Really? Ask the victims. Sorry, you can’t.

When I see the smiling face of its President, Cecile Richards, I remember my childhood spent reading Superman comics and the Bizarro world. Some of my readers remember the strange upside down world of the Bizarros. They inhabited a planet called “Htrae” (“Earth” spelled backwards). Their code was “Us do opposite of all Earthly things! Us hate beauty! Us love ugliness! Is big crime to make anything perfect on Bizarro World!” Planned Parenthood promotes a new Bizarro world where killing children in the womb is called a “right.”

The organization is being defunded on the state level. However, the Obama administration is threatening those States. A just federal administration would defund Planned Parenthood. But not in this new Bizarro world. Planned Parenthood charges women for killing their children, and the women deceived are the second victims. Their “Doctors” use surgical strikes, suction devices or “medication abortion” (chemical weapons) to intentionally kill children — and then they are paid for that evil act.

Every person began their life in the sanctuary of the womb. No one can any longer claim that the child in the womb is not a human life. We surgically operate on them and send their 4D sonogram images around in greeting cards. Yet, the sonogram is also used to guide the killer in Planned Parenthood “clinics.” The only argument left is that some counterfeit “right” entitles the woman to make a “personal health decision” which always ends the life of an innocent child. We would never make the same argument about killing a one-year-old child. There is no moral difference.

Dependency is not a sound defense of abortion; we are always dependent on one another. Stages of development are not a defense; we are all always developing. The me of twenty years old is the same me at 61. The time thresholds of “viability” in the Supreme Court’s Roe and Doe decisions keep being pushed back as science confirms what our consciences have known all along, these children are our neighbors and it is wrong to kill innocent neighbors.

Procured abortion is also a violation of our obligation in solidarity. We are responsible for one another and have a special obligation to the poor. These children in the womb were called the “poorest of the poor” by the late Mother Teresa. Our civil law has rejected their Natural Law Right to Life. Until the civil law is changed, our tax dollars must not be used to fund Planned Parenthood. .

As Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine “proudly celebrated” the 100^th anniversary of Planned Parenthood, I remembered my friend, the late Dr. Bernard “Bernie” Nathanson, who went home to the Lord on February 21, 2011. I recalled the time I saw Bernie at a retreat sponsored by the personal prelature of Opus Dei. He was kneeling in the chapel, deep in prayer. He seemed profoundly burdened. I had known of him for many years. However, that weekend I came to know him, as a friend.

As the director of an abortion clinic, he once presided over 60,000 abortions. He instructed others who performed 15,000 more. He personally performed 5,000 abortions. He acknowledged that he killed his own child, whom he and a girlfriend had conceived in the 1960’s. Co-founder of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (now NARAL ProChoice America), Bernie was a leader of the early abortion movement.

However, that is not how history remembers him. Bernie is remembered as one of the greatest heroes of the pro-life movement.  In 1979, he co-authored Aborting America, which ripped the veneer of civility off of the beginnings of the abortion movement. His 1985 film, The Silent Scream, is one of the most powerful testimonies to the truth of what occurs in every procured abortion. His documentary film, Eclipse of Reason, explains the gruesome procedures used to execute the child in the womb.

Many years ago, expressing deep anguish, Bernie told me he helped to come up with the use of the word “choice” to hide the truth of what happens in every procured abortion. It was obvious he felt deeply responsible for the horror that the sophistry unleashed. He also acknowledged that he and his abortionist colleagues lied about the number of women who died from illegal abortions in order to garner support.

In his 1996 autobiography, The Hand of God, the weight of this is made clear. “Abortion is now a monster so unimaginably gargantuan,” he wrote, “that even to think of stuffing it back into its cage is ludicrous beyond words. Yet that is our charge — a herculean endeavor.” He openly acknowledged, “I am one of those who helped usher in this barbaric age.”

In 1996, Bernie was baptized into Jesus Christ by the late Cardinal John O’Connor in New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and received confirmation and first Communion. He wrote of the day, “I was in a real whirlpool of emotion, and then there was this healing, cooling water on me, and soft voices, and an inexpressible sense of peace. I had found a safe place.”

Now, he is in the safest of places, in communion with the Lord of life. The Lord of Life sends us men like Bernie Nathanson to keep the truth before us. A week after the 100th anniversary of Planned Parenthood, we must  recommit ourselves to the greatest human rights struggle of our age, restoring the right to life of our youngest neighbors.