Organ harvest trade underlines inhuman violence of abortion

As she spears another bite of salad, Dr Deborah Nucatola, Planned Parenthood's senior director of medical services, says: "I'd say a lot of people want liver." She is talking not about menu options but about organs from aborted foetuses requested by human tissue procurement companies. She says such organs can be procured easily by an experienced abortionist.

“We’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver . . . 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.”

Unfortunately, heads are difficult, as few women are dilated enough to deliver an intact head. So the foetus is manipulated into breech position. When the feet and body are delivered first it is possible to deliver a head without crushing it.

The video was recorded without Dr Nucatola's consent by people pretending to be from a human tissue procurement company. The Centre for Medical Progress, which made the video, has claimed Planned Parenthood is illegally harvesting and selling aborted body parts.

In fact, it’s much worse. What Planned Parenthood is doing is likely to be entirely legal. Provided the women consented and only reasonable expenses are paid, there is more than likely nothing illegal about this violent, gruesome process.

Nor is there anything illegal about using those foetal tissues for commercial purposes or indeed for what one California biotech startup, Ganogen, is already doing. It transplants human foetal kidneys, livers, hearts and lungs into rats. It hopes to grow the organs to sizes suitable for human transplant.

The tragedy lies in what Michael Wear, US president Barack Obama’s former outreach man to religious groups, tweeted: “It should bother us as a society that we have use for aborted human organs, but not the baby that provides them.”

The only reason these organs are valuable is because they come from human beings. But to harvest these valuable assets the humanity of the individual must be obliterated.

That obliteration is illustrated by phrases used by Planned Parenthood in its indignant response that it is doing nothing illegal and in a backgrounder circulated by a PR firm with a long association with the organisation.

Both use the phrase “life-saving” to justify harvesting organs and tissue from aborted foetuses. The life saved, obviously, is not the one aborted. They also use the word “humanitarian”.

Human foetuses are considered to be merely products of conception, not people. Denying humanity to some classes of humans is age-old. Some commentators declare the story is a “yawn” and that describing, say, heart surgery would also sound horrific. There is one difference. One aims to save life, the other aims to end life.

I oppose abortion because it is violence, albeit sanitised violence. Some pro-choice people acknowledge this violence in second-trimester abortion. Dr Lisa Harris talks about performing an abortion while pregnant, specifically of separating a leg from the body of a foetus, just as there was a "kick – a fluttery thump, thump" from her baby.

Tears streamed from her eyes without her conscious volition, “heartfelt and unmediated by my training or my feminist pro-choice politics”. She also describes performing an abortion at 23-24 weeks, and then rushing to deliver a premature baby.

Harris thought: “How bizarre it was that I could have legally dismembered this foetus – now newborn – if it were inside its mother’s uterus – but that the same kind of violence against it now would be illegal, and unspeakable.”

Feminism, she says, does not condone violent problem-solving, and opposes war and capital punishment.

“But abortion is a version of violence. What do we do with that contradiction? . . . There is no bright line here – not even viability – that distinguishes what is morally acceptable or not, or prohibited or not. That is, even as we think abortion is morally permissible we are also permitted increasing discomfort, grief or loss with later abortions.”

Ending life at any gestational stage is violence, and is permissible only when there is no other option and both mother and baby will die unless the baby is delivered.

We hear 26 abortions have been carried out in Ireland this year, three on grounds of a threat of suicide. There is no scientific evidence to suggest abortion has therapeutic effects in reducing the mental health risks of unwanted or unintended pregnancy.

We have no idea what the gestational stage of those babies was, or what the outcome will be for the mothers. We might say we are not as cold and heartless as Planned Parenthood, but the lack of public outcry about these hidden deaths might give the lie to that.