Planned Parenthood’s president Cecile Richards made a couple of remarkable comments in an interview a couple of weeks ago with Jorge Ramos of Fusion TV. We talked about it on Saturday’s Caffeinated Thoughts Radio show already, but it’s still on my mind and I wanted to write a little about it. The first comment of note was Richards’ response to the question when does life begin. She answered:
It’s not something that I feel like is really part of this conversation…every woman needs to make their own decision.
Theologian Al Mohler calls her reply a “non-answer”. I disagree. She answered the question. More about this in a moment. Ramos, apparently thinking she was avoiding the question, asked her why it would “be controversial for you to say when you think life starts?” She replied:
I don’t know that it’s controversial. I don’t know that it’s really relevant to the conversation.
Then she “dropped the bombshell”, as Al Mohler put it:
For me, I’m the mother of three children. For me, life began when I delivered them. They’ve been probably the most important thing in my life ever since. But that was my own personal decision.
As a result, Mohler concludes that Richards believes that “life begins at delivery”, and this remark is the one that everyone remembers. I certainly don’t dispute that hearing her say that is shocking, but I would contend that isn’t all she is really saying. What she is really saying is far worse. What she is saying is that the matter is completely a subjective and arbitrary one. Whether a fetus is life or not, whether it lives or not, are decisions made exclusively by the woman and no one else. And there is nothing else that is relevant to the discussion.
Hence, it should surprise no one when Planned Parenthood one day promotes postpartum terminations of live births as acceptable. Richards doesn’t really believe life begins at delivery. Life begins when a woman says it does. Period.
