Friends of ours raise pigs. They only have a few who wander about eating an organic, natural diet. The result is delicious pork, a commodity that can be sold, bought, bartered, given away and, of course, turned into dinner.

That’s because pigs are not persons and while there are still ethical standards for how they should be treated, the ethical standards for treating persons — that is, human beings — are much more exacting and far more consequential.

Knowing the difference between pigs and persons ultimately separates those who support abortion from those who oppose it.

This year’s March for Life on January 27 comes in the wake of a report by the House of Representatives Select Investigative Panel of the Energy & Commerce Committee on the buying and selling of fetal parts obtained as a result of elective abortions.

Reading the report it became obvious to me that doctors performing abortions, researchers experimenting with the resulting fetal tissue, and various organizations trafficking in aborted body parts believe they are working with something more akin to pigs than human persons.

Laws Discarded

The panel found that in order to procure and profit from the parts of — or in some cases intact — aborted babies, clinics, researchers and the corporations in between violate one law after another.

Clinics coerce women to donate their aborted children to science by using an informed consent form that even senior Planned Parenthood officials said is “misleading and unethical due to its contention that fetal tissue has been used to find a cure for diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, and AIDS.” There are no cures for these diseases and fetal tissue research is not the cutting edge of finding cures. In other clinics, informed consent for the procedure and informed consent for donation are the same form, something that is as misleading and unethical as it is illegal.

Clinics also “committed systematic violations of the HIPAA Privacy Rule” by sharing women’s confidential medical records with tissue collectors from the corporations, researchers and others who demanded body parts with specific characteristics.

“The Panel also learned that abortion providers may modify abortion procedures, in apparent violation of the law, to increase the odds of getting an intact infant cadaver.” They also avoid using fetus-killing poisons in such cases since the chemicals would taint the cadaver. “Clearly,” the report states, “these factors increase the likelihood that unborn infants are born alive during late second-trimester abortions, and raise the question whether these infants’ civil rights are recognized by abortion providers.” That is, it raises the question of whether or not live infants, having survived a modified abortion, were smothered to death outside the womb.

And, of course, the panel investigated the profiting from “donated” body parts and thereby violating “the federal statute prohibiting profit from fetal tissue sales.”

A Child is a “Who” Not a “What”

Clinic personnel, researchers and the middleman corporations can only be in this ghoulish business by believing that an unborn child is of no greater moral consequence than a pig. Own it, kill it, slice it up and use it. It’s not a problem as long as the child is a “what” — not a “who.”

After all, that’s why the normally adoring abortion gangs attacked Hillary Clinton last April. “The unborn person doesn’t have constitutional rights,” she said. For that crowd, “unborn person” is anathema since it contradicts their central lie, the lie that the unborn whatever-it-is has to something other than a human person. The unborn child can never be “he” or “she,” but must remain “it” lest lie fall apart and the truth become obvious.

The crimes outlined in the panel’s report are the direct result of believing the lie. As Pope St. John Paul II wrote in his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae, “The Gospel of Life,” “Even certain sectors of the medical profession, which by its calling is directed to the defense and care of human life, are increasingly willing to carry out these acts against the person. In this way the very nature of the medical profession is distorted and contradicted, and the dignity of those who practice it is degraded.”

Then he went on, “The end result of this is tragic: not only is the fact of the destruction of so many human lives still to be born or in their final stage extremely grave and disturbing, but no less grave and disturbing is the fact that conscience itself, darkened as it were by such widespread conditioning, is finding it increasingly difficult to distinguish between good and evil in what concerns the basic value of human life.”

The March for Life — or more accurately this year’s forty-nine Marches for Life — are more than just a collective prayer to end abortion, but a call for renewed public sanity in the face of the reigning lie about the human person and the kinds of evil consequences the Special Panel’s report outlines — consequences that inevitably follow from treating persons as though they’re pigs.