The 1978 movie, Coma, was a chilling exercise in horror.  It starred Genevieve Bujold and Michael Douglas.  Bujold played a resident doctor at the fictional Boston Memorial Hospital, who discovers that a number of fit and healthy young adults have unexpectedly died, been declared brain dead, during routine, minor surgeries.  As she investigates, Bujold discovers that the bodies are being maintained in a coma state at the mysterious Jefferson Institute. 

It turns out that the hospital is secretly running a lucrative side business selling human organs to the highest bidder.  Bujold herself is almost murdered in an attempted cover-up, but she escapes at the last moment.  Coma is a disturbing film, but in the end, right prevails and the police march in to arrest the Chief of Surgery who had masterminded the whole project.

Now it turns out that Planned Parenthood has been doing the same thing for decades.  This time, however, the victims are babies in the womb.  And the body parts being sold are hearts and livers and other prenatal organs.   Planned Parenthood’s chief of medical services was caught on video describing the grotesque procedures and explaining the process by which the organs are harvested.  The abortion doctor’s forceps carefully crush the head and body above and below the desired organs so that they may be safely preserved.  The rest of the body is torn to pieces and pulled out through the birth canal.  The organs for sale are then stored and shipped.

The problem is that this is not a horror film.  Planned Parenthood not only admits the practice, but advertises it.   They boast that this service is really a benefit to humanity and an aid to medical science.  The reality of course is that baby organs or fetal tissues are never needed for scientific or medical research.  There are other means readily available to accomplish the objectives of medical research. 

Although the sale of human body parts is plainly forbidden by Federal and state laws, Planned Parenthood justifies it as merely a legally permitted donation of tissues.  They get around the law by cleverly erecting a middle man who does the actual sales.  But the money finds its way back to Planned Parenthood’s coffers.

The mainstream media has avoided coverage of the story.  Predictably.   Planned Parenthood is largely funded by millions of Federal and state tax dollars.  So, again predictably, left wing politicians rise to PP’s defense.   I suspect most people feel a vague squeamishness about this crass trade in baby parts.  But ill-defined unease does not begin to offer an appropriate response.  Thirty-seven years ago, the movie, Coma, worked because there was universal horror at the harvest and sale of human body parts.  Today our moral outrage is muted.

What has happened to us?  We have slid so far down into the acceptance—no, the approval--of evil, that we are no longer the same people.  The psalmist wrote, “You formed my inward parts; You wove me in my mother’s womb.  I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.  Wonderful are Your works, and my soul knows it very well.  My frame was not hidden from You, when I was made in secret, and skillfully wrought in the depths of the earth.   Your eyes have seen my unformed substance; and in Your book were written, all the days that were ordained for me, when as yet there was not one of them.” (Psalm 139:13-16)

The psalmist speaks elegantly of the process of human development, the amazing secret creation of a human being.  Somehow we have lost that.  The abortionist’s eyes now go via camera where once only God could see.  But instead of being awed by the majestic work of God’s hands in the womb, evil men and women now seek utterly to tear it apart.  I suppose it began when we started calling a baby in the womb a “fetus,” labeled it “tissue,” and proclaimed that a mother has the right to deny the most basic instinct God has placed within her—the instinct to protect her child—and justified it by saying that a woman may do whatever she wills with “her body.”  Correction—her child’s body.

Even if a person does not heed the word of God or acknowledge him as the Creator of the human race, how have we fallen so far that we do not see that abortion—and now the dismembering of the most helpless and innocent among us to sell for profit—is plain and simply an effort to self-destroy the human race?  Where could such a perverted idea have come from?  The answer is that this diabolical, utterly despicable idea originated from the arch enemy of all humanity—the very one who has spawned world wars to kill tens of millions, and genocides and holocausts to brutally destroy tens of millions more.  Abortion and the traffic of human baby parts emerges from Satan himself, from the very pit of hell.  And we have been gullible enough, and wicked enough, to swallow it whole, and then to boast of our participation in Evil.

Planned Parenthood is evil to the core.  And so are those who defend it and who fund it.  We all must hang our heads in shame at our complicity, and from the depths of our souls, repent before God.  And hope that he will forgive us.  The apostle, speaking of those like abortionists, reminds us that “They are not pleasing to God, but hostile to all men…They always fill up the measure of their sins.  But wrath has come upon them to the uttermost.” (I Thessalonians 2:15-16)  The measures for America must be pretty near the “full” mark.  But perhaps God will be merciful.  He forgives those who turn humbly to Christ to save them from the wrath that is coming.

Dr. Rick Perrin is a minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and Chairman of the Board of World Reformed Fellowship..  He writes a weekly blog called ReTHINK which may be accessed at www.rethinkingnews.wordpress.com. He may be contacted directly at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..