On Sunday, Planned Parenthood shared an illustration by Lena Dirscherl, a self-described pansexual, body-positive feminist, to their Instagram page. The illustration depicts a large man standing next to a caption that reads: “The size of your body doesn’t define your worth.”
Beneath the original post, Dirscherl wrote:
You aren’t worth more when you are skinny and you don’t lose any of your worth when you gain weight. It doesn’t matter what kind of body you have. You are a human being and therefore worthy! Always.
The irony of Planned Parenthood posting a message like this wasn’t lost on commenters:
“Exactly. If only they’d extend this consideration to unborn babies. Their small size does not make them less human. Planned Parenthood is a hypocritical organization.” – @pkulynych
“So if your the size of, oh I don’t know, a fetus. Does this still apply?” – @designer_ted
“Correct. A person’s a person no matter how small. Were you hacked?” – @lau.ra.mis
“Um…y’all can’t be serious right now. You terminate over 300k of our smallest and most vulnerable. Clearly you don’t agree with your own post.” – @claytonbhughes
“Wow. You finally got it.” – @the_prolife_teen
In response to the Instagram post from Planned Parenthood, anti-abortion organization Live Action uploaded its own image:
You’re right, @plannedparenthood – our size does not determine our humanity. It’s time to put an end to your killing of over 900 innocent children each day. Our world deserves better.
The Daily Wire reached out to Live Action Founder Lila Rose to discuss Planned Parenthood’s ironic post:
DW: What was your reaction when you saw the Instagram post?
ROSE: I thought that even a broken clock is right twice a day. Planned Parenthood is correct that the size of our body does not determine our value, and that’s particularly true for our preborn brothers and sisters in the womb.
DW: Do you think that Planned Parenthood is aware of the irony of their post?
ROSE: I don’t think so. I think that they have so dehumanized a whole group of people and they’re so obsessed with their abortion ideology that they are out of touch with most people in our country, and how ridiculous some of their own statements sound.
DW: What would you say to Planned Parenthood in response to this?
ROSE: They should keep telling people that, and they should be inclusive, and include all human beings in that claim.
The irony of Planned Parenthood sending out a message in which they state that “the size of your body doesn’t define your worth” is that a major portion of their business model is based on defining an human being’s moral value based on their size.
Despite the scientifically-established fact that upon conception, a genetically distinct human being is created that is wholly unique from either of its progenitors, many in the pro-choice community believe that until a fetus is “viable,” it is perfectly acceptable to terminate it. There is even a sub-community that believes in a moral right to abortion up until the moment of birth.
Author Sophie Lewis argues that a fetus is inflicting “violence” on someone who “doesn’t want to do gestational work,” and that abortion is a “form of killing” that is defensible:
We have very little to lose at the moment when it comes to abortion, and I’m interested in winning radically. I wonder if we could think about defending abortion as a right to stop doing gestational work. Abortion is, in my opinion, and I recognize how controversial this is, a form of killing. It is a form of killing that we need to be able to defend. I am not interested in where a human life starts to exist. I see the forms of making and unmaking each other as continuous processes.
This size-based argument is indelibly linked to the more frequently cited “viability” argument. A human being is terminable until it reaches a designated size, called “viability,” at which point it can survive outside the mother’s uterus.
Of course, “viability” is constantly changing with advances in medical technology. Although a birth at approximately 24 weeks gestation is considered by many the earliest stage at which a premature infant can realistically survive, there have been cases in which younger infants have persevered.
The ever-changing viability window raises serious question for the pro-choice community.
In February, during a debate with “Christian” abortion doctor Willie Parker, UNCW criminology professor Mike Adams, PhD, asked the audience to join him in a thought experiment about “viability,” and described how such a standard is illogical:
Imagine that a woman is pregnant in New York City and she has a viable fetus. She is 22 weeks pregnant. If she gets on a plane and she flies to Bangladesh – guess what? That human fetus is no longer viable because viability in Bangladesh doesn’t occur until about 35 weeks. So let’s just assume she’s hanging out in Bangladesh, she doesn’t like it very much, so she decides that she’s going to come back to New York City. Are we actually going to suggest that she had a person there in her uterus in New York City, a non-person in Bangladesh, who, when returning the United States of America, became a person for the second time? It is absolutely absurd…
According to a May 2019 Gallup poll, support for abortion at any time during pregnancy is down from previous years.
The organization asked: “Do you think abortions should be legal under any circumstances, legal only under certain circumstances or illegal in all circumstances?”
25% of respondents said that abortion should be “legal under any” circumstances. This is down 4% from 2018, 2017, 2016, and 2015, when 29% said the same. 53% said that abortion should be “legal only under certain” circumstances, up from 50%. Lastly, 21% of respondents said that abortion should be “illegal in all” circumstances, up from 18% the previous two years.
When asked if abortion is “morally wrong” or “morally acceptable,” 50% said it’s wrong (up from 48% in 2018), while 42% said it’s acceptable (down from 43% in 2018).
Planned Parenthood performed 332,757 abortions in the 2017/2018 fiscal year.