In late October of last year, I wrote the article that follows this introduction. I, as perhaps were many of you, was extremely disturbed by the revelations about Planned Parenthood. The article was never finished and I just pulled it out for revision this past week. Though still deeply shocked by the lack of response from the politicians and media, I, as perhaps are some of you, am more troubled by the fact that this topic is now completely off the radar for most of us, including myself. How can this be? How did we get here? Well, before Planned Parenthood we received quite a bit of training about the moral ambivalence of abortion. You could say that it started in the 60’s.

A physician whose name was Bernard Nathanson had just finished his residency in obstetrics and gynecology. In 1968, he met the author of Abortion, Lawrence Lader. Together with Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique, they formed the first pro-abortion organization known as NARAL (at first the acronym stood for National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws; after Roe v. Wade it was changed to National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League).

In only two years of deceitful marketing, they (NARAL and a relatively small group of eager activists) struck down the anti-abortion laws in several states, starting in New York. Deceitful – how, you may ask? For example “…we simply fabricated the results of fictional polls. We announced to the media that we had taken polls and that 60 percent of

Americans were in favor of permissive abortions”. [1] Another example: “We aroused enough sympathy to sell our program of permissive abortion by fabricating the number of illegal abortions done annually in the U.S. The actual figure was approaching 100,000 but the figure we gave to the media repeatedly was 1 million.” [2] Another lie: “…we fed the public through the media was that legalizing abortion would only mean that the abortions taking place illegally would then be done legally. In fact, of course, abortion is now being used as a primary method of birth control in the U.S. and the annual number of abortions has increased by 1,500 percent since legalization”.[3] Also inflated was the statistical number of women who were dying from illegal abortions. The real number was less than 300 per year but the media were told that 10,000 women died from illegal abortions annually.

Dr. Nathanson changed his mind about abortion but not for religious reasons. As the technology for prenatal screening advanced, he simply became aware that the unborn child was his patient. He could watch the baby, in the womb, urinate and swallow, even dreaming was visible with the new real-time ultrasound machines. In 1985, Dr. Nathanson made a video/film of a real abortion called The Silent Scream. In 1987, Dr. Nathanson released an even more shocking film revealing the details of a D & E (dilation and evacuation) done in the womb of a woman at 191/2 weeks. Why is it that these shattering films did not even seem to slow the abortion industry down? How did we get here?

(The previous story of Dr. Nathanson and much more is available in David Kupelian’s well written book, The Marketing of Evil, from WND Books.)

As I mentioned, Dr. Nathanson claims no religious affiliation but has changed his position simply on the moral observation that the unborn child is a person and that abortion is, well, what would you call your personal assistance in the cessation of a live person?

So now, over 40 years later, how have our attitudes changed from the late 60s when about 100,000 illegal abortions were performed in our country? How is it that, “To a liberal, 2,200 military deaths in the entire course of a war in Iraq is unconscionable, but 1.3 million aborted babies in America every year is something to celebrate”.[4]

What follows is the article that I wrote last October while much of the country was still reeling from the revelations about Planned Parenthood caught on video by undercover cameras. Immediately, Planned Parenthood cried foul and appealed to law about the ethics of using video while the subject was unaware they were being filmed. The same code of law that makes selling reusable parts of aborted babies illegal. The political manipulation of the legal system is endemic to a certain part of the population that wants there to be no restriction on licentiousness. We often hear it said that you cannot legislate morality. We know that this should not extend to murder, do we not? Why is no one crying about the fact that we have now gone very far down the path of legislating immorality (SCOTUS and gay marriage for example). As a country we have reached a place where we think we:

“Can demand a ruling from the Supreme Court that will take all the risk out of trysting sex. But the high Court can’t do that any more than penicillin can. Liberals seem not to realize their real complaint is with a Lawmaker whose judgment cannot be appealed”.[5]

UNPLANNED PARENTHOOD

Arguably the most important event in my life took place near the middle of 1947. A woman whom I have never met became pregnant by the man she would later marry. Due to the aforementioned circumstance, her family flew her to live, for the next seven months or so, with an aunt in Northern California. The physician that delivered her baby had a friend, a classmate from medical school, who was looking for a baby to adopt. He and his wife were not able to have children of their own. The arrangements were made, and after the delivery, her baby boy (me) was placed in the care of the adoptive parents. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am an advocate for adoption in both the Biblical and practical sense.

How would this story play out now? Though we cannot know for sure, one source says that over 56 million abortions have been performed since Roe v. Wade in 1973. The C.D.C. (Center for Disease Control) puts the number higher at well over 57 million. When put on a graph, the abortions-per-year has expected peaks and valleys. But the average number of “procedures” per year is somewhere between 1.3 and 1.5 million. To put this in perspective, this number is greater than the number of deaths-per-year caused by heart disease and cancer combined. I am grateful to have been born prior to the statistics of “choice”.

My father was a family practice physician in Southern California. One year, he delivered more babies than any other physician of any specialty at the hospital closest to his suburban office. He was smart and funny. The son of Seventh-day Adventist missionaries, he lived in South America until he was 16. He told me that he was not sure he would have been able to enter Med-school and become a doctor if it were not for the demand created by World War 2. The U.S. Army paid his school bill. And he paid them back with service during the Korean conflict while I was in kindergarten and first grade.

I can remember conversations that we had about the possibility of legalized abortion. He did not think that it could happen in America. The Nazi (National Socialist) Party in Germany was too fresh in our memory, he thought. Their experiments in social engineering were based on some pseudoscientific principles: Survival of the Fittest proposed by Darwin and its evil twin Eugenics championed in this country by Margaret Sanger, (founder of Planned Parenthood). Then it did happen. Abortion became the law of the land. No one ever thought of my dad as a starry-eyed idealist but he stated that even though abortion had been legalized he believed that doctors would individually refuse. He was wrong about that. I think it was one of the great disappointments of his medical career, if not his life.

What has this to do with Fulcrum7 you might ask? Perhaps a few Seventh-day Adventist historical snapshots will explain.

A friend of ours, a Pastor, took a call to Hawaii. One of his first experiences on Oahu was driving on to the campus of Castle Medical Center where Roman Catholic priests, nuns and laymen were picketing. It was an anti-abortion rally. This was in the 1980s. He was troubled then by the question we may still ask now, have we surrendered this portion of the moral high ground to the Roman Catholic organization?

A few years later, my wife and I were listening to a Seventh-day Adventist radio program while driving our car through Loma Linda. Dr. Jack Provonsha was carefully guiding the radio listener through the “bio-ethical” background of a Seventh-day Adventist position on abortion. I remember him mentioning that most would agree on the advisability of abortion if the life and health of the mother were at risk. I also remember my mental assent to this statement. He then went on to say (as I remember it) something like this: “But what if the psychological health of the mother were at risk?” My wife and I had never thought of that. At first, and in the context of the tone of the program (moderate and helpful) and the tone of voice of the speaker (soft and thoughtful) it all seemed to make sense. Only later did we wonder how the psychological condition of the mother, in whatever state, could be enhanced - could be made less “at risk” - by taking the life of her unborn child.

And now, fifty years down the road from a choice made for all of us by SCOTUS, come these videos capturing comments by employees, “health-care professionals” and Hippocratic oath takers of the partially tax-payer funded Planned Parenthood. A brief summary can be found on the website: http://www.lifenews.com

Here it is:

• In the first video: Dr. Deborah Nucatola of Planned Parenthood commented on baby-crushing: “We’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so 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.”

• In the second video: Planned Parenthood’s Dr. Mary Gatter joked, “I want a Lamborghini” as she negotiated the best price for baby parts.

• In the third video: Holly O’Donnell, a former Stem Express employee who worked inside a Planned Parenthood clinic, detailed first-hand the unspeakable atrocities and how she fainted in horror over handling baby legs.

• In the fourth video: Planned Parenthood’s Dr. Savita Ginde stated, “We don’t want to do just a flat-fee (per baby) of like, $200. A per-item thing works a little better, just because we can see how much we can get out of it.” She also laughed while looking at a plate of fetal kidneys that were “good to go.”

• In the fifth video: Melissa Farrell of Planned Parenthood-Gulf Coast in Houston boasted of Planned Parenthood’s skill in obtaining “intact fetal cadavers” and how her “research” department “contributes so much to the bottom line of our organization here, you know we’re one of the largest affiliates, our Research Department is the largest in the United States.”

• In the sixth video: Holly O’Donnell described technicians taking fetal parts without patient consent: “There were times when they would just take what they wanted. And these mothers don’t know. And there’s no way they would know.”

• In the seventh and perhaps most disturbing video: Holly O’Donnell described the harvesting, or “procurement,” of organs from a nearly intact late-term fetus aborted at Planned Parenthood Mar Monte’s Alameda clinic in San Jose, CA. “‘You want to see something kind of cool,’” O’Donnell says her supervisor asked her. “And she just taps the heart, and it starts beating. And I’m sitting here and I’m looking at this fetus, and its heart is beating, and I don’t know what to think.”

• In the eighth video: StemExpress CEO Cate Dyer admits Planned Parenthood sells “a lot of” fully intact aborted babies.

• The ninth video: catches a Planned Parenthood medical director discussing how the abortion company sells fully intact aborted babies — including one who “just fell out” of the womb.

The 10th video: catches the nation’s biggest abortion business selling specific body parts — including the heart, eyes and “gonads” of unborn babies. The video also shows the shocking ways in which Planned Parenthood officials admit that they are breaking federal law by selling aborted baby body parts for profit.

Now an 11th video shows a female M.D., working in Austin, Texas talking about being able to sell intact “fetal” heads for brain research.

Without apologizing to the Nuremburg defendants, our government seems unable to stop the slaughter. Indeed many politicians are wondering why the outcry? What century are we from, etc.? Were we not aware that it is a constitutional right to have taxpayers pay for the unwanted outcome of a woman’s right to have unprotected, “…sex with men they don’t want to have children with”.[6] One pundit has legitimately asked if the liberal side of the aisle would be so unfeeling if we were talking about dolphins?

Why are Seventh-day Adventists not talking about this? Why did we not go into “sticker shock” when we saw that this was one of the price tags for accreditation? As we catapult into the final chapters of Revelation, will our health messengers be asked for a statement? Is the left hand aware of the fact that our “right arm” is still performing abortions?