The video evidence that betrayed a profitable business from the dismembered parts of children is not silent. There is more than enough reason to think that Planned Parenthood is guilty of atrocity that far outweighs anything they have passively conceded by changing their reimbursements policy.But sadly, as the often-frustrating Congressional testimony of Cecile Richards demonstrated, it seems that the nation's largest abortion provider is for the moment insulated from any serious trouble. There are just too many political allies, too many reliable talking points, and too few in positions of meaningful leadership willing to risk political face to confront Richards and her company.
So where does that leave us? What are we to think and say and do going forward? If what we saw in those videos was indeed what I believe we saw, we cannot be satisfied. We cannot shrug and go on to the "next cause." If the videos were a moment of reality for pro-choice Americans, they were even more so a moment of accountability for pro-life Americans. We can't look at the abortion debate in this country the same way after #ItsABoy. Something has changed, and a moral demand is placed upon those with the truth to do something faithful with it.
The first thing we must do as pro-life Christians is repent. We must repent of ever being comfortable with abortion as a "private values" issue. Abortion is not ultimately about "values" or "legislating morality." It's about legislating justice and human rights. In the absence of jarring human degradation, we can forget that. We can unwittingly accept the other side's cries of "culture war" and comfort ourselves that we are on the right side of history, no matter what's going on in the abortion clinic downtown. No more. We have seen, and we have heard.
Secondly, we must prepare. We have no reason to think the legal battle to restore human rights to the unborn will be any easier than was the legal battle to restore rights to millions of African slaves. "Reproductive freedom" is the plantation of our time. It is a glossy, extravagant, externally beautiful facade that runs on the churned up bodies of the innocent. If attacking the materialism of the age–indeed, the materialism in many of our own hearts!–was difficult and costly back then, why should we think it would be different now?
That means that not every skirmish over unborn rights will end in victory. It also means that not every victory will be the victory we would want. Like William Wilberforce, we have to sober and resolute enough to keep shouting, keep debating, and keep fighting even in the face of overwhelming odds and mounting defeats.
Finally, we must preach the gospel. Unless we preach the full gospel of justice, atonement, and mercy, we will not capture the hearts of this country. Even if we are armed with the most compelling visual evidence, the most airtight philosophical arguments, or the most cutting edge medical technology, the human hearts we preach to will do whatever it takes to keep from coming under the condemnation of their own conscience. A pro-life message of only judgment and justice isn't a full pro-life message. The unborn are made in the image of the same God who put the sins of the world on his only Son. The gospel is good news that the unborn, the elderly, and the disabled have inherent human dignity, and that every crime against that dignity can be absorbed by the sacrifice of the most dignified Being in the history of the cosmos.
We must hold that hope out to a world that sees the infant hand and hears the infant cry and must explain it all away or face despair. A pro-life Christianity is either a gospel Christianity or it isn't pro-life at all.
Planned Parenthood is open today, and for that we mourn. But we cannot resign ourselves to its world. We have too great a message, and too great a hope, not to endure in this fight. Lives, and souls, depend on it.