A friend is thinking out loud about what exactly is right and wrong, in the complex racket Planned Parenthood and StemExpress and their ilk make their living at:

Consider this scenario: Bill and Susan Jones are driving their 8-year-old son, Tommy, to his soccer game. Susan is pregnant. Suddenly, a drunken driver plows into the side of the Jones car. Tommy is killed. Susan suffers a miscarriage. In the hospital, after many tears and prayers with their minister, the couple agrees to donate Tommy’s heart, lungs, kidneys and eyes to suffering children. Then, after many more tears and many more prayers, Bill and Susan agree to donate the fetal tissue from their unborn child—a child they very much wanted—to medical research.

(source: Don’t be so afraid of science | News OK)

What, he asks, is it that we object to, if both of these can save lives?

This is a good question, especially in light of CCC 2296.

My answer:

Well, there’s “science” and then there’s disrespect for humans and their bodies. As a culture, we have travelled a long way down a road that will not hear any serious discussion of the difference between those two things. Yes, it is possible for me to obligate myself to work for someone–but can I obligate myself to use my body *any* way that person wants? Can I sell my right arm to pay the bills?

The ideas that my body parts are property, and that property can be bought and sold by anybody whose claim to title over that property is not contested, are related and dangerous errors. When they are combined–when Planned Parenthood’s murder-for-hire operation crosses yet *another* line and so displays its obvious mercenary interest in keeping vulnerable women weak and panicky, and politicians and citizens too afraid to criticize the slaughter of innocents–then we have something we really *must* point out.

Offering my tissue and organs to save the life of a vulnerable person surely expresses some real virtues of courage and sacrifice. Taking the body parts of slaughtered babies and trafficking them for negotiated fees is not even similar to this, morally. It is abhorrent, and if we refuse to see it, we are no different from the Germans in 1930.

In our culture, we will not listen to serious *reasons* that the treating of bodies as property, and property as always subject to morally neutral exchange, is bad; so we are left stirring up honest and realistic feelings of revulsion that common people have. It’s not the way we should prefer to do things, but until reason has a public voice again, we have no choice but to publicize and accentuate the moments when people finally notice the stark contrasts between glorious, joyful, life-giving truth and the horrible, hidden, death-dealing lies our mass-market democracy insists we tell in order to keep everybody comfortable.

Let me add a final note:

It is important to remember that there are always justifications offered for evil, and they are always plausible within the culture.  That is why the evil can happen.