"Reproductive Justice" and The Salting of a Leech
Lord of The Flies (1963)
When I was about 12, I was foraging with a friend through one of the few tracts of undeveloped land in our Detroit suburb. Good fortune smiled upon us and we stumbled upon a black leech about 4 inches long - the granddaddy of leeches! Captivated by its grossness, yet frightened by the prospect of it attaching to our flesh and sucking the lifeblood from our veins, we stuffed it into a discarded beer can for safe transport home. Arriving at my house, we carefully unloaded the slimy beast from the can and onto the garage floor. Signifying that adolescent cruelty rather than necessity may be the true mother of invention, we poured a large ring of salt around the leech then watched as it slowly, blindly inched itself into the salt path, then recoiled and headed in a different direction but back into the ring of salt. Like Jack, and his morally debauched devotees in William Golding’s, Lord of The Flies, we howled with laughter, quite pleased with our own brilliance.
However, our self-congratulatory celebration ended abruptly when my dad stepped into the garage and asked sternly, “What are you doing?” Foolishly assuming he’d approve of our clever form of amusement, I proudly replied, “Salting a leech.” I don’t recall his exact words, but I remember well the tone of utter disgust with which he condemned our baleful activity. I also remember the guilt that washed over me when he flipped my conscience switch to “on.” The moral lights shined brightly and I felt ashamed before my earthly maker. My dad taught me an important moral lesson that day; no one--not even a leech--deserves to be treated cruelly.
Of course, this brings me to the cruel treatment of children by abortion. I just finished reading Dr. Willie Parker’s new book, Life’s Work: A Moral Argument For Choice. Parker is an abortionist who claims to be a Christian, believes Christ has called him to perform abortions and likens himself to a “twenty-first century Saint Paul, preaching the truth about reproductive rights.” He speaks warmly of “the Jesus I love,” a Jesus who he claims “realizes that petty rules and laws laid down by the fathers and authorities are meaningless.” Apparently Parker’s Jesus views the 6th commandment, “Thou Shall Not Murder,” as “petty” and “meaningless.”
Now free from the real Jesus who loves children, Parker argues that a child should be “imbued with sacredness only when the mother, or the parents, deem it so” - a view that would justify killing any child of any age whose sacredness his or her mother does not acknowledge. All the while, Parker, a self-proclaimed “reproductive justice advocate,” speaks of the “respect and compassion that should be accorded to every human being.”
Like most abortion supporters, Parker loves his euphemisms, calling preborn children “products of conception” and innocuously referring to his twisting their heads and limbs off as “disarticulation,” yet he describes his abortion procedure with shocking candor on pages 94-95:
“I then open the cervix with a series of dilators…until the opening is as big as I need it to be, a measurement that correlates directly to the gestational age of the fetus...Then I insert a straw, called a cannula, through the opening and attach that to a suction tube, which leads to a canister by my feet. I flip a switch on the canister body, which turns on a vacuum, and, with a circular motion, I sweep the walls of the uterus with the tube. Within the space of a couple of minutes, the products of conception are sucked through the tube and into the canister.”
Parker continues by describing what he does after the abortion to prevent serious infection in the mother, a process he describes “as crucial as any other, because it assures me that I’ve done my job completely and well”:
“I take the products of conception back to the lab…And there, I inspect what has just come out of the woman’s body: what I’m looking for is the fetal sac, which, at a later gestational age, becomes the placenta, and, after nine weeks, every one of the fetal parts--head, body, limbs--like a puzzle that has to be put back together….I make sure I find every part, and I place them together, re-creating the fetus in the pan. I have done this so many times that it has become routine…”
Only a work of the devil could cause one to view the ruthless dismemberment and “salting” of innocent children as “reproductive justice” and to link such barbarism to Christ who warned it would be better to have a millstone tied around your neck and to be thrown into the sea than to mistreat one of His little ones.
If the Church will not speak out boldly against abortion, we should not be surprised when words like “compassion” and “justice” become synonyms for “murder” and “butchery,” and when our children, in the name of Christ, treat our grandchildren worse than leeches and believe they’ve acted virtuously for having done so.