lawmakers, and also the interpretation of Planned Parenthood and Planned Parenthood’s own attorneys are actually all in agreement here. The federal fetal tissue law that if you’re making a profit or receiving a financial benefit for supplying aborted fetal tissue, everybody, Planned Parenthood included, agrees that that’s what’s against the law and that’s wrong, and that’s the point that Planned Parenthood is most strongly trying to say, “We don’t receive any financial benefit. We don’t receive any profit.”

But when you actually look at the way that the business operates, Planned Parenthood doesn’t transport fetal tissue, Planned Parenthood doesn’t ship it, Planned Parenthood doesn’t do any of that, because they partner with middleman companies like StemExpress or Advanced BioScience [Laboratories] or Novogenix Laboratories, and those middleman companies send in harvesting technicians or procurement technicians like my friend Holly O’Donnell, who used to be one, who used to work for StemExpress doing that, and those techs go into the Planned Parenthood abortion clinics first thing in the morning. They have a list of all of the body parts orders that have come in, and they let the clinical staff know what they’re looking for, like Dr. Nucatola, the senior director of medical services, says, they have a huddle at the beginning of the day to map out what they need to harvest at that day.

The procurement technicians are the ones typically who consent the abortion patients; they identify the abortion patients who can provide the baby parts that they need, and they consent them. They then wait for the procedures to be done. They wait in the back path lab of the clinic. The clinic brings the aborted baby from the operating room to the path lab, which is what they do every day for every abortion procedure anyway. They leave it with the technician. The technician does all of the dissection. They package it up; they ship it off. So the only thing that Planned Parenthood has to do is open the doors for the technicians in the morning and carry the fetus from the OR to the path lab. And just for doing that, for supplying the baby and the baby parts, Planned Parenthood gets a per-specimen payment, per specimen that’s harvested from the aborted baby, of sometimes $50 a specimen, $75 a specimen, even $100 per specimen, and all of that is straight-up profit that goes to Planned Parenthood’s bottom line.

Mr. Allen: As you know, better than I, some of the pro-choice media have contacted experts who have said that the price ranges mentioned in the first two videos, anywhere from $30 to $100, do not come close to making Planned Parenthood a profit, but just recovering some of their costs. How would you respond to that?

Mr. Daleiden: Those so-called experts just don’t understand how Planned Parenthood operates. They’re clearly not experts in the way that abortion happens clinically, because the only thing… Again, Planned Parenthood literally has no costs when they’re allowing an outside biotech company’s procurement tech to come into their clinic, harvest the body parts, and sell them.

Mr. Allen: And even Dr. Nucatola, in the first video, makes a statement that suggests that some clinics would be comfortable with a payment that was slightly more than their expenses. She [says]:

I think for affiliates at the end of the day they’re a non-profit. They just don’t want to. They want to break even. And if they can do a little better than break even, and do so in a way that seems reasonable, they’re happy to do that.

So she seems to be admitting this.

Mr. Daleiden: Absolutely, absolutely. Everyone admitted at the end of the day that it constituted as some kind of financial benefit to Planned Parenthood. Nobody denied that when the media spotlight wasn’t on them. And Dr. Mary Gatter, who is the president of Planned Parenthood’s medical directors council, she described the arrangement that Planned Parenthood in Los Angeles has had with Novogenix Laboratories and said, “It was very easy. We didn’t have to do anything,” yet they still received so-called “compensation” for it.

Mr. Allen: David, also at issue in this video is patient consent. For researchers to use the fetal tissue or body parts, the specimens need to remain intact, which could mean that the providers would have to use a different method to abort first-trimester fetuses. But, per Planned Parenthood’s own protocols, women who decide to donate their fetal tissues are told that their care will not be changed in any way based on their decision. Do your videos, past or future, provide evidence that Planned Parenthood is or has violated this protocol by using different methods to maintain intact fetuses so they can be sold or harvested?

Mr. Daleiden: Planned Parenthood is lying to their patients and lying to pregnant women who come into their clinics, because Planned Parenthood… Every single Planned Parenthood doctor that we talked to was happy to modify their abortion technique in order to get higher quality baby parts for sale. And they’re not just willing to make slight alterations; they’re willing to use flat-out illegal abortion procedures in order to get those body parts…

Mr. Allen: Wow.

Mr. Daleiden: …like the partial-birth abortion technique, which is where you use ultrasound guidance to convert the fetus to a breech position, you pull the baby out of the mother feet-first, keeping it all in one piece, because, as the baby’s body gets bigger from the legs to the torso to the shoulders, it helps to increasingly dilate the birth canal so you can get a fully intact fetus out of the mother. And that’s exactly the procedure that Dr. Nucatola, the senior director of medical services for Planned Parenthood, described to our investigators that she and other Planned Parenthood doctors could use in order to get higher quality fetal hearts and brains and livers in order to sell. And that procedure is completely illegal according to federal law, and that’s an issue that Planned Parenthood—that’s an argument that they’ve completely dropped for the past five or six weeks. They won’t even address that issue because they have no defense for it.

Mr. Allen: And in one video, a Planned Parenthood visual—you’ll [have to remind] me which one it was—discussed facilitating organs harvest by crushing fetuses in a “less crunchy” manner so as to procure them, and that seems to me to be a pretty admissive statement.

Mr. Daleiden: Yeah, that was Dr. Mary Gatter, the president of Planned Parenthood’s medical director council.

Mr. Allen: Number two, wasn’t it?

Mr. Daleiden: Yeah. [She was] saying that when it came to a suction abortion, they could use a “less crunchy” method for the suction, basically a much less powerful suction instrument, and use that to try to keep the entire baby intact.

Mr. Allen: For the purpose of?

Mr. Daleiden: For the purpose of harvesting the bodies.

Mr. Allen: Obviously. Why would they do it that way if not?

Mr. Daleiden: Yup. In a case like that, when you’re making decisions about your patient based on what’s going to get you a more intact specimen so that you can sell it so that you have a financial benefit, in that case you’re no longer treating that patient as a woman, you’re no longer treating her as a human being who has patient autonomy and has her own dignity. You’re treating her like a harvesting pod, which is horrific.

Mr. Allen: And as you know, many women have post-abortive psychological issues: grieving and all of these things. I wonder, if Planned Parenthood were upfront about what they’re doing, if this would change the minds of many of these women, especially young women, that come in.

Mr. Daleiden: Oh, yeah. There were… And what Planned Parenthood likes in part about the fetal tissue sales as well is that it can be a way to lock in certain abortions and make certain that they happen. There were Planned Parenthood doctors who suggested to our investigators that getting patients to sign the donation form for fetal tissue collection might actually decrease their no-show rate, because typically you have a certain percentage of patients that come in for pre-op work on day one, and then don’t actually show up on day two because they changed their mind, and some of them hope that if we got them to sign the form on day one, they would definitely come back on day two.

Mr. Allen: Or maybe feel better because they think they’re contributing this abortive process to medical benefit.

Mr. Daleiden: Right, but at the same time, the form that they’re being consented for and the process of so-called donation that they’re being consented to is actually not the process that is actually happening, because it’s not a donation, it’s a sale; the financial interest the clinic has in the patient’s so-called donation is not being disclosed to them; and the fact that they’re going to change the abortion procedure is not being disclosed to them.

Mr. Allen: My, my. You know, in a robust attempt by Planned Parenthood to “tar and feather” you personally and your organization, Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards said to George Stephanopoulos, who, by the way, as you probably know, is a Greek Orthodox priest’s son, on Good Morning, America!, she said you are “part of the most militant wing of the anti-abortion movement that is behind the bombing of clinics, the murder of doctors in their homes and in their churches.” What’s your response to that?

Mr. Daleiden: It’s outrageous. Planned Parenthood is resorting to name-calling, because they don’t have any argument to make, and they don’t want to address the actual issue of their baby parts sales. I’m not a violent person. I’ve never been connected to any kind of bombing or violence or anything like that. It’s just ridiculous. It’s a little outrageous that they’re resorting to name-calling because they don’t have anything else to say.

Mr. Allen: One thing I did pick up, though, that I wanted to challenge you with, I guess, is this: Do you think that this statement was said because one of your board members [is] a man named Troy Newman, who is the president of Operation Rescue, and two people affiliated with Operation Rescue were actually convicted of an attempted bombing of an abortion clinic in 1998, and she’s just kind of washing everything over?

Mr. Daleiden: Yeah, that’s it exactly. They’re trying to play “eight degrees of separation” with my organizations and the board of directors. Troy Newman is one of my board members. Troy Newman was never involved with a bombing of a clinic or a killing of a doctor. Troy Newman’s organization has never been part of that. Nobody who’s worked for Troy Newman has ever been part of violence against an abortion doctor. It’s a really cheap, ad hominem, name-calling way of trying to play “eight degrees of separation” to attack the messenger because they don’t want to talk about the message at all.

Mr. Allen: David, I would like to ask you this. An Obama-appointed Superior Court judge in San Francisco issued a temporary restraining order against your organization, the Center for Medical Progress, from releasing video footage of StemExpress officers, one of Planned Parenthood’s affiliates. First, has that restraining order been rescinded, and why do you think StemExpress is so concerned about the video being out there?

Mr. Daleiden: So that temporary restraining order actually came from a judge in Los Angeles county. That’s not from the federal court in San Francisco.

Mr. Allen: Okay.

Mr. Daleiden: But StemExpress and Planned Parenthood are both really concerned about the video from a business dinner meeting that our investigators did with StemExpress’s CEO, Cate Dyer, and with their other top leadership back in May, because during that meeting Cate Dyer very candidly admitted to our investigators frequently receives fully intact fetuses shipped to their laboratory from their abortion clinics, and whenever we’re talking about fetal tissue harvesting, we’re talking about abortions where no chemical or poison could be used to kill the baby before the abortion, because that would poison the body parts and render them unusable for fetal tissue work.

So if you’re talking about no feticidal chemical being used, but you’re also trying to get an intact fetus, a fully intact fetus, then you’ve got a perfect storm there for a born-alive infant, because all you’re doing is you’re delivering a premature baby. If you’re doing that at the abortion clinic and shipping that baby to StemExpress’s laboratory, are you killing the baby after it’s delivered? Are you letting it die in transit? Are they killing it through vivisection at the StemExpress laboratory? Either way you slice it, no pun intended, you’re talking about homicide and conspiracy to commit homicide, and that’s what Planned Parenthood and their ally, StemExpress, are terrified about coming to the public right now.

Mr. Allen: Has that temporary restraining order been rescinded, or is it still in place?

Mr. Daleiden: There is a hearing going on as we speak right now about that temporary restraining order. All signs point towards its being dissolved today, so we’re hopeful about that.

Mr. Allen: Now, StemExpress, as you obviously know, has now officially cut ties with Planned Parenthood. Why do you think that is?

Mr. Daleiden: Allegedly, StemExpress has cut all of their ties with Planned Parenthood. I think there’s a good reason to be skeptical about that, because the indicators that we have from the statements of their own CEO is that they’ve been working with a large number of Planned Parenthood clinics across the country, not just the two big affiliates in northern California that they explicitly said they cut ties with. I think ultimately those questions need to be answered fully and explored by the different Congressional committees that are investigating them right now, but as far as the PR move, I think this is a PR move simply from StemExpress themselves because they’re really afraid about what their connection to Planned Parenthood is going to continue to mean for their business and for their bottom line, and they’d have to be really afraid to do that, because, as they’ve told our investigators, they’re frankly desperate for as many fetal livers as they can get right now.

And for them to sacrifice their three big, high-volume Planned Parenthood collection sites in northern California, that’s a lot of fetal liver that they’re giving up that they need for their bottom line. So they’d have to be very concerned about the revelations that are going to continue to come forward about themselves and their relationship with Planned Parenthood in order to cut those ties, and it’s interesting that it seems to not have been a coordinated PR move with Planned Parenthood, because the Planned Parenthood CEOs came out with their own joint statement a few days later, saying: Hey, wait a sec. We can’t control StemExpress but for our part, we’re going to continue to offer fetal tissue collection services, and we’re going to find another way to do so. Which is kind of an awkward thing for them to do if this was a coordinated move to try to bury the whole issue. So I think you also see from that all of the different players in the abortion industry—Planned Parenthood national, Planned Parenthood local, StemExpress—they’re all kind of pulling away from each other right now, and they’re all kind of out for themselves.

Mr. Allen: Despite having a bi-partisan majority in Congress to defund Planned Parenthood, on Monday, August 3, the Senate couldn’t overcome the 60-vote procedural hurdle enjoyed by Planned Parenthood supporters in Congress. Do you think the Congressional battle over defunding Planned Parenthood is over, or will it continue?

Mr. Daleiden: All indications are that it’s definitely going to continue; this issue is not going away. Even after the various budgetary and fundings that are going to happen in the next month, in September, there’s still… there’s now four different Congressional committees that have open and robust investigations of Planned Parenthood and their baby parts sales. So regardless of what happens legislatively in September, just with the different budgeting and appropriations, this whole issue is going to continue to be investigated and to continue to be brought up in Congress for a very long time.

Mr. Allen: And I’m speaking with David Daleiden. He is the director of the Center for Medical Progress and the producer and the man behind the exposé videos of Planned Parenthood which have shaken up the abortion industry internationally.

David, there was a news article, I believe, in The L.A. Times, written where the author said the people who support animal rights tend to do so because they feel that animals are innocent and vulnerable and need human protection, so why do you think this same empathy and compassion for animals, for their innocence and vulnerability and their need for human protection, doesn’t just inherently or patently apply to innocent and vulnerable babies in the womb, whom many pro-choicers refuse to even call human?

Mr. Daleiden: I think it does apply, and I think the difference is just…. why they’re not people [is that people do not] actually take the time to actually look at the baby, to look at the human fetus in the womb, because what most people do [is] they do automatically apply those same feelings of compassion and respect and a desire to protect that innocent little human life, and I think that’s why in part why our videos are having such an impact, because they’re forcing everybody to take the time to look at the baby that’s being violently ripped apart and pulverized or exploited because of the abortion industry.

Actually, even some abortion doctors that we spoke with, even Dr. Nucatola herself—this doesn’t come up so clearly on the video, but in person—when our investigators would speak with her, and she would describe in detail her abortion procedure and she would describe saving the baby’s head for last or doing a certain maneuver on the fetus, she would… her voice would get hoarser, almost like she would start to choke up, almost like she had a voice in her throat, and she would wipe her eyes once or twice, talking about it. She wasn’t the only abortion doctor like that. Some of them are so far gone that it does seem like there’s something really almost inhumanly evil or twisted going on there, but Dr. Nucatola’s not one of them, and many of the abortion doctors that we met I did not think were like that, were very, very conflicted about what they do.

Some abortion doctors cry when they see the baby parts. Some of them are really upset by it and really cut up about it. So I think that the hard-core pro-abortion people are definitely in the minority, the sort of people who are willfully ignorant or willfully in denial about the humanity about the unborn baby. Abortion doctors generally don’t have that luxury; they have to deal with it every day. So I think the explanation for the really few people out there who are full-throatedly comfortable with abortion, having taken the time to consider all aspects of it and even confront the baby in the womb, those are people who are frankly okay with killing certain types of people, and that’s what it comes down to. So we shouldn’t be scared of that or shocked by that; we shouldn’t be discouraged by that, because all that means is that when normal people and the vast majority of people do take the time to consider the unborn baby, they overwhelmingly come down on the side of life.

Mr. Allen: Thank you for that, because sometimes we can tend to demonize people, and it’s good to know that you have noted their inherent humanity and the conflict that even some abortion doctors experience, so I appreciate that.

I want to switch gears a bit here. I don’t know if you saw this report or not, but there was the 2008 Pew Research poll, called the US Landscape of Religion, and this direct question was asked of all of the various Christians of varying faith traditions, and the question was very direct. It was: “Should abortion be illegal in all or almost all cases?” With the Roman Catholics polled, according to the Pew Research Poll, only 55% of Catholics agreed with the statement that abortion should be illegal in all or almost all cases, and of the Orthodox polled—and the sampling may be a bit skewed, because in our case the sample number was very low, reflecting our minority status in the United States, but nevertheless, the Orthodox results were the lowest: only 30% agreed with the statement. Evangelicals, on the other hand, agreed with the statement by 61%, so they’re more orthodox—small-o—on this than even Roman Catholics or Eastern Orthodox. So my question to you, David Daleiden, is: Why do you think this is, that in the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church, with the clearest canons and teachings against abortion and infanticide and the sanctity of life, the polling numbers showed up the way they did?

Mr. Daleiden: That’s a really big question and topic, and we could almost do a whole ‘nother interview on that, I think, with pastors from both traditions and all kinds of stuff. I have a couple of ideas, though. I think the first is that, in general, I think it’s well-known that the Evangelical communities in America tend to be a little more uniformly devout than both the Catholic and the Orthodox communities, and that’s just kind of a function of Evangelicalism: you’ve got a lot more converts and sort of reverts, people who are born again, whereas in the Catholic and Orthodox communities we have a lot of people who are cradle, and our faith has become such a part of our culture, just sort of the air that we breathe, that sometimes sin is even like the air that we breathe, too. There’s both good things and bad things to that. I’m a cradle Catholic, and I’m not ashamed of that. I think there’s a lot of benefits to that that come to you that you don’t always get as a convert. There’s something to be said with growing up in an environment that in some way has been immersed in the faith for centuries, but there’s also a downside, in that sometimes you can take it for granted.

I think maybe also, like you said with regard to the Orthodox specifically in America, Orthodox are much more of a minority in the United States, and I think there’s a lot more of an immigrant context where even just the political context of abortion in America is maybe a little more foreign to Orthodox, and so for that reason the polling questions and the answers may not even translate the same way, so what Orthodox understand abortion in America to be and the way they’re answering the question, it may not… we might not even be talking about the same things.

And then the third thing that I would say is that, in contrast to the Protestant and Evangelical traditions, Catholics and Orthodox, I think we’ve always been… I think our theology is a little more nuanced in general. There’s always been a more robust, nuanced theological tradition. I wonder if, culturally, we might both have a tendency to answer questions, especially if you’re not a dogmatic theologian, you might have a tendency to answer questions in a more nuanced way.

So I guess what I’m kind of saying is I wouldn’t say necessarily that Catholics or Orthodox are more pro-abortion or are more hateful of unborn children or something like that than other traditions. I wouldn’t say that it’s necessarily that we’re lazy or uncanonized or anything like that. I think that there’s just a lot of cultural static that might be getting in the way there.

Mr. Allen: David, as we’re coming to a close, how many more videos, now that we have seven, are you planning to release?

Mr. Daleiden: I’ve been predicting in various media outlets that when all is said and done, we’ll have about a dozen very high-quality, shocking, significant videos that will have been released, so that leaves about five left to go. We are on track to have that total of twelve, but truly, at the end of the day, the Center for Medical Progress has collected probably close to 300 hours total of undercover footage of the abortion industry on the baby parts issue and other related issues, so we could potentially go beyond that twelve in the coming weeks and months.

Mr. Allen: Wow. And the CMP does its own editing and its own production work?

Mr. Daleiden: We do our own production. We have a very qualified and skilled, talented video editor that we work with.

Mr. Allen: Gotcha. Yeah, because they’re very professional.

So, David Daleiden, as we’re coming to an end of our very fascinating and informative interview, which we appreciate very much, what can our listeners—Orthodox, Evangelicals, and Catholics—do to be of help to you, your organization, and your defense should they choose to?

Mr. Daleiden: They can do a couple of things. Number one, you can visit our website, centerformedicalprogress.org, and on our website you can find the petition to sign to call for an immediate moratorium on all of Planned Parenthood’s taxpayer funding and also a full investigation of the full extent of their lawbreaking on fetal tissue sales and illegal abortion procedures. Number two, you can contact your Congresspeople, your representatives in Congress and your other elected representatives, and you can ask them to see to it that there’s a full investigation of Planned Parenthood and that they’re fully held accountable for the crimes that they’re committing against humanity and against unborn children. And the third thing, you can share our videos and our materials, our resources, with your friends on social media and in person. You can also find a link to donate on our website, at centerformedicalprogress.org, to support our work.

Mr. Allen: Great. Thank you so much. My guest on this program has been David Daleiden. He is the director of the Center for Medical Progress and the young man behind the exposé videos of Planned Parenthood and their affiliates which we all know has made international impact. David, thank you very, very much for being my guest on Ancient Faith Today.

Mr. Daleiden: Thank you so much, Kevin.

One Real Leader Makes a Big Difference

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A priest at Sameba Cathedral, the main cathedral in Tbilisi, Georgia baptizing a baby.

Patriarch Ilia II of the Georgian Orthodox Church is on a one man crusade for life, and he is making a difference. The AP reports this story through lens of American pragmatism (the only reason for children is to increase the birth rate) but anyone familiar with the soul-stultifying and life-denying precepts of Marxist ideology (and its materialist premise that has gained hold in the West and manifests itself as the culture of death) knows that this is a cultural shift of the first order. It’s drawn from the moral precepts of the Christian tradition. Christian teaching, properly understood, holds life inviolable.

One way to reduce abortions is to start valuing life again. Imagine that.

Georgia’s Patriarch Baptizes 400 Babies

TBILISI, Georgia (AP) — The patriarch of the Georgian Orthodox Church presided over the baptism of hundreds of babies in a Tbilisi cathedral on Sunday as part of an effort credited with helping raise the birth rate in this former Soviet nation.

Patriarch Ilia II has promised to become the godfather of all babies born into Orthodox Christian families who already have two or more children. Since he began the mass baptisms in 2008, he has gained nearly 11,000 godchildren.

Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili has said the patriarch deserves much of the credit for the rising birth rate, which in 2010 was 25 percent higher than in 2005. The number of abortions also declined by nearly 50 percent over the same five-year period.

Parents of the 400 babies baptized by an array of priests Sunday said the patriarch was instrumental in their decision to have a third or fourth child.

“This is a wonderful day for my family,” said Tamar Kapanadze, a 33-year-old father of four. “Our fourth son, Lashko, was baptized by the patriarch himself, and before this he baptized our daughter Liziko. This is why we decided to have a fourth child.”

Lamara Georgadze, whose fourth child was among those baptized on Sunday, said she and her husband also answered the patriarch’s call to have more children.

“The Holy Father reminded us all of the importance of increasing the birth rate,” she said. “There are too few of us Georgians and therefore this is very important.”

Saakashvili has set a goal of increasing Georgia’s population from 4.5 million to 5 million by 2015.

Since coming to power in 2004, Saakashvili has focused on modernizing and expanding the economy, attracting foreign investment and pushing for closer ties with the United States and Europe. With Georgia’s population aging, he is eager to see a new generation born that could help secure the country’s future.

In his annual address to parliament in February, he said the government would give parents a one-time payment the equivalent of about $600 for a third child and double that amount for a fourth child.

“This will help raise the birth rate,” Saakashvili said. “The patriarch has already taken steps in this direction. We should be thankful to him for continually reminding the Georgian people that we should multiply.”

The president and his Dutch wife have two children.

Something Deadly This Way Comes

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– HT: OrthodoxNet.com Blog

The insatiable appetite of the Culture of Death

The debate over abortion comes down to one essential issue — the moral status of the unborn child. Those making the case for the legalization of abortion argue that the developing fetus lacks a moral status that would trump a woman’s desire to abort the child. Those arguing against abortion do so by making the opposite claim; that the unborn child, precisely because it is a developing human being, possesses a moral status by the very fact of its human existence that would clearly trump any rationale offered for its willful destruction.

This central issue is often obscured in both public argument and private conversations about abortion, but it remains the essential question. We have laws against homicide, and if the unborn child is recognized legally and morally as a human being, abortion would be rightly seen as murder.

In the main, abortion rights advocates have drawn the moral line at the moment of birth. That is why, even with our contemporary knowledge of the developing fetus, abortion rights activists have persistently argued in favor of abortions right up to the moment of birth. Anyone doubting this claim needs only to consider the unified opposition of leading abortion rights advocates to restrictions on late-term abortions.

From the beginning of the controversy over abortion, this supposedly bright line of the moment of birth has been unstable. Abortion rights activists have even opposed efforts to restrict the gruesome reality known as partial-birth abortions. The moment of birth has never been the bright line of safety that the defenders of abortion have claimed.

Now, an even more chilling development comes in the form of an article just published in the Journal of Medical Ethics. Professors Alberto Giubilini of the University of Milan and Francesca Minerva of the University of Melbourne and Oxford University, now argue for the morality and legalization of “after-birth abortion.”

These authors do not hide their agenda. They are calling for the legal killing of newborn children.

The argument put forth in their article bears a haunting resemblance to the proposal advocated by Dr. Peter Singer of Princeton University, who has argued that the killing of a newborn baby, known as infanticide, should be allowable up to the point that the child develops some ability to communicate and to anticipate the future.

Giubilini and Minerva now argue that newborn human infants lack the ability to anticipate the future, and thus that after-birth abortions should be permitted.

The authors explain that they prefer the term “after-birth abortion” to “infanticide” because their term makes clear the fact that the argument comes down to the fact that the birth of the child is not morally significant.

They propose two justifying arguments:

First: “The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus, that is, neither can be considered a ‘person’ in a morally relevant sense.”
Second: “It is not possible to damage a newborn by preventing her from developing the potentiality to be a person in the morally relevant sense.”
Thus: “The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack the properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual.”

Those assertions are as chilling as anything yet to appear in the academic literature of medical ethics. This is a straightforward argument for the permissibility of murdering newborn human infants. The authors make their argument with the full intention of seeing this transformed into public policy. Further, they go on to demonstrate the undiluted evil of their proposal by refusing even to set an upper limit on the permissible age of a child to be killed by “after-birth abortion.”

These “medical ethicists” argue that a traditional abortion is a preferred option, but then state:

“Abortions at an early stage are the best option, for both psychological and physical reasons. However, if a disease has not been detected during the pregnancy, if something went wrong during the delivery, or if economical, social, or psychological circumstances change such that taking care of the offspring becomes an unbearable burden on someone, then people should be given the chance of not being forced to do something they cannot afford.”

Nothing could possibly justify the killing of a child, but these professors are so bold as to argue that even “economical, social, or psychological circumstances” would be sufficient justification.

This article in the Journal of Medical Ethics is a clear signal of just how much ground has been lost to the Culture of Death. A culture that grows accustomed to death in the womb will soon contemplate killing in the nursery. The very fact that this article was published in a peer-reviewed academic journal is an indication of the peril we face.

For years now, pro-life activists have been lectured that “slippery slope” arguments are false. This article makes clear the fact that our warnings have not been based in a slippery slope argument, but in the very reality of abortion. Abortion implies infanticide. If the unborn child lacks sufficient moral status by the fact that it is unborn, then the baby in the nursery, it is now argued, has also not yet developed human personhood.

The publication of this article signals the fact that a medical debate on this question has been ongoing. The only sane response to this argument is the affirmation of the objective moral status of the human being at every point of development, from fertilization until natural death. Anything less than the affirmation of full humanity puts every single human being at risk of being designated as not “a person in the morally relevant sense.”

Something very deadly this way comes. This argument will not remain limited to the pages of an academic journal. The murderous appetite of the Culture of Death will never be satisfied.

Bishop Demetrios (GOA) Speaks on Sanctity of Life Sunday in Chicago

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Below is the address given by Bishop Demetrios of Mokissos at the Pan-Orthodox Sanctity of Life Vespers held in Chicago on January 22, 2012. To his credit, Bp. Demetrios has been unequivocal in his support of the sanctity of unborn life, including participation in the March for Life in Washington, DC four or five years ago.

Bp. Demetrios is also opposed to the death penalty and spoke about that as well. Thankfully he avoids the politically correct shibboleths. He came to his position when counseling a death-row inmate who was subsequently executed. His argument that the application of the penalty can be arbitrary is compelling (I have deep misgivings about capital punishment for the same reason), but the morality of capital punishment remains an issue about which reasonable people can reasonably disagree. I’ll leave the rest for the discussion.

Source: Greek Orthodox Metropolis | His Grace Bishop Demetrios of Mokissos

His Eminence Bishop Demetrios of Mokissos was invited by the Orthodoxx Christian Clergy Association of Greater Chicago to give the keynote address at the 2012 Pan-Orthodox Vespers Service on January 22, 2012. In a deeply felt address, His Grace advocated for the sanctity of all life, even in those of whom we believe we can discern nothing good whatsoever. He reminded those present that Christ demands this of those who wish to bear his name – who call themselves Christians – and that we as His faithful servants have been called to follow His example of self-less love towards all.

Photographs of the event can be found in the Greek Orthodox Metropolis Photo Gallery.

Orthodox Christian Tradition, Social Justice and the Sanctity of Life

Offered by Bishop Demetrios of Mokissos

January 22, 2012

A recent report on FOXNews after Christmas focused on the life of a young Palestinian woman living in Gaza under the Palestinian Authority. She was studying at university to be a journalist and, unlike most residents of Gaza who live in relative poverty; she was a member of a comparatively affluent family who owned a retail store. What made her story so interesting was the fact that she was recently released from an Israeli prison along with hundreds of others in exchange for a single Israeli soldier being held captive by Hamas. She was imprisoned because she had attempted to detonate an explosive vest she was wearing at an Israeli checkpoint but the explosives failed to detonate. Now, back at school and studying to be a journalist, she calmly tells her interviewer that she is awaiting the opportunity to repeat her suicide mission, looking forward to the day she can kill her enemy and enjoy martyrdom.

In a recent documentary on Cook Country Prison, a young adult’s numerous scars from gunshot wounds are revealed as the young man admits that he simply does what he needs to do until the day he dies: “That’s just the way it goes.” With nothing to live for, he has nothing to lose; when his time comes, he admits, it will not be “any big loss.”

A recent article in the Greek Star, a local Greek-American publication, written by John Vlahakis, implicitly suggests abortion as the appropriate means to control world population now that seven billion people inhabit our planet, straining our resources and affecting our shared environment.

And just as recently, the introduction of a new version of the Air Jordan shoes, on the day before Christmas, resulted in several acts of lethal violence in the competition to gain footwear. Apparently the $200.00 shoes were equated with the value of a human life.

I begin with these descriptions that are only indirectly connected to my topic to illustrate an underlying issue of concern to all of us who have gathered at this Church of the Holy Apostles in the interest of the apostolic proclamation of the Gospel, the proclamation of eternal life, sacred life, for which our Lord was born, ministered, taught, died, rose from the dead, ascended into Heaven and sent to his disciples the Holy Spirit.

The underlying issue is the degradation of life’s sanctity exhibited in some form by all these examples: from distorted religious fervor, from what is essentially philosophical nihilism, from political relativism, and economic priorities for our standard of living. All these examples, among a host of others each of us could probably recall, subordinate the gift of life to other concerns. Interestingly, except for religious zealots of the world, very few propagators of what has rightly been called the culture of death commit suicide; those who espouse—in some form or another—the value of death are usually unwilling to die themselves. They do not, however, object to others dying: the undesired enemy, the unwanted or inconvenient preborn, the criminal, persons who live far away and who do not look, talk, or think like we do. This is, of course, hypocrisy.

One writer recently defined hypocrisy as, “the art of affecting qualities for the purpose of pretending to an undeserved virtue.” He add, “Imagine how frightful truth unvarnished would be” [Benjamin F. Martin, “France in 1938,” 2005]. Many of the issues that we, as Americans, have come to argue so passionately are not immune from our collective hypocrisy. Our political discourse has become immersed in it.

On the political left, they euphemistically talk about a woman’s right to choose when they really mean her right to kill her preborn child, and certainly not about the right to choose to abstain from those behaviors that result in the conception of an unwanted child. Self-control is a virtue if it involves killing someone else; it is not a virtue if it involves moral behavior: a frightful truth unvarnished. On the political right, they will condemn this “culture of death” and espouse a “right to life” while advocating for capital punishment in the name of public safety and denying that right to persons deemed criminal, no matter how corrupt the system, no matter how many persons have been proven to be erroneously convicted. Christian politicians of the right routinely invoke moral values as originating from our Creator, court the Evangelical Christian vote, and protest the current administration’s “war on religion,” but also, as at a recent debate, routinely espouse the supposedly evangelical ideal concerning our enemies: “Kill them” [Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry]. Truth unvarnished is indeed frightful.

The positions of both political parties, of course, can be reduced to self-concern and, indeed, selfishness. Political conservatives live up to the specific etymology of the word, serving themselves and their own interests; liberals have devolved, in many cases, to moral libertines. The two dominant political parties take diametrically opposed and un-Christian positions on two issues which, for Orthodox Christians, are inherently related since they both concern the execution of life.

Undoubtedly, most Americans who claim to support the so-called “right to life” or “sanctity of life” position do so with abortion in mind. Indeed, public opinion polls consistently show a majority of Americans are against the idea of elective abortion on demand. A far greater number assumedly would consider abortion “wrong,” but hesitate when making discussion turns to making it illegal due to largely hypothetical circumstances (such as rape, incest, or threats to the life of the mother). This is why so many “pro-choice” advocates so urgently resist the label “pro-abortion.” In our culture, it is so much more difficult to argue against free choice. In any case, with some important exceptions—such as the Terri Schiavo case in Florida back in early 2005—a broad coalition of activists and supporters has successfully managed to make “right to life” and “anti-abortion” almost synonymous.

Public opinion polls regarding another right-to-life and sanctity-of-life issue, capital punishment, are likewise consistently high in the United States. Politicians who publicly vow to put an end to abortion routinely espouse the necessity for the death penalty. Among Evangelical and Free-Church Protestants, the overwhelming majority is opposed to abortion, but more than half support the death penalty in some form, in some cases. In some regions of the country, support is far higher. Through casuistry and sophistry, it would appear that many persons, claiming to respect the sanctity of life on moral or religious grounds, reason that the preborn are “innocent,” while those who have been found “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt” have somehow either forfeited a right to live or, perhaps worse, they have decided that the general principle of life’s sanctity must be modified due to circumstances that are ugly, uncertain, or repugnant in and of themselves; it is as if disrespecting the right of others to live renders a convicted criminal’s life un-sacred in the eyes of God. There seems to be some type of cognitive, if not spiritual, dissonance at work in such minds.

I raise this point because when it comes to my main concern this evening, there is often an emotional, even visceral, reaction to the concept of capital punishment. The intentional causing of the death of the preborn as a matter of convenience—freely chosen murder—is always unjust and unrighteous (a distinction to which I will return). Yet there is often a sense that capital punishment is somehow necessary—however lamentable—for a just society. While not an exact analogy, the killing of Osama Bin Laden—a punishment for the horrific murders he ordered in our nation—aroused enthusiastic cheers across our land. Perhaps this can be rationalized as an act of war, so perhaps a better example would be an actual execution of a convicted criminal, by any comparison to others a true monster. A sigh of relief was heard around the world when Sadaam Hussein was hanged after his trial in Iraq, an outcome little in doubt at its outset for a man we have learned may not have had weapons of mass destruction, but either personally killed or ordered the deaths of literally tens if not hundreds of thousands of his own citizens.

There is a basic, well-ordered logic and rationale for the existence of capital punishment, at least as a response to some crimes. This is, in fact, part of its appeal—not to mention biblical warrant for it in the Old Testament. The United States is one of the few nations to retain it, though we would probably not like to be compared as a nation-state to the others such as China, Syria, Iran, and so forth. Nonetheless, in the context of retributive justice, there are times when capital punishment makes logical sense according to human reason. Opposition to the death penalty in all cases is rather incomprehensible and non-rational. And that is precisely why I am opposed to it.

Before proceeding, let me clarify one terminological distinction that I believe is quite important for Orthodox Christians. In the Bible, the Greek word δίκαιοςδικαιοσύνη and its cognates, such as δικαιοσύνη, is often translated “just,” “justice,” and so forth, as in the description of Joseph the betrothed of Mary: “a just man.” The word can also be translated as “righteous.” Indeed, when Joseph is introduced to us as a “just” man, the application is paradoxical in the context of Joseph’s Jewish culture and piety. We are told that he resolved to “divorce” Mary quietly or discreetly when she was found to be pregnant during their betrothal before their actual marriage and “coming together.” Under the Law of Moses, “justice” would have been far stricter with Mary. Strictly, she should have been stoned to death (Deuteronomy 22:22-24) since there is no indication she was pregnant due to rape. As far as Joseph knew, this was a violation of the Law. Joseph was actually violating the law in seeking to avoid the harsh penalty for Mary’s condition which, of course, was an act of God in the Holy Spirit as he is informed in a dream. Yet the Evangelist, in noting that He is δίκαιος, actually shows Joseph was concerned about “righteousness,” not justice as defined in his culture. In other words, Joseph—and not the letter of the law—was right.

In our culture, justice is ideally “blind.” Equality under the law is a basic principle, and identical (or nearly-identical) crimes are punished—in theory—with identical punishments. Yet we can clearly understand that “justice” being blind sometimes gets the story wrong. Justice and truth do not always coincide in our Western culture, not even ideally. There is widespread agreement that justice does not concern “truth,” but rather certainty beyond a reasonable doubt. Serving justice does not mean serving the truth. Sometimes the two might coincide; at other times they do not; and certainly sometimes what is just is simply not right: it is clearly wrong. As an example, we can return to the so-called constitutional right of a woman to abort her preborn child: it may be no injustice in our society, but it is clearly wrong.

In an Orthodox Christian context, we serve the truth who is Jesus Christ. Our concern is not about justice in the normal, we might say “human,” sense of the word, but about being right and righteous. The concept of justice might be ambiguous in our culture, but being right—and righteous before, with and in God—is never ambiguous: either we are or we are not. Either we are on the mark and right, or “off the mark” which is exactly what the Greek word signifying “sin” means: ???????.

There can be no doubt that, even in a biblical sense, the imposition of capital punishment in some cases is just. The Law came through Moses, but originates in God. There can also be no doubt that in the same biblical sense it is always wrong, and even the authors of the Pentateuch presume this since death itself, in any form, is always wrong and contrary to the will of God for His creation. It is the result of sin. Of course, this is more explicit in the Christian scriptures and I will return to this thought later in my presentation. Let me return to the subject of capital punishment.

I have long been an advocate for the abolition of the death penalty. My active involvement began when it was made personal. Prior to my personal involvement, it was theoretical: while I was vaguely aware of the issue and was always opposed to it in principle, I confess that my views were largely shaped by the injustice of capital punishment.

By this I refer to the fact—one that was vividly demonstrated here in Illinois—that the ultimate penalty of death can be, and often has been, imposed on those who were later proven to be innocent of the crimes for which they were convicted. It goes against reason that those vindicated while on death row and subsequently released were the only examples of the miscarriage of justice: when a just sentence is simple wrong. We cannot know how many have been executed when actually innocent.

However, the injustice of our justice system continues beyond this. Rather than equal penalties for equal crimes, the death penalty is disproportionately imposed upon the poorest, darkest-skinned and most shoddily represented among us. Rather than saving the state an expense of life imprisonment, implementing the death penalty costs at least three times as much as the costs associated with sentencing a convicted criminal to life without possibility of parole. Rather than being a deterrent to crime, states with the death penalty actually have higher homicide and overall crime rates. Rather than providing victims or their families any timely sense of retribution, vengeance or closure, the condemned typically spend well over a decade awaiting execution during a complicated appeals process that often causes continued pain and anxiety for survivors.

The injustices of the system have all been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. They provide compelling reasons to abolish the death penalty, and this is why an Orthodox Christian clergyman such as myself was able to work with a broad coalition of persons and organizations to organize against the death penalty. During my presidency of the Illinois Coalition Against the Death Penalty, I worked with persons who often held very different religious or even moral views from the Church, and some were opposed to capital punishment for reasons unrelated to any specifically Christian moral principle, such as for economic reasons. Nonetheless, I became involved because I saw this as both an opportunity to work toward a new moral awakening in our nation, to work for the cause of righteousness and not simply social justice. But above all, I felt it imperative to do what I was able to save lives. In fact, one specific life.

I met the “notorious” Andrew Korkoraleis at the Pontiac Correctional Institution, just weeks before his scheduled execution. Although I had visited inmates before, this was the first time I was to meet with a death row inmate. After encountering the institutional and callous prison personnel as well as enduring a body search, I passed through several gates, which seemed to close out the world behind. I was then taken to a cold, concrete visiting room and was instructed sit in one of four chairs around a bare table. All of them were bolted to the floor.

Andrew, with his hands shackled together, was escorted to my table by a prison guard. Of course, I will not reveal the details of our discussion. However, I need you to know that instead of encountering a monster I found Andrew to be a person of great faith, who was at peace with himself as well as with his accusers.

For all the 17 years he had been imprisoned, Andrew had maintained his innocence. On the basis of that first visit, and many other direct experiences I had with Andrew, I firmly believe that he was indeed innocent of the crime for which he was ultimately killed. Notably, others convicted as accomplices in the same crime (the so-called Chicago Rippers) were either not executed due to subsequent events, or were not sentenced to death. In any case, I cannot communicate to you what it felt like to have bonded so deeply with a person who had spent all of his adult life imprisoned.

Nor can I describe what it felt like to have seen Christ face to face in prison, shackled, alone, with no family or friends. His only remaining family was his Church. His Greek Orthodox Church stood by his side as his family and galvanized the wider religious community in the face of the great social evil of capital punishment. We felt it incumbent upon ourselves to stand decisively for clemency for Andrew and to stand in opposition to the death penalty in general. Even though our pleas fell upon insensitive and even deaf political ears, we knew that we had to do what was Christ-like.

And we tried – with letters, with demonstrations; with all the moral authority we could bring to bear. We publicized the fact that not a single shred of physical or scientific evidence existed that tied Andrew to the crime for which he was to be executed – no fingerprints, no DNA, no eye witnesses. In fact the only evidence against him was a confession obtained by police that Andrew almost instantly recanted.

As the fatal day of his execution approached, we gathered many religious leaders in the Greek Orthodox Cathedral to offer the then-governor our collective wisdom and prayers in his struggle. Former Governor Ryan, as you know, had turned a deaf ear to the religious community in general, and in particular to the religious community of which Andrew Kokoraleis was a part.

On March 17, 1999, our brother-in-Christ Andrew was put to death by the state of Illinois. Two days later I returned home from a very emotionally draining and difficult day at my office and received an ominous letter in the mail. It was from Andrew. With great care I opened the envelope and read the enclosed card. I absorbed every word into my being. I took what Andrew told me to heart and I clearly heard his every word as a personal calling. Andrew’s correspondence gratefully asked and hoped that somehow by his execution others might be spared a similar fate and that all executions might be terminated. He thanked me for the support I had provided him and told me that we would certainly see each other again in the Kingdom of Heaven.

I live everyday with the prayer that Andrew’s dying wishes will be granted. As it happened, two weeks after Andrew’s state-sanctioned homicide, Former Governor Ryan indicated a reduced obstinacy toward the religious community by making a public appearance at a Prayer Breakfast. Later, as we know, he publicly announced he regretted the various decisions he made in regard to the implementation of the death penalty in Illinois and placed a moratorium on executions, although in theory it was temporary until reforms for “fairness” and to ensure “just” executions occur—in other words, so that innocents not be put to death mistakenly, as so many in Illinois almost were, and perhaps—as I believe—actually were. Of course, more recently, under Governor Quinn, the hopeless broken system has been finally abolished—at least for now. Of course, there is still work to be done. Indiana, Iowa and Missouri, three states in which our Holy Metropolis has parishes, still maintain the death penalty. Obviously other states do as well, as does our Federal government. Working for abolition requires a long-term commitment. But after the United States, we will continue on to eliminate it in all corners of our world.

It is one thing to be an advocate for the unjustly accused or convicted. There is a generally recognized nobility in such a struggle. It is another thing—more difficult—to be an advocate for the guilty. Inevitably, this is what those who work for the abolition of capital punishment are—in part. And in our society, there is usually only scorn for those who seek to prevent even the guilty from being put to death by the state.

In Orthodox sacred tradition, every human being is created in the image and likeness of God. We are each of us an icon, an image of Christ and a mirror to one another of God’s living presence in the world. No human being – no murderer, no governor who in essence flipped the switch, nor the citizens whom she or he represents – no one is a “monster.” And every human being, including Andrew and every other death row inmate, is of value and worth as a person. This is true even for those who seem most evil, and this is a mystery and perhaps the ultimate challenge of our Faith.

Saint Paul mentions in his letter to the Corinthians a “more excellent way,” the way of love. In the Bible and in theology, love is not a sentiment or feeling or emotion. It is a manner of existing. The Greek word in the New Testament for love ?????, literally derives from ?–ἄ-ἐγώ, “not me.” Thus, to love means to live in such a manner as to not be concerned with the self, but only with the one we love. Of course, the teaching of Jesus Christ is that we love everyone, and this without condition. It means to be concerned with the life of the one we love, and this of course precludes ending that life. Love is always an act of freedom, a choice we make: to love or not to love. And the New Testament is clear, that if we love, we love because God first loved us (1 John). In other words, the capacity to love—and we each have this capacity—comes from God.

But as an act of freedom, love brings us to a place that is really beyond our conventional sense of justice and our commonly shared social ethics (what we ought to do or not do) and system of law. Love is not about law and ethics, but is all about our ethos, our way of being in the world. The simple text of the Bible is that we should love our neighbor (and this really means everyone as the Parable of the Good Samaritan shows). But Jesus Christ takes this one step further: “as you did to the least of these, so you did to me.” And this means precisely that we must treat each and every human being as we would treat Christ. This sounds rather simple, but is in fact the most difficult of teachings. For if we truly love, there is nothing that we would not do for our beloved. And this moves us beyond what “ought to be” done. It moves us beyond categories of right and wrong into the realm of self-emptying for the sake of the other person. It is sacrifice of our life, plain and simple, for another—whoever that may be.

Obviously, such a calling, such a vocation and ethos is simply impossible to legislate and is, as Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) of Pergamon states in his recent publication, Communion and Otherness, “inapplicable in a justly, that is, morally, organized society. It would be inconceivable to regulate social life on such a basis [of unconditional love for our neighbor], for there would be no room for law and order” (Zizioulas). Love is not a law (an infringement on freedom) nor can it be “ordered.”

The prescriptions of the Sermon on the Mount, such as the one to turn the left cheek to someone who strikes you on the right (Mt 5:39) is certainly a far cry from our society’s sense of justice. The call to love our enemies in the Christian tradition is another example of an ethos that is largely inapplicable in the American justice system or, frankly, anywhere in the world. But then the problem, from an Orthodox Christian point of view, is the very idea that justice can be systematically administered in a manner that is “righteous,” a standard that means for us consonant with God’s unconditional, self-emptying and self-sacrificing love and example.

One may point out that I have been an activist for seeking to reform our system of justice. This is not because I believe that the system can be reformed in such a manner as to be consistent with this ethos of love. It cannot. We live in a society of laws, a society of systems, a society where justice requires the payment of debts, not the forgiveness of them (unless you have extremely good political relationships with the U.S. Congress). It is a society where the death penalty still exists because it does, in fact, hold a certain logic of it own, consistent with the lex talionis: an eye for an eye, a life for a life. It also, paradoxically, perhaps, appeals to feelings and sentiment of grief and anger.

Yet as a bishop of the Church of Jesus Christ, I fight against the injustice of capital punishment precisely because the Church cannot abandon or betray or distort the Gospel, and present to society at large an ethos different from that of Christ’s life. In the final analysis, the Church is in this world, but it is not of it (Jn 15:16). Despite the “way of the world,” the Church must persevere in converting the ethos of the world, and this we can only do with acts of love, one at a time.

And so at a very basic level, to change minds and hearts (and the meaning of the New Testament word we usually translate as “repent”, μετανοεῖτε, literally means to change one’s mind), to change minds we begin at a common denominator of language—those elements on which we can agree. These are the practical and moral (because there certainly is a right and wrong) aspects of the calls to abolish state-sanctioned murder of human beings created in the image and likeness of God. On these, all rational minds can agree (whether they will or not). From this point, what I have called our new moral awakening, we can move to the more excellent way, and for Christians this is always the way of love in Christ Jesus.

We will never be capable of healing all the hurts of the world, and fixing all the problems. We are actually told this. Yet to live together as a sign and icon of the Kingdom means to endure in this age and fight against, as Saint Paul so aptly phrases it, our final enemy, death.

The images I presented at the beginning are indicative that there is still a great need for the proclamation of the sanctity of life in all cases and all forms. Perhaps, unlike ancient times, the message of hope that we proclaim at every Pascha rises to a place above where most hearts and minds can comprehend the Good News of the Resurrection. The success of Saint Paul and the Church in ancient times was predicated on a certain cultural perspective of life and death, one that has largely changed in our contemporary, western, technological, scientific and largely urban setting. The Church cannot simply offer words of encouragement to a world immersed in death and corruption. We must be actively seeking to put into action the annihilation of death and the wages of death within our own broken world in an obvious and practical manner. I, and others, will continue advocating in ministries revolving around social justice, for if we can achieve some measure of justice we can move on to righteousness, the “more excellent way.” By this, we can transform our culture from one where the execution of life—abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment—is commonplace to one where the goal is, indeed, the execution of death.

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