I have spent my entire life as an animal rights advocate. As a lawyer, I have represented owners of domestic pets in states where pets none-the-less had no legal rights.I have made an effort to personally save any injured animal that has ever crossed my path. When possible, I bury the dead animals I encounter that we term “road kill.” I take spiders and insects out of my house rather than step on them (with the one exception being scorpions, as I live in Texas). I have always had an extraordinary, in the literal sense of the word, compassion and even empathy for the plight of the animal and insect kingdoms. I have often wondered if my compassion for animals actually exceeds that of my compassion for my fellow humans.

That is, until recently.

While I wept for Cecil the lion, I am revolted and outraged by what Planned Parenthood has done, and continues to do without conscience, to innocent life for profit. I am certain that we will be held accountable, and suffer the consequences, of allowing such depravity to occur on our watch. The “straw-man arguments” that 1) it’s about a woman’s right to choose and 2) that de-funding Planned Parenthood is an assault on women’s healthcare are each deliberately deceitful.

I have written about a woman’s right to choose previously. So I’ll reiterate my thought here. If it were really about that, then every time a woman has her breasts removed as a preventative measure to preempt a genetic predisposition to cancer, or her face peeled off and tightened to look younger, or her uterus removed once its past it usefulness there would be protestors marching outside the facilities where such procedures were being performed. But there are not.

Protestations against abortion are different. Those protestors are not protesting again the woman’s right to do whatever she wishes to do to her body.  She is free to do with her body what she chooses without raising societal reaction. Protests against abortion, in particular, are about preventing a woman from doing to someone else’s body whatever she chooses. (I am not unconditionally against abortion. In the instances of rape, incest or life of the mother I understand the larger issues and defer to the life of the mother as well as to the medical and biblical prohibitions and their outcomes).

As for an assault on women’s healthcare, there are 9000 government funded clinics in this country, separate from Planned Parenthood, where the same women who would seek out Planned Parenthood can receive pre and post-natal care along with a variety of other additional healthcare procedures.

If you are Pro-Choice, and are willing to watch this latest video release of Planned Parenthood’s practices, and remain Pro-Choice after watching, I respect your right to maintain that opinion. I simply could not identify your humanity. I could only further assume that you would have had no problem watching Mengele’s experiments of placing newborns on their mothers’ stomachs while taping the mothers’ breasts over so the infants slowly starved to death while their mothers looked on…helpless to intervene. Planned Parenthood isn’t doing anything to “tissue.” When the laboratory dish contains easily identifiable arms, legs, fingers, toes, eyeballs, and brain matter… “tissue” is the euphemism, the comfortable word you prefer so that you can live yourself. A human, in fact, is what it is.

We have turned into a Nation that uses abortion as 1) a remedy for self-gratifying sex whenever and wherever we want it without taking personal responsibility and 2) a means of limiting the growth of poor and minority populations. If you think that sounds like a crazy or conspiratorial opinion, read about Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, and what her stated intentions were.

Decades ago, a good friend of mine and practicing psychologist told me, “Every culture that has abandoned its children has not survived.” At the time, she was troubled by 1,000,000 runaways annually in this country.  Her comment is historically correct. So ponder this:

What are our chances of survival, not in the face of radical Islamic extremists, but in the face of our indifference, willful blindness and hardheartedness to the mutilation of our children… a/k/a/ the “tissue” on the laboratory tabletops of Planned Parenthood?

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