After video surfaced yesterday of Dr. Deborah Nucatola, Planned Parenthood’s senior director of medical services, talking about fetal organ harvesting over a salad and glass of wine, the response of Christians was immediate. And sustained. And outraged.
The casual manner with which strategic extraction of a fetus is described so as not to crush the vital organs is sickening. The baby is killed with every effort given to keep the organs, tissue and/or muscle for donation.
It’s the same flop-house mattress of demonic ideology where any diseased child-killing philosophy can breed.
Shockingly, it all seems legal. It has been since 1993. Perhaps our outrage is due to having been duped for so long as to this gruesome reality. The spectre of Kermit Gosnell does not easily dissipate, nor should it.
Long have Christians hoped and longed for Planned Parenthood to be closed, or at the least, severely curtailed. We must ask ourselves just how serious we are.
We complain about tax dollars being used for things churches should be doing, but how many churches are doing those things?
Per the Planned Parenthood website,
Planned Parenthood has 59 independent local affiliates that operate approximately 700 health centers throughout the United States, providing high-quality services to women, men, and teens.
Planned Parenthood often is the only source of family planning for a large proportion of the women we serve.
[…]
Planned Parenthood provides sexual and reproductive health care, education, information, and outreach to more than five million women, men, and adolescents worldwide each year.
2.7 million women and men in the United States annually visit Planned Parenthood affiliate health centers for trusted health care services and information.
Eighty-four percent of Planned Parenthood health care clients in the U.S. are age 20 and older.
One in five women in the U.S. has visited a Planned Parenthood health center at least once in her life.
For the sake of this argument let us take the numbers at face value: Seven hundred health centers in the U.S. serving 2.7 million men and women annually.
The loudest argument from Christians is for defunding Planned Parenthood, which is appealing. PP’s attitude toward the unborn is barbaric. But, the Texas experience demonstrates one result of defunding.
Planned Parenthood does more than abortions (even though they lead the nation in that bloody tally). They provide birth control and other health services in many low income areas. This is the argument touted by many. “See what other good things they do?”
So, if followers of Jesus want to see Planned Parenthood closed–not defunded, but closed–our churches need to pony up the money to start hundreds of clinics that provide better counseling and health services. If Planned Parenthood is in a rough urban area, a church sponsored clinic should be across the street. If Planned Parenthood is in a poor rural area, church sponsored clinics should around the corner. Employees and volunteers should be filled with grace, mercy and love.
Take away the demand and Planned Parenthood may go away of its own accord.
There is a rub, though, and it is not a small one. Planned Parenthood provides any number of abortions to a prostitute who’s gotten pregnant again. They’ll provide one more abortion to a junkie who tricked for a fix, a teen whose mother “just can’t find out,” a single mom who cannot handle a third child, a frightened girlfriend who will find herself kicked out of her boyfriend’s trailer if she does not abort.
They provide birth control to anyone who wants it, married or not.
If we truly want to put Planned Parenthood out of business, churches need to run clinics where women are in need. This 2004 study revealed most religious health centers do not focus on women’s needs. There is little chance of supplanting Planned Parenthood without addressing women’s health issues. As long as Christians exist should there be any woman whose only option is a Planned Parenthood, or other abortion clinic?
Finding the total number of church-sponsored health clinics in the U.S. online is a challenge, but assume we need 1,000 more than we have. When will we start them? Where? Will we shift church budgets to reflect neighborhood health and wellness needs? Will be immediately begin comprehensive programs for new mothers, sick kids, sexual problems, adoption, after school care, literacy, clothes, food, and the like, or more strongly support those we have? Are we utterly blind as to how this opens the door to the gospel?
There are already an estimated 4,000 Crisis Pregnancy Centers in the United States. How many more would we need?
Planned Parenthood and its progeny will likely never disappear since no amount of health care repairs the broken human spirit. All the free pregnancy tests in the world will not slow people who are determined to sleep around. Does it really need to be said again that we who are followers of Jesus cannot expect unbelievers to act like believers? Why are we yet surprised when they do not?
The very existence of Planned Parenthood is like pepper spray in the eyes of a church bereft of disciplemaking. We feel the sting, but miss the root cause. Our blurred vision led us to fight culture rather than fighting Satan. We chose carnal weapons rather than spiritual ones, wield them wildly, and watch the losses pile up.
To supplant the influence and existence of Planned Parenthood will, frankly, take far more sacrifice than most churches and individuals are willing to make. It takes time we will not give, and may take up places we are only willing to go as “a ministry opportunity.”
Consider the words of Paul, writing to the believers at Thessalonica:
Although we could have been a burden as Christ’s apostles, instead we were gentle among you, as a nursing mother nurtures her own children. We cared so much for you that we were pleased to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own lives, because you has become dear to us. (1 Thessalonians 2:7, 8, HCSB)
Until we are willing to pour our very lives into those in need, convincing them by love and life that God’s way is the eternal way, then those for whom abortion seems like the best and surest way out of a jam will continue to walk across the street, or around the corner to Planned Parenthood.
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