The recent tragic and vile shooting at the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood facility has returned abortion to the front and center of the nation’s consciousness.

There are two perspectives in the debate, one based in reality, the other in an ideological narrative.

For years, the pro-abortion lobby has argued that science is on their side. The humanity of the child, they say, is no more than an article of faith. Pro-lifers are “anti-science.”

Now it’s time to turn the tables and show that it is the pro-abortion crowd that is anti-science. Nancy Pearcey, in her fine piece “Why Pro-Abortion is Anti-Science,” writes:

In the past, abortion supporters simply denied that the fetus is human: “It’s just a blob of tissue.” Today, however, due to advances in genetics and DNA, virtually no ethicist denies that the fetus is human — biologically, genetically, physiologically human. Even the arch-radical Peter Singer acknowledges that “the life of a human organism begins at conception.”

Pro-abortionists are pursuing an ideology. Meanwhile, here’s the reality: what a woman carries in her womb is human life. This has been repeatedly affirmed by objective science. At least three facts are indisputable:

1. What a woman carries in her womb is a human (what else?).

2. The baby in the womb is alive. It is a human life.

3. An unbroken DNA continuity exists in this person. The baby’s DNA at the moment of conception is identical to the DNA of the child at birth, and the DNA of the adult at death. An absolutely unique human being is alive from the point of conception to the moment of death.

The Colorado Springs shootings have reignited a debate

Yet the abortion industry continues to promote the factious narrative that a woman carries “a product of conception” in her womb. “Tissue.” A ”foreign substance.” They tell this lie to sustain the vastly profitable (and culturally impactful) business of destroying human life.

But now truth is coming from an unlikely source. Prominent people are acknowledging that a pregnant woman carries a human life in her womb. Princeton’s bioethicist Peter Singer, mentioned by Nancy Pearcey above, is one of many abortion advocates honestly acknowledging that a woman’s womb shelters a human life.

Now the same is coming from another unlikely source–pro-abortion advocates.

Faye Wattleton, former President of Planned Parenthood, told MS Magazine in 1997, “I think we have deluded ourselves into believing that people don’t know that abortion is killing. So any pretense that abortion is not killing is a signal of our ambivalence, a signal that we cannot say yes, it kills a fetus.” (“Speaking Frankly,” May/June 1997).

Naomi Wolf, a prominent feminist author and abortion supporter, writes in the left-wing New Republic that so-called pro-choicers deceive themselves with dehumanizing speech. “Clinging to a rhetoric about abortion in which there is no life and no death, we entangle our beliefs in a series of self-delusions, fibs and evasions. And we risk becoming precisely what our critics charge us with being: callous, selfish and casually destructive men and women who share a cheapened view of human life…we need to contextualize the fight to defend abortion rights within a moral framework that admits that the death of a fetus is a real death.”

Feminist author Camille Paglia is even more blunt in a 2008 Salon article: “Hence I have always frankly admitted that abortion is murder, the extermination of the powerless by the powerful. Liberals for the most part have shrunk from facing the ethical consequences of their embrace of abortion, which results in the annihilation of concrete individuals and not just clumps of insensate tissue.”

(These three quotations were taken from Scott Klusendorf’s piece, “In Their Own Words: Pro-Lifers Aren’t the Only Ones Who Call Abortion Killing.”)

Here we find a conundrum, pro-abortion feminists acknowledging that what a woman carries in her womb is human life. And yet they advocate for the taking of that life. How do they get around that dilemma? By twisted logic! They argue that a human being is not really a “person” until they are “self-aware” and have an out-of-the-womb autonomy.

Many argue that a child achieves personhood at about the age of three. Until that time a child is not a person and the mother may make a decision to have the child’s life terminated. When feelings trump facts, when ideology replaces science, this is the slippery slope that follows.

We must condemn in no uncertain terms that, the alleged Colorado Springs shooter, Robert Lewis Dear, committed the vile, evil act of murder. He took innocent human life without reason. Including that of husband and father, Garrett Swase.

Swase was a Christian, a bi-vocational pastor and policeman. As a pro-life advocate, he would have been appalled at the violence perpetrated on women and babies at the Colorado Springs clinic. But he acted consistently pro-life; he willingly gave his life to save human lives at that very clinic.

Herein lies an irony for the pro-abortion supporters of Planned Parenthood: they rightly condemn the one-off murder of three innocent adult human beings at the Colorado Springs clinic, while promoting the daily violent taking of pre-born babies’ lives at the same clinic.

Writer Nicole Russell, wife and mother of four children, reflected on this paradox in her thought-provoking piece, “The Irony of Planned Parenthood Condemning Murder.” Russell sees through the ideology of Planned Parenthood to the facts of science:

Planned Parenthood advocates, in all your righteous indignation, how exactly would you justify moral outrage over a gunman brandishing his weapon at abortionists as they butcher babies? Yet if the shooter’s actions are reprehensible—and let’s again make clear that murder obviously is—what makes them so different? Motive? Legal sanction?

If the person who dies is gestationally 26 weeks old (the latest-term abortion allowed in Colorado—when, by the way, an infant can survive and thrive outside the womb with proper medical care), what’s the moral and philosophical difference between that person and 44-year-old police officer Garret Swasey, the pro-life, churchgoing husband and father who was one of the victims of this crime?”

As our “unlikely sources” acknowledge, what a woman carries in her womb is human life. Let us, like Garrett Swase, seek to be passionately pro-life, willing even to sacrifice our own life in the cause of life.

As we approach the celebration of the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, we are reminded that what a woman carries in her womb is human life. May we thus remind the world as well.

And reflect on this: That 2000 years ago, a young woman’s womb was inhabited for nine months by the Creator of that womb. From the brutality of what took place at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, we are reminded, by the coming of the Christ–and by the way that he came- that all human life is sacred, and that special space in every woman called a womb is sacred, too.

• Darrow Miller

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