I apologize for not blogging today. I’ve been busy all day at the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission’s daylong conference on the Gospel and politics. This has been a fantastic time here in Nashville, and I’ll have a lot to say about it tomorrow when I’m back home (and I’ll get caught up on approving comments; thanks for your patience). I do want to pass on to you an amazing blog post by Ross Douthat, about the Planned Parenthood scandal.

Douthat talks at length countering the widely read claim this week that there is a pro-life case for Planned Parenthood (the idea is that through its contraceptive services, PP prevents pregnancies that would otherwise end in abortion. Douthat challenges that, and then makes a terrific point:

If, like many of the moderate-liberal columnists writing on this issue, you are 1) made at least somewhat uncomfortable by the dismemberment of living human beings in utero but 2) are convinced that Planned Parenthood’s non-abortion-related services are essential to the common good, why not write a column urging Planned Parenthood to, I dunno, get out of the dismemberment business? If all these other services are such a great, crucial, and (allegedly) abortion-reducing good, why do you, center-left journalist, want them perpetually held hostage to the possibility of public outrage over the crushing of tiny bodies in the womb? If a publicly-funded institution does one set of things you really like, and another thing that makes you morally uncomfortable, why are you constantly attacking that organization’s critics and telling them that they just have to live with the combination, instead of urging the organization itself to refocus on the non-lethal, non-dismembering portions of its business?

Exactly right. And this:

So let’s be clear about what’s really going on here. It is not the pro-life movement that’s forced Planned Parenthood to unite actual family planning and mass feticide under one institutional umbrella. It is not the Catholic Church or the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles or the Southern Baptist Convention or the Republican Party that have bundled pap smears and pregnancy tests and HPV vaccines with the kind of grisly business being conducted on those videos. This is Planned Parenthood’s choice; it is liberalism’s choice; it is the respectable center-left of Dana Milbank and Ruth Marcus and Will Saletan that’s telling pro-life and pro-choice Americans alike that contraceptive access and fetal dismemberment are just a package deal, that if you want to fund an institution that makes contraception widely available then you just have to live with those “it’s another boy!” fetal corpses in said institution’s freezer, that’s just the price of women’s health care and contraceptive access, and who are you to complain about paying it, since after all the abortion arm of Planned Parenthood is actually pretty profitable and doesn’t need your tax dollars?

This is a frankly terrible argument, rooted in a form of self-deception that would be recognized as such in any other context.

You should read the whole thing, if only to read his devastating final paragraph.

If Planned Parenthood didn’t dismember unborn children and sell the hands and feet and brains and eyes of these “human cadavers” (as one PP employee is heard calling them on an undercover video, raising the obvious question of how this “human” became a “cadaver”), there would be broad agreement in American culture that contraceptive services are overall a good thing. I think most of the deeply conservative Catholics who oppose contraception would gladly accept federal funding of Planned Parenthood’s women’s health services, including contraception, if Planned Parenthood got out of the abortion business.

It won’t do that, and Planned Parenthood’s defenders — and the defenders of the Sexual Revolution — won’t ask them to. Why not?

Why not?