If you are struggling to understand why Gov. Gary Herbert instructed the Utah Department of Health to “cease acting as an intermediary for pass-through federal funds to Planned Parenthood,” spend a few minutes watching the videos of Planned Parenthood health care “professionals” haggle over the purchase price for aborted fetuses. The videos, surreptitiously recorded by the pro-life Center for Medical Progress (CMP), hearken back to the hard-hitting exposés made famous by McClure’s Magazine during the golden age of journalism of the early 20th century. As Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens revealed to the world the evils of anti-competitive trusts and wholesale political corruption, so too has CMP revealed the underbelly of the abortion trade in the United States.
I am pro-life for many reasons, including a deep faith in God and his plan for his children. But I am also pro-life because of the miracle of life itself. My wife and I have six living, breathing, beautiful, independent children. They belong to themselves, and yet they are ours. They are the joy of our lives.
Our oldest child Sarah — a baby girl, born prematurely at 22 weeks gestation — is buried in the Bountiful, Utah, Cemetery. Sarah was perfectly formed and beautiful. I held her tiny body in my hands as she died, born into the world two weeks too early for her tiny lungs. I would not trade those 20 minutes with my daughter for anything the world has to offer.
It offends my soul and my sense of justice that the laws of the United States of America allow abortionists, in the name of choice, to rip unborn babies from wombs, tearing them apart in the process, and offer up their tiny body parts to medical research for a negotiated “processing” fee (intact fetuses cost more). To know that Planned Parenthood purposely and casually kills and mutilates the bodies of babies near the same stage as our Sarah makes me nauseous. Abortion is immoral, and should only be an option in instances of rape, incest or where the life of the mother is threatened. There are tens of millions of Americans that believe and feel as I do.
Mother Teresa observed, “Abortion kills twice. It kills the body of the baby and it kills the conscience of the mother. Abortion is profoundly anti-women. Three quarters of its victims are women: Half the babies and all of the mothers.”
Not only do the CMP videos reveal the daily carnage carried out at Planned Parenthood — it performs over 300,000 abortions each year — it also shows the cavalier attitude of its people toward the unborn. To the women in the videos, a fetus is just tissue, albeit with little boy and girl parts (in one video, a nurse exclaims “It’s a boy!” as she pries apart the legs of an aborted fetus). To most Americans, an aborted baby is heartbreak, a tragic end to a human life.
Planned Parenthood is not entitled to taxpayer funding. Nor is defunding Planned Parenthood an attack on women as some Utah Democrats have claimed. Planned Parenthood does not have a monopoly on sexually transmitted disease education and prevention programs. Utah can and should provide these key services directly through the Department of Health and through other community health care partners. Planned Parenthood need not be involved.
While some may argue that the $500-plus million Planned Parenthood receives each year from the federal government does not directly fund abortions (a claim I think Rep. Jason Chaffetz’s House Oversight Committee is right to question), continuing to send taxpayer funds to an organization that treats human life with such contempt is unacceptable.
Dan Liljenquist is a former state senator and former U.S. Senate candidate.