Evil

 

“Such a gray softness can be but one thing. It is a baby, and dead”

By Dave Andrusko
  As we’ve done for the last two weeks, we will be offering multiple posts today on the controversy, which shows no signs of waning (just the opposite), over two secretly recorded videos in which two high ranking Planned Parenthood officials blasély conversed about intact hearts and lungs and livers and skulls.
Many people, including me, have attempted to convey why these conversations recorded by The Center for Medical Progress have created such a whirlwind of controversy. Ross Douthat, a columnist for the New York Times, offered his insight in a column “Looking Away From Abortion” that ran Sunday.
I’m going to fold his very helpful thoughts into another post. But I want to thank him for beginning with an excerpt from an essay that appeared in a book by Dr. Richard Selzer published in 1976. We’ve written about a different essay in “Mortal Lessons: Notes On The Art Of Surgery” on several occasions. (I’m reposting that one which goes back all the way to 1993. Of everything I’ve written in the last 34 years, it is my all-time favorite.)
What Selzer saw is as good an example of the shock of recognition as you will ever find. After a garbage truck has left, Dr. Selzer finds “a foreignness upon the pavement.” But the “it” is not an “it” at all, but fetal body parts which a hospital

“mixed up with the other debris” instead of being incinerated or interred. “It is not an everyday occurrence. Once in a lifetime, he [the hospital director] says.

  (You have to read much further into Selzer’s essays to appreciate its sheer soul-chilling impact.)
The bag containing the babies’ remains had fallen off the garbage truck and broken open. It was very important to the hospital director that Selzer understand what had happened—and to himself as well, it appears. He laid out that “aborted fetuses that weigh one pound or less are incinerated. Those weighing over one pound are buried at the city cemetery.”
Why the need for the meticulous detail? Selzer speculates that it is an attempt to offer a rationale—an assurance—that contrary to your lying eyes, the world has not gone crazy. The director’s explanations are to assure us so that

Now you see. It is orderly. It is sensible. The world is not mad. This is still a civilized society…

But Selzer DID see, in the only way that matters.

“All at once you step on something soft. You feel it with your foot. Even through your shoe you have the sense of something unusual, something marked by a special ‘give.’ It is a foreignness upon the pavement. Instinct pulls your foot away in an awkward little movement. You look down, and you see… a tiny naked body, its arms and legs flung apart, its head thrown back, its mouth agape, its face serious. A bird, you think, fallen from its nest. But there is no nest here on Woodside, no bird so big. It is rubber, then. A model.  A joke. Yes, that’s it, a joke. And you bend to see. Because you must. And it is no joke. Such a gray softness can be but one thing. It is a baby, and dead.

As he ponders what he has seen and heard—and what it means — Selzer concludes

But just this once, you know it isn’t [sane and sensible]. You saw, and you know.

  At least in the first two videos we have not seen baby body parts. But we have seen into the heart of darkness.
As you listen to Dr. Deborah Nucatola, senior director for medical services for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and Dr. Mary Gatter, president of the Medical Directors Council of PPFA, you might truly begin to understand for the very first time the banality of evil.
How behavior that almost defies imagination can be carried out on a mass scale by ordinary people so utterly desensitized that they can cheerfully talk over salad and red white wine about what they are doing to helpless unborn babies.

Source: NRLC News