Scott Walker has done the women of Wisconsin a signal service, and advanced the respect for human life, by pushing and signing a bill that mandates ultrasounds before abortions. As in his battle with corrupt, cash-grabbing public employee unions, Walker faced down a wave of vilification that spilled over into hatred, and he never flinched. This is the kind of political courage we need in a president, on a wide range of issues from religious freedom to foreign policy, from budget battles to Supreme Court appointments.

And it’s no surprise that Walker is now facing blowback. Politifact has published a story designed to make Walker look like a liar, a candidate who relies on biased studies and slipshod evidence to advance flawed public policy. In the story, they cited Walker’s comment on The Laura Ingraham Show:

We know if people can see that unborn child, particularly with the latest technology, the odds are pretty high they’re going to keep the baby.

Walker did not cite a study, or pretend that he was offering an ironclad scientific rationale for his bill. He was speaking off the cuff, and from the heart, as a father who had seen ultrasounds himself, and remembered the surge of protective love they normally evoke — the most deep-seated and decent human animal urge, to care for your helpless baby.

Politifact drilled into Walker’s remark as if it had been expert testimony before a congressional committee, attacking prolife studies that support the impact of ultrasounds, pointing to their small or potentially skewed sample bases. The upshot of Politifact’s hit-piece: It seems that women who are already fully committed to have an abortion are unlikely to change their minds because of an ultrasound, while those who are ambivalent might well decide to keep their babies, especially if they are offered counseling and help in continuing their pregnancies. That’s the kind of help offered by pro-life pregnancy centers, but not by baby-parts businesses like Planned Parenthood. According to that organization’s 2013 annual report, abortion makes up 94% of its pregnancy services, and Planned Parenthood performs 174 abortions for each 1 adoption referral it makes. In that year, Planned Parenthood received more than $528 million in taxpayer funding.

But abortion profiteers like Planned Parenthood fought like wildcats to stop the ultrasound bill. If the procedure doesn’t change any minds, why would you think they would do that? Ultrasounds are safe, non-invasive procedures that most expectant mothers request at least once during each pregnancy. Their only outcome is usually a photo that goes on the fridge, and is Tweeted to friends. Why would doctors who specialize in aborting children, not delivering them, object to providing this service? Might they fear that women could change their minds once they saw their babies?

Pro-lifers such as Gov. Walker hoped that this is precisely what would happen. Dropping the sick pretense that abortion is a morally neutral decision which the state has no business attempting even to influence, Walker boldly said as much. He wants to encourage Wisconsin women not to destroy their unborn Wisconsin children, and to do that he wants to offer them more information, an extra medical procedure that is routine, standard and safe. The groups that profit from selling human organs want to give women less information, to urge them to make a lethal decision in the dark. Could the contrast be any clearer? One side wants to tell the truth in the service of life, the other to keep it hidden in service of death.

Darkness, Ignorance, and Deception

Evil thrives in darkness and moist hidden corners, like a fungus or STD. It cannot bear exposure to truth and light, so it cloaks itself in nebulous language and tortured rationalizations. There is something resilient in the human conscience, however fallen and blunted by sin, which gags on obvious evil. Only the very worst criminals can steel themselves, and only sometimes, to admit the vileness of what they do — stripped clean of euphemisms and self-deception  — then go ahead and do it anyway. In his infamous secret speeches at Posen in 1943 to SS field commanders who were putting the Holocaust into action, the vicious administrator of the empire of SS death camps, Heinrich Himmler, for the first and only time spoke openly of the “extermination” of Jews:

The most telling lines in this speech are these:

Most of you will know what it means when 100 bodies lie together, when 500 are there or when there are 1000. And … to have seen this through and — with the exception of human weakness — to have remained decent, has made us hard and is a page of glory never mentioned and never to be mentioned. … We have carried out this most difficult task for the love of our people. And we have suffered no defect within us, in our soul, or in our character.

Despite all Himmler’s bluster about Nazi supermen performing their “difficult task[s]” unflinchingly, the facts contradict him. As moral philosopher J. Budziszewski points out in his indispensable book on conscience, What We Can’t Not Know, the men who put the Holocaust into action were in fact tormented by nightmares, driven to drink and drug their brains into submission. For all the lies that they had told themselves, all the dehumanizing rhetoric aimed at the helpless Jews — they were “vermin,” a form of “bacillus,” a species of “poisonous parasite” that was only seemingly human — the Nazis themselves were only human, and so they had consciences. And so they were fully responsible for every crime that they committed.

It is simply impossible to reshape the human mind so that it can look at human faces, and human bodies, and truly believe that what it is seeing isn’t human. When they looked at the 100 or 500 or 1000 bodies lined up alongside graves which the victims had been forced to dig for themselves, the Nazis knew exactly what they were doing.

So do the organ entrepreneurs of Planned Parenthood. If you go back and watch those videos captured by the heroic pro-life journalists of the Center for Medical Progress, pay attention to the faces and voices of the guilty. Look how they down those cocktails, and notice their nervous laughter. What you’re seeing are human souls being slowly torn apart.