A profane 'gift'

I recently had the displeasure of reading this profane piece of writing. The article, written by Valerie Tarico, a Planned Parenthood board member, was published last January. It’s old news in internet time, but it’s back in the headlines after Christian News reported on an article she wrote last month praising the decline of so-called “religious fundamentalism.”

It was a tough read for me, and I don’t know how it escaped my notice until now. There is so much wrong with it, but I’ll mention a few things.

Tarico believes that a series of victories on the pro-life side (as Courtney Crandell noted in her Vital Signs roundup) is the result of her side’s “inability to claim the moral high ground.” Tarico offers talking points to align the pro-abortion movement’s rhetoric with the moral stance of pro-lifers and somehow shift the country’s opinion on snuffing out babies in utero.

In addition to her abortion-as-sacred-gift-or-blessing sacrilege, Tarico suggests that women should be honored for killing their own children, “just as we honor motherhood.” In response to claims that abortionists are murderers, Tarico suggests:

“God (or Nature) aborts most fertilized eggs. Abortion doctors are compassionate healers who devote their lives to helping women and men ensure that they have strong, well-planned, wanted families. Their work is as sacred as any in the field of medicine.”

How is this a reasoned response to the claim that abortionists are murderers? Murder is an act of the human will. The living God is sovereign over His entire creation, and human life, whether fertilized egg or octogenarian, is His to take according to His divine decree. One doesn’t have to even believe in God to grasp the absurdity of analogizing a miscarriage to an induced abortion. And the procedure is healing for whom? Certainly not the baby. Tarico also wrote that slaughtering unborn babies “can be loving and generous. It can be responsible and self-sacrificing.” And on and on.

I’m not surprised people think like Tarico, who calls herself a “former evangelical.” I’m surprised that she can publicly state such bizarre and profane things. That’s probably why the comments are closed on the article. To deny the obvious—that life begins at conception—is how abortion advocates rationalize. But to go so far as to call tearing an unborn baby limb from limb or flooding him with poison or partially delivering him, then inserting a probe into his skull, sacred or a blessing? The most self-sacrificial thing a woman can do when faced with an “unwanted” pregnancy to protect her baby’s right to live, isn’t it?

Natural man is sinful, and it’s natural to cloak sin in darkness. But we’ve reached a whole new level of depravity when we seek to sin in the light. We call the profane sacred and the sacred profane. Has God given us over?