Category Archives: Current Events

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Choosing Unity: The Pro-Life Movement after November 8th

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Estimated reading time: 4 minutes.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to catch up with one of my closest childhood friends. Our conversation quickly turned to the election because he and his wife have been agonizing over what to do with their votes. These are very godly, very pro-life people. They take this decision seriously and are still trying to figure what to do. My guess is that they will probably begrudgingly vote for Trump, and I won’t.

And that’s okay. We will still love each other after the election.

The question I’ve been concerned about lately is: can pro-life people do the same with their friends and colleagues who make different voting decisions next month? Or will the pro-life movement face an unprecedented and catastrophic level of division?

I told my friend yesterday, “I just want this election to be over. We’re all sick of it. But here’s my hope for what happens next: I hope that all of the people who have agonized over this decision can come together afterward, even though some of their friends also agonized over the decision and made a different choice.”

This election has been a uniquely divisive one. It’s probably the toughest election pro-life advocates have ever had to deal with. We are all doing our best in an awful situation.

I’m not saying both sides are right. On the question of whether to vote for Trump, there is an actual right decision and an actual wrong decision, but it is admittedly very difficult to determine which decision is right. I definitely have an opinion, but I believe reasonable and virtuous people can disagree.

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Why Pro-Life Advocates Are Not Responsible for the Planned Parenthood Shooting

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Many pro-choice people have responded to the recent shooting by blaming pro-life advocates. In this article I show why such claims are completely unjustified by analyzing culpability and what it means to incite violence.

Estimated reading time: 14 minutes.
Photo credit: Colorado Springs Police Department

Photo credit: Colorado Springs Police Department

Last Friday a 57-year old armed man named Robert Lewis Dear walked into a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado Springs and opened fire. He barricaded himself inside for hours, and before surrendering himself to police he killed three people and wounded nine more.

Ben Domenech at The Federalist summarized many of the weird things that have already come out about Dear:

As is so often the case in these circumstances, Dear is described by neighbors as an odd loner, who avoided eye contact and spoke unintelligibly. In South Carolina, his previous residence, he had been arrested after hiding in the bushes and peeping into his neighbor’s house. He shot a neighbor’s dog with a pellet gun and threatened him with bodily harm. In Colorado, he lived off the grid in a trailer, on a five-acre plot of land he apparently purchased for $6,000 in 2014. This followed a series of cabins and trailers — without electricity or running water — that he stayed in after his divorce in 2000.

Dear has no history of affiliation with the Republican Party or pro-life groups or politicians.

While we don’t yet know very many details about his initial questioning by police, it was leaked that he said something about “no more baby parts” at some point. This is a clear reference to the Center for Medical Progress’ (CMP) undercover videos that have provided evidence that Planned Parenthood illegally sells body parts from the babies they kill in abortion. Planned Parenthood and others are claiming or implying that pro-life advocates are partially to blame for the shooting because we have been saying that Planned Parenthood sells baby parts.

Are pro-life advocates culpable for the shooting? By culpable I don’t mean “the only person to blame,” or even “the primary person to blame.” I also don’t mean “ought to be legally prosecuted.” By culpable I mean “morally blameworthy for their actions.” Whether pro-life advocates are culpable for the recent shooting depends entirely on what it means to incite violence. While I will not answer every possible question about what circumstances could make one culpable, I will argue that there are two extreme ways of thinking about culpability that we should avoid. I will also argue that the right way to determine if a statement incites violence is to examine the statement, not merely whether or not it was credited for violence.

Let’s start by examining four fictional cases.

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What We Learned in CMP’s Fifth and Worst Video Yet

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This morning Center for Medical Progress (CMP) released their fifth undercover video. It is the most visually graphic and disturbing yet, and it is also the most damning to Planned Parenthood.

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes.

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In this post, I’m going to summarize the most important parts of the video, because it’s important that we don’t miss any of this. Rather than putting them in the order they appear in the video, I’m organizing them based on the type of evidence they provide.

I’d encourage you to watch the video for yourself, even though, again, it is very graphic.

Evidence of Planned Parenthood Changing Abortion Procedures to Harvest Baby Parts

The two main legal critiques of Planned Parenthood since the CMP videos started coming out are:

  1. That they change abortion procedures to procure baby parts against their consent-agreement with the children’s mothers;
  2. That they are financially profiting from selling, not merely donating baby parts.
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Summarizing the Strongest Evidence That PP is Selling, Not Donating

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pp-screenshot-title

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes.

A friend of mine asked me this question, in response to the third Planned Parenthood video coming out:

I’m still not sure enough that PP is selling baby parts. Would you guys be willing to write a blog post about why you think they are? I think that would be helpful to your pro-choice readers too.

The way Planned Parenthood has attempted to defend themselves is by saying they are donating, not selling the baby parts, and that they are compensated for what it costs them to donate the baby parts. That’s an adequate response if the only thing you’re trying to explain is putting numbers like $75 for a “specimen.” They can say “that’s just us recouping our costs. We do not profit.”

The problem is that there are statements in each video that contradict this attempt to explain away the damning evidence Center for Medical Progress has provided. With each video, the evidence gets worse and worse.

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Outrage, Disgust, and Grief are Proper Emotional Responses

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Josh Brahm and I have been working on a blog post in response to the recent Planned Parenthood videos (we’re going to publish it on Monday).

Working on this piece has been unbelievably draining. I have never written something that has so deeply emotionally affected me before. The alternating grief over the children and anger at the people trying to cover this up has been a rough roller coaster of emotion.

People who know me well know that I can get animated but I tend to be very emotionally even-keel. It takes a lot to really upset me. When I get upset, I have an immediate impulse to take all of my opinions with a grain of salt because I feel like I’m not in control. I’ll tell Josh “my compass is broken right now,” meaning I don’t trust my intuition, just like I wouldn’t trust a compass that I thought might not be pointing north.

Yesterday I emotionally broke down, but for those few minutes my compass was pointing true north. I’m less emotional now, and I trust my compass less. Outrage, disgust, and grief are proper emotional responses. Being calm, cool, and collected is not remotely appropriate under the circumstances.

Disclaimer: Please don’t consider this permission to be a jerk. Let your passion motivate you to defend the dehumanized children, but without dehumanizing our opposition. Pray for them, don’t mistreat them. Be angry and do not sin (Psalms 4:4, Eph 4:26).