When Harriet Beecher Stowe met Abraham Lincoln in the White House on Nov. 12, 1862, he is supposed to have greeted her with the approximate statement that she was “the little woman who began the big war.” She was. Ten years earlier, she had published Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which quickly became a sensation. The goal of the book, according to Wikipedia, was “to educate northerners on the realistic horrors of the things that were happening.” It did. The key word of these is “realistic.” People avoid pain, and contrive to side-step ugly things that are not directly in front of them, as we do every day with many atrocities, as we did with slavery until 1865, and with segregation for one hundred years after.
In each case it was the “realistic presentation of horrors” that made the big difference, whether Mrs. Stowe’s book, the church bombing in Birmingham or the numerous cases of televised violence. In the taped expose of Planned Parenthood’s methods, the pro-life movement has uncovered its Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It won’t start a war, but it will start a battle. And this may be one it can win.
The arguments made in defense of these methods are almost as bad as the methods themselves. “The details are gruesome, as are many medical procedures, and how doctors and nurses tell stories,” says the Washington Post Metro columnist Petula Dvorak, who sees nothing sinister. Michelle Goldberg in the Nation made the same argument: The group’s employees made the “mistake of talking the way doctors talk in front of the wrong people … any conversation about the logistics of adult organ donation would likely sound similar.” No, it would not. “Medical procedures” are designed to cure, not kill people. Organs taken from adults are taken with their consent after they die on their own of natural causes, while in these cases small human beings who never consented have been torn apart. These people were taped without their consent, but so was Mitt Romney in his “47 percent” campaign blunder. They weren’t coaxed, but were lulled into thinking they were among friends, so they felt free to reveal their true feelings: Swirling wine to release the bouquet while talking of “crunchy” abortions, and moving the forceps to mangle only the child’s less salable parts. “I’m not gonna crush that part, I’m gonna basically crush below, I’m gonna crush above, and I’m gonna see if I can get it all intact.”
The thing being crushed had no import whatever: “They take the products of conception and sell it to whoever,” a spokesman for Planned Parenthood said. But even Goldberg herself was forced to admit that “Politically, this is terrible for the organization and for the reproductive-health movement… [her] breezy tone and big glass of red wine and her discussion of doctors’ prowess in getting ‘heart, lung, liver’ out intact is hard to watch.”
“One of the turning points for the civil rights movement … was when the network news broadcast film of scenes like Bull Connor…turning fire hoses on black civil rights marchers,” writes Steve Hayward on Powerline. “The videos of the grotesque callousness of Planned Parenthood that are coming out may prove to be a turning for late-term abortion,” which two-thirds of Americans already want halted. When making a point, it always helps to get personal, to show the effect of one set of policies in its physical impact on one human being. Call this a “crushing defeat” for the abortionist lobby. Describing the process of “crushing the baby” is one way to get the job done.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
