Those Guilty of Doing Nothing in the Face of Evil

On October 27, 2009, a 15 year old girl went to her homecoming dance being held at the gymnasium of Richmond High School in Richmond, California. She was attacked outside the building and for some 2-1/2 hours was gang raped while as many as 20 bystanders looked on and did nothing.1 In October of 2012, a man is savagely beaten, robbed, and stripped of his clothes while onlookers laughed and filmed the event on their phones (clips of which can be seen here.)2 Jose Robles, manager of a Manhattan deli, after being beaten and mugged, complained from his hospital bed that no one stepped in to answer his cried for help. Instead, "people were watching and they were having a good time filming" the crime he said.3

Many people wonder how or why otherwise upright individuals could so callously ignore someone in need. Why wouldn't anyone help? In some situations, actually having a lot of people know about a heinous situation diminishes the desire for people to step in. Because of perceived social cues and reluctance to stick out, people will shy away from helping until they see others do so. The phenomenon is known as "the bystander effect" in psychology circles.4

The Bystander Effect

In her article on the bystander effect,5 Dr. Melissa Burkley references a landmark series of experiments conducted by John Darley and Bibb Latane. There they found two main components driving the lack of involvement by others. The first she dubs "pluralistic ignorance" and uses an example of a child who's splashing wildly in a pool. Upon seeing the child, you may survey the other adults in the pool area to see if anyone else is bothered by her actions. If they are concerned the child is drowning, you would dive in to rescue her. If they're indifferent, you may conclude nothing's wrong. But if no one knows and they all are looking at each other, then a false message is communicated.

The second factor of the bystander effect is what Burkley labels "diffusion of responsibility." She explains:

When you are the only eyewitness present, 100% of the responsibility for providing help rests on your shoulders. But if there are five eyewitnesses, only 20% of the responsibility is yours. The responsibility becomes defused or dispersed among the group members. In these situations, people may assume that someone else will help or that someone else is better qualified to provide assistance. But if everyone assumes this, then no one will intervene.6

It shouldn't be a revelation that those who succumb to the bystander effect are wrong. Even Jesus taught against it in his parable of the Good Samaritan. As beings who are morally aware, every person has a duty to help those in need. To watch others and assume you carry only a fraction of the moral responsibility in a dire situation is to allow evil to persist. Even if one is unsure, as in the pool example, there is nothing improper for a person to walk toward the edge of the pool and ask the child if she is in distress. An inquiry is preferable to a child's death.

Bystander Effect and Planned Parenthood

I bring this up because I'm seeing the bystander effect writ large in our society today. Millions of Christians as well as others are ignoring the evil of Planned Parenthood's extracting live babies from their mothers wombs in order to cut them apart and sell them off piece by piece. A few folks have written to me and asked "Why aren't people more upset about this?" As I've stated before, if public outcry can spur legislation within a month to ban confederate flags or one lion's death can ignite indignation across the country via social media, then certainly the lives of the most defenseless of human beings should be worth our time and effort. To ignore it or assume others will carry on with the fight is wrong.

There are many ways you can make a difference in the effort. First, if you haven't done so, make sure you watch the videos. I've linked to them all here. You don't have to watch the full footage, but the ten videos to date are damning evidence that this isn't manipulation or slick editing. Secondly, share them. Share them a lot. Voice your outrage at this barbarism. You can also follow some of the suggestions I've outlined here. And if you'd like to pass on some answers to the objections Planned Parenthood supporters are raising, check out the links to the articles below.

We must act in this crisis and not wait for others. As Carly Fiorina stated in the Republican Presidential debate on September 16, 2015:

I dare Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama to watch these tapes. Watch a fully-formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain. This is about the character of our nation.7

It's also about the character of each of us as individuals.

References

1. CNN. "Police: As Many as 20 Present at Gang Rape outside School Dance." CNN. Cable News Network, 28 Oct. 2009. Web. 16 Sept. 2015. http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/10/27/california.gang.rape.investigation/.
2. Sylvester, Lisa. "Onlookers Jeer as Man Is Beaten, Stripped and Robbed in Baltimore." CNN. Cable News Network, 9 Apr. 2012. Web. 16 Sept. 2015. http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/09/us/maryland-beating/.
3. Burke, Kerry, Tina Moore, and Bill Hutchinson. "Port Authority Attack Victim Angry at Do-nothing Witnesses." NY Daily News. NYDailyNews.com, 1 Apr. 2014. Web. 16 Sept. 2015. http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/port-authority-attack-victim-angry-do-nothing-witnesses-article-1.1742519.
4. Burkley, Melissa, PhD. "Why Don't We Help? Less Is More, at Least When It Comes to Bystanders." Psychology Today. Sussex Publishers, LLC, 4 Nov. 2009. Web. 17 Sept. 2015. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-social-thinker/200911/why-don-t-we-help-less-is-more-least-when-it-comes-bystanders.
5. Burkley, 2009.
6. Burkley, 2009.
7. Beckwith, Ryan Teague. "Transcript: Read the Full Text of the Second Republican Debate." TIME. Time, Inc., 16 Sept. 2015. Web. 17 Sept. 2015. http://time.com/4037239/second-republican-debate-transcript-cnn/ .

Do the Ends Justify the Means in Fetal Tissue Donations?

The Center for Medical Progress has released seven undercover videos showing how Planned Parenthood staff will use the remains of aborted babies to procure fetal tissue, which it then sells to medical research firms, tissue middlemen like StemExpress, or to the abortion doctors themselves who sometimes do their own research.1

Many who seek to defend the practice have tried to argue that providing fetal tissue is a good thing. For example, Planned Parenthood spokesman Eric Ferraro stated, "Women and families who make the decision to donate fetal tissue for lifesaving scientific research should be honored, not attacked and demeaned." 2 Blogger Hank Green responded to a question about the practice similarly, stating:

For those wondering, fetal tissue is used in medical research. It has been used in medical research for decades and has been instrumental in the development of vaccines for diseases like polio and treatments for conditions like Parkinson's disease. Planned Parenthood helps biomedical research labs acquire fetal tissue for this research.

I understand being morally confounded by the question of whether abortion is moral or should be legal, but I don't understand why legally providing inanimate tissue for life-saving research is a more inflammatory issue than the abortion itself.

Planned Parenthood does not "sell" the tissue, which is illegal, though they do ask the research facilities using the material to cover the costs of transport.3

Is it morally wrong for Planned Parenthood to sell or otherwise help labs acquire fetal tissue for research purposes? Have such techniques been going on for decades? I think a bit of clarity about the situation is in order, and it begins with how the tissue samples were obtained.

Coercive versus non-coercive environments

 There is no law prohibiting an inmate from being an organ donor. In 2007, South Carolina State Sen. Ralph Anderson proposed two bills that would reduce inmates' sentences if they agreed to donate bone marrow or organs like kidneys, however such bills have been criticized by the American Medical Association.4 Yale University Transplant surgeon Amy L. Friedman called the move "extremely inappropriate" noting the ability for free and informed consent without coercion "is totally absent in the prisoner's circumstance."5 Organ donations are a vital part of the ability to save lives, but bargaining for body parts with those who want to escape the confines of prison smacks more of usury than informed consent.

Transplant doctors have even shunned receiving organs from prisoners scheduled for execution. In his paper for the American Journal of Bioethics entitled "The Use of Prisoners as Sources of Organs–An Ethically Dubious Practice", Dr. Arthur Caplan notes the practice first wouldn't yield many usable organs because of the nature of the execution process. However, he notes if the goal is to harvest organs, the method of execution could be changed "in order to increase the chance of a successful procurement." He explains:

Prisoners might be anesthetized and have their organs removed by a medical team before they are dead. I have dubbed the notion of execution by means of the removal of the heart or other vital organs the "Mayan protocol" after the Mayan practice of human sacrifice by removing a beating heart during certain religious rituals (Wood 2008). It is, however, morally repugnant to involve physicians as executioners or to shift the setting of punishment from prison to hospital. Involvement in causing death in any way is a direct violation of the "dead donor" rule, which has long been maintained as a bright line between death and donation in order to insure public trust and support for cadaver donation (DeVita and Caplan 2007). This principle would even restrict efforts to maximize the likelihood of procurement by the use of drugs and cold perfusion as steps prior to execution (emphasis added).6

Planned Parenthood Violates the 'Dead Donor' Rule

There is a similar dynamic at work in Planned Parenthood clinics. While the agency claims abortions account for only 3% of their services, this is a myth of statistics created by breaking up an abortion visit into its various parts and charging each step separately. The New York Post's Rich Lowery demonstrated how this fiction is perpetrated.7 The Planned Parenthood website itself states an abortion procedure could run "up to $1500 in the first trimester."8 Even at $400 each, the 327,659 abortions performed during their last fiscal year gives a total of over $ 131 Million in service fees.9 Add to that the additional money generated by the specimens from even half of those abortions and one can see the incentives are there for Planned Parenthood to push abortions and fetal tissue donations at all costs. This is not a coercive-free environment!

While one may shudder at the idea of bargaining days of freedom for organs from prisoners, what Planned Parenthood has done is worse. It is trading not on the patients' own lives, but the lives of their innocent children. And in this article, I've given Planned Parenthood the benefit of the doubt, assuming for the sake of this article that their actions are legal! Tomorrow I will demonstrate why they aren't. Green inquires, "I don't understand why legally providing inanimate tissue for life-saving research is a more inflammatory issue than the abortion itself." I don't know that it is, but the supposed donation help coerce women into having abortions and helps justify ending the lives of helpless babies. That should be not merely inflammatory, but opposed at every turn.

References

1. Brown, Kristi Burton. "Planned Parenthood Abortionists Do Their Own Research on the Babies They Abort." Live Action News. Live Action, Inc., 05 Aug. 2015. Web. 19 Aug. 2015. http://liveactionnews.org/masters-of-deceit-planned-parenthood-doctors-perform-their-own-research-on-babies-they-abort/.
2. McLaughlin, Elliot C. "Planned Parenthood Exec, Fetal Body Parts in Video" CNN. Cable News Network, 15 July 2015. Web. 19 Aug. 2015. http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/15/health/planned-parenthood-undercover-video/.
3. Green, Hank. "Hi Hank! Could You Explain What Exactly All This..." Hank's Tumblr. Hank Green, 16 July 2015. Web. 19 Aug. 2015. http://edwardspoonhands.com/post/124281239155/hi-hank-could-you-explain-what-exactly-all-this.
4. O'Reilly, Kevin B. "Prisoner Organ Donation Proposal Worrisome." American Medical News. American Medical Association, 9 Apr. 2007. Web. 19 Aug. 2015. http://www.amednews.com/article/20070409/profession/304099964/6/.
5. O'Reilly, 2007.
6. Caplan, Arthur. "The Use of Prisoners as Sources of Organs–An Ethically Dubious Practice." The American Journal of Bioethics 11.10 (2011): 3. Web.
7. Lowry, Rich. "Planned Parenthood's Pathetic '3 Percent' Lie." New York Post. NYP Holdings, Inc., 3 Aug. 2015. Web. 19 Aug. 2015. http://nypost.com/2015/08/03/planned-parenthoods-pathetic-3-percent-lie/.
8. "In-Clinic Abortion Procedure | What Is the Cost & Process?"  Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood Federation of America Inc., 2014. Web. 19 Aug. 2015. http://plannedparenthood.org/learn/abortion/in-clinic-abortion-procedures.
9. 2013-2014 Annual Report. Planned Parenthood Federation of America. 2014. Page 21. Web.

Planned Parenthood is Selling Body Parts. Here's What You Can Do.

The plot of Michael Crichton's 1978 film Coma turns on a surgical resident who uncovers a private medical facility that induces comas in healthy, young patients in order to sell their organs on the black market. After the film's release, one reviewer cautioned "See it and worry" but Dennis Schwartz dismissed the film as "more entertaining than credible."

Yet, today the story is breaking that Planned Parenthood has been selling the organs of aborted babies on the black market for some time and they've even captured top Planned Parenthood staff negotiating a deal and explaining how they do it. Live Action News just released the hidden camera footage (embedded at the bottom of this post) along with the story of Planned Parenthood Federation Senior Director of Medical Services, Dr. Deborah Nucatola talking with two undercover reporters about how to order children's hearts, livers, legs, or other parts they desire.1

The video is gruesome. It shows the actual web-based order form that allows customers to select gestational age, the type of tissue you would like, the quantity, and shipping options, like these are automobile parts and not organs of a human being who must be killed for them to be harvested.

The undercover meeting with Nutacola is no easier to watch. There, she explains how they will alter their method of aborting the child in order to preserve whatever parts are requested by their customers. One undercover reporter asked, "How much of a difference can that actually make, if you know kind of what's expected or what we need?" Nutacola cooly responds:

It makes a huge difference. I'd say a lot of people want liver. And for that reason, most providers will do this case under ultrasound guidance, so they'll know where they're putting their forceps...

We've been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I'm not gonna crush that part, I'm gonna basically crush below, I'm gonna crush above, and I'm gonna see if I can get it all intact. And with the calvarium, in general, some people will actually try to change the presentation so that it's not vertex.

You may have missed the meaning of Nucatola's last statement about changing the presentation. She is stating that she will turn the baby in utero from a head-down position to a breech position of feet first in order to make the mother dilate more as the abortion progresses and the baby's head won't need to be crushed. That's the textbook definition of partial-birth abortion which is illegal under federal law. Of course so is the buying and selling of human fetal tissue. 2

What You Can Do About It

This is all horrifying and many will be shocked. Others will say, "What did you expect? The abortion industry has many gruesome stories." However, I think this particular case, given the high-level involvement and the clearly illegal nature of the acts affords us a unique opportunity.

1. Ask Your Elected officials to Revoke all Planned Parenthoood Government Funding
The level of corruption within Planned Parenthood is s patently obvious from the video. There, even PPFA President and CEO Cecile Richards is caught praising Nucatola after the reporter told here "We do fetal collection and she's been very helpful with figuring out who to talk to." It would take a fool to believe that Richards doesn't know what's going on especially when Planned Parenthood's lawyers are providing council on how to handle this from an organization's legal liability perspective.

Listen, Planned Parenthood, according to their own reports, received $524 million last year from various government grants.3 Given the horrific nature of these crimes, every person needs to call their elected official and demand the suspension of all grants to Planned Parenthood programs, no matter what their purpose, until this case can be properly investigated. The money stops now.

If you think this is a long shot, think again. It took only 24 days of public outcry over the Confederate battle flag to force the state of South Carolina to remove it from their capitol. Twenty four days for a change to happen that had no direct factor in the killing of those nine church members. Certainly something this terrible warrants investigation and given both houses of congress are currently controlled by Republicans who are less sympathetic to Planned Parenthood, now is the time to act.

2. Spread the Word.
I anticipate the major media outlets will ignore this story like they ignored the Gosnell trial. But if enough people make enough noise, they won't be able to turn away. If the House of Representatives debates pulling all funding for PPFA, the media will cover it. Therefore, we need to spread the word. Tweet about this. Share this story and share the video with everyone you know. Keep up the pressure. Challenge people to watch it. Don't let up. Make it news too big to ignore. If you are more outraged by a Confederate flag than this, you're a monster.

3. Pray
Lastly, let's pray that God will use this discovery to dismantle Planned Parenthood. PPFQA is the #1 abortion provider in the United States. They are based on the racist beliefs of Margaret Sanger and were formed as an avenue to practice eugenics. 4 Pray that God will open people's eyes and we can put an end to this bloody chapter in America's history.

In his review of the movie Coma, Schwartz believed that the film's premise wasn't creditable. Perhaps he may be right; the patients in the film simply weren't young enough. As the video shows, reborn babies are much easier to harvest and dismember for parts. See it and worry.

References

1."BREAKING: Planned Parenthood director caught on tape selling aborted ‘baby parts'" Live Action News. Live Action, Inc. 14 July 2015. Web http://liveactionnews.org/breaking-planned-parenthood-director-caught-on-tape-selling-aborted-baby-parts/
2. Prohibitions Regarding Human Fetal Tissue, §§ 6A-289g-2-289g-2 (2003). Web. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/289g-2
3. 2013-2014 Annual Report. Planned Paerenthood Federation of America. 2014. Page 21. Web. http://issuu.com/actionfund/docs/annual_report_final_proof_12.16.14_/0
4. Grossu, Arina. "Margaret Sanger, Racist Eugenicist Extraordinaire." Washington Times. The Washington Times, 5 May 2014. Web. 14 July 2015. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/may/5/grossu-margaret-sanger-eugenicist/.
Image courtesy drsuparna [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons