Pro-life progress

The Center for Medical Progress (CMP) stunned pro-lifers last summer when it began releasing secretly recorded videos showing Planned Parenthood employees discussing the sale of aborted baby body parts with CMP operatives posing as buyers. CMP also secretly recorded employees from StemExpress, a tissue company that worked with Planned Parenthood, picking through body parts. Former StemExpress employee Holly O’Donnell talked about harvesting an aborted baby’s brain.

The pro-life movement had asked state and federal lawmakers to defund Planned Parenthood before the CMP videos, but what CMP’s David Daleiden exposed gave the effort new energy. More state lawmakers passed legislation to defund the nation’s largest abortion provider. But pro-abortion advocates fought back and declared the videos deceptively edited. Planned Parenthood sued CMP, Daleiden, and others. A Texas grand jury indicted Daleiden and colleague Sandra Merritt on felony counts of tampering with a government record (fake IDs) and misdemeanor counts of attempting to buy body parts.

After a judge dismissed the misdemeanor charges last month, the prosecutor’s office said it wouldn’t appeal the decision. On Tuesday, the remaining charges against Daleiden and Merritt were dismissed. Daleiden said the dismissal is a “resounding vindication of the First Amendment rights of all citizen journalists” and a “clear warning to any of Planned Parenthood’s political cronies who would attack whistleblowers to protect Planned Parenthood from scrutiny.”

Sadly, it’s not against the law to “donate” the body parts of aborted babies, but it is against the law to sell the tissue. The U.S. House of Representative’s Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives is looking into whether Planned Parenthood profits from “donations” of the body parts of “unwanted” discarded human beings.

Nothing should shock us in this fallen world, but it happens. I can barely imagine making the decision to kill my unborn baby, a human being who’s part of me, to rip him from the protective womb in which God placed him. I also can’t imagine working in a place that kills babies, or one that picks through the tissue to find “good” specimens to sell. But people do it and probably sleep peacefully. Daleiden exposed the horror, and we can appeal to our elected officials to do something about it. Whether it’s banning the sale of any part of a baby killed through abortion or barring any tax dollars from going toward abortions—even in cases of rape or incest—we can do something. And we can always pray.

Despite these and other heinous acts, including global Islamic terrorism that will get worse, God is still saving. I like to remind fellow believers that some of the presently unsaved could become part of the body of Christ at any time. What does Christ have to say to the woman who killed her baby for convenience or the Muslim who murdered “infidels”?

“I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.”