Be Our Guest / Tom Grenchik

Abortion is a grisly business that masquerades as compassion

A priest friend of mine has been known to say, “Abortion is nothing more than violence masquerading as compassion.”

Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, tries hard to keep public focus on their “compassionate” services to women, and not on the grisly reality that they kill more than 300,000 defenseless children year in and year out.

As much as abortion advocates struggle to hide that violence from the public view, nothing can hide the ongoing revelations of botched abortions and wanton injuries and deaths of mothers undergoing abortions coming from many abortion clinics around the country.

The news of Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s chamber of horrors abortion factory in Philadelphia was the most dramatic example of the depravity to which a person might sink when he makes his living by killing children. Abortion makes fast money with little to no government regulation.

Gosnell has been charged with eight counts of murder, and several staff members at his abortion center have been charged with assisting in botched abortions, practicing medicine without a license or covering up the actions of those people who did. The counts include grisly infanticides of babies, whose premature births were induced so they could be killed in the minutes following their births.

This kind of horrific news seems to be helping Americans wake up to the extent of the carnage: More than 50 million children dead, and more than 5 million of them at the hands of Planned Parenthood staff.

Every abortion—whether in a filthy slaughterhouse or in a clean and bright abortuary—still destroys a precious little boy or girl. And some of their mothers have died from abortions done at Planned Parenthood centers as well—from California to Massachusetts and in states in between.

The abortion industry takes in more than $1 billion a year so why does its flagship, Planned Parenthood, require $360 million a year in taxpayer funding?

Planned Parenthood will argue that those federal dollars go to other expenses like salaries, rent or other programs, but this certainly frees other monies to be spent on promoting and performing abortions.

As Congress has been debating ways to cut back on the budget, pro-life members have proposed cutting all funding for Planned Parenthood and its 102 affiliates all around the country.

But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has now threatened that the Senate will not tolerate any defunding of Planned Parenthood. If Congress is really concerned about compassionate care for women, it should redirect funds now provided to organizations that perform and promote abortion, and instead respond to the basic needs of the poor.

Whether at a shoddy abortion business in Philadelphia or the corporate empire of Planned Parenthood, abortion is truly “nothing more than violence masquerading as compassion.”

And cutting programs for the poor, while giving hundreds of millions of federal dollars to an organization dedicated to eliminating the children of the poor, is simply one of the most appalling aspects of this tragic masquerade.

(Tom Grenchik is the executive director of the Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Log on to www.usccb.org/prolife to learn more about the bishops’ pro-life activities.) †