From the diaries…

By Anne Morse, compiler and co-author of My Final Word: Holding Tight to the Issues that Matter Most (Zondervan 2015)

In the last few weeks, as I’ve given interviews about the collection of Chuck Colson memos gathered in a newly released book, “My Final Word,” several people have asked me, “What would Chuck have to say about the Planned Parenthood videos? “

In the unlikely event that you have missed them, these are the videos that graphically reveal that Planned Parenthood has been selling the hearts, livers, and lungs of the unborn babies their abortionists have just killed.

What Chuck would have said, I believe, is: “I’m not surprised.”

He would not have been surprised because this grisly practice—killing humans in the fetal stage of life, and then selling their organs—is the logical and predictable outcome of a worldview that does not value the sanctity of human life. ALL human life.

After all, once you have decided that some lives are not worth protecting, why NOT slaughter them and sell them for parts?

Chuck would then have given us examples from history of what happens when we decide it’s acceptable to pick and choose whose lives to value and protect. For example, for three centuries, this worldview led to the enslavement of millions of African American. African lives weren’t worth protecting, so why NOT capture them, slap them in chains, carry them to American shores, and force them to work on plantations, where they were whipped, raped, and separated from their families?

This worldview led, some 70 years ago, to the persecution and slaughter of six million Jews, along with the extermination of the mentally and physically handicapped, in Germany. Lives unworthy of life, the Nazis called it. Or, as Planned Parenthood puts it today, “Just helping mothers feel good about destroying their offspring.”

Chuck would have applauded the exposure of what has been happening behind Planned Parenthood’s closed doors. One of the people he admired most was the British abolitionist William Wilberforce, who spent his life fighting British slave trade. In the recent film about his life, “Amazing Grace,” there is a memorable scene of Wilberforce taking upper class Brits on a boat tour—and taking them right past a slave ship, near enough to see the chains and smell the nauseating stench of hundreds of human beings who were treated—well, as though their lives didn’t matter.

Wilberforce persevered—and the slave trade was eventually outlawed.

If we persevere in showing Americans what abortion is all about—through ultrasound images of fetuses turning summersaults and sucking their thumbs, and videotapes of the people who destroy them because they want a Lamborghini (as one Planned Parenthood employee put it), we will one day convince enough Americans that ALL human lives matter.

Ironically, the Planned Parenthood scandal is breaking at the very moment a Broadway musical is shocking audiences with the reality of the British slave trade. The play is also titled “Amazing Grace,” and it’s the story of slave trader-turned hymn writer John Newton. I saw it a few days ago; I heard members of the audience gasp with horror when newly purchased slaves were branded. Yes, we knew slavery existed (and, tragically, still exists today in many places). But there’s nothing like seeing its full horror right before our eyes.

And this is why Planned Parenthood is running scared: Those videotapes are exposing the horror of what they have been doing behind closed doors to millions of tiny, helpless human beings. And Americans are reacting to it.

Chuck would have thrown his efforts behind the move to defund Planned Parenthood of the $500 million in taxpayer dollars it receives annually. In the face of this week’s defeat in the Senate, he would tell us to keep trying. He would tell the church to educate the faithful about this issue, and urge his BreakPoint audience to demand that our government get out of the business of killing the unborn once and for all.

Finally, Chuck would be reminding us that the way we think about our fellow humans has far-reaching consequences. He would be urging us to take a close look at what we believe, why we believe it—and what is the logical outcome of our worldview. Killing fetuses and selling their organs is the result of a worldview that refuses to see the unborn, and every human being, as bearers of the image of God.

This is dangerous, not only to human fetuses, but to anyone who is old, handicapped, or flawed in some way—that is, every one of us at some point.  As Chuck warned in the bioethics chapter of “My Final Word:” “You look at the events of the thirties, and you realize that, culturally, we are on a very similar trajectory…..What will we accommodate?”