Planned Parenthood didn’t kill my daughter. Chicago’s Masonic Hospital did. Tim Kaine didn’t make the law that permitted it — at the time, he still found it useful to call himself pro-life. But Planned Parenthood created the morally twisted world where my daughter died. And men like Tim Kaine let it happen — Jesuit-educated “devoutly Catholic” men who knew better, who should have done better, who sold out because it was easier.

I have told this story many times. Every time I address abortion, I feel a solemn duty to repeat it, to remind Americans that this is no “victimless” crime. As I wrote here last year during the March for Life:

Put briefly and bluntly, my girlfriend and I had an unplanned pregnancy while we were both still in high school. I manned up, she mommed up, and we schemed how to keep the baby. I quit high school and joined the army. She wore baggy sweaters and took lots of vitamins. But then her father found out, and forced her to have an abortion. I got the call at Fort Benning, where I was in Basic Training. I begged my captain to call the police, to prosecute the people who killed our baby. I didn’t even know that abortion was legal.

I fed quarters into that payphone on the Army base and heard my girlfriend weep from the depths of her soul, so I said what I could to comfort her. … As I wrote in National Review exactly a year ago, Jessica’s murder changed me at the core of my very being. I wanted to avenge it — but not in the crass sense of hunting down the men responsible. (The list is long, includes politicians, and even in my opinion some bishops.) No, I would beat their evil by fighting for good, for the very good thing that our culture and economy, our politics and media treated as trash. I became a “worker on behalf of the most embattled, most important cause on earth: the dignity of the human person.”

Planned Parenthood Used Racism to Enable Empty Hedonism

In stark contrast, Planned Parenthood was begun as a racist conspiracy to skew our nation’s birthrates in favor of WASPs and against ethnic minorities — which in the 1920’s included groups now considered “white,” such as Irish, Slavs, Italians and Jews. Sanger used the racial panic that was spreading in America at that time, and added to it eugenics — the pseudo-science that claimed most social problems could be traced to “hereditary” tendencies toward criminal behavior, “shiftlessness,” and “imbecility.” She wielded these powerful weapons to break down something crucially important: the profound respect which Christians had always had for the sanctity of life, including its origins in sex and childbirth. She did this in service of a radical, selfish, hedonistic quest for sexual freedom, to be enjoyed by society’s “enlightened elites.” Of course, she thought of herself as part of that elite.

Since the church was born on Pentecost, believers followed the Jews in seeing life on earth as fundamentally good. The conception and birth of a child was a gift from almighty God, whatever the circumstances. Unlike the pagan Romans, Christians never abandoned their infants — and often would haunt the walls of Rome to rescue the unwanted. How many saints in heaven today started life lying cold and alone on those stony walls, until a pair of Christian hands embraced them? In this life, we’ll never know.

The sexual philosophy of Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood is something much closer to the jaded Roman aristocrats who dropped off their “surplus” babies to die. In the wealth and corruption of that empire, they had lost all faith in heroism, sacrifice, or the future. They didn’t even fight for glory in the army — but hired barbarians to do that job for them. They had learned to be Epicureans — that is, sophisticated hedonists, who “knew” that life is short, futile, and sad. It only makes sense to maximize happy moments, which are few and far between.

One of life’s few guaranteed pleasures is sex, so why not strip away the ugly obstacles to pleasure — such as tedious, costly obligations to kids you never wanted, whom you are too lazy to love? Even better if you can convince the grubby, unloveable poor to destroy their own little offspring, who will only swell the ranks of the mob which you have to support with your taxes.

The Tim Kaines of this World Make the Margaret Sangers Possible

That’s where Planned Parenthood comes in, with their thousands of seedy clinics conveniently sited near government housing projects, in poor minority neighborhoods. Every time an affluent taxpayer writes a check to Planned Parenthood, a little impoverished angel gets its wings. Or a one-way ticket to the afterlife, at least.

My daughter Jessica got one of those tickets. By Margaret Sanger’s standards, she didn’t make the cut: Her parents were both high-school students, her father a working class kid from the South Side of Chicago. We couldn’t have sent her to a first-rate private school, or bought her piano lessons. Judging by my family, Sanger would have been certain that Jessica would have inherited “anti-social tendencies,” and joined the tide of “human waste” that Sanger had sworn to stem. I was one of the poor whites whom Sanger wished to keep from breeding, as part of her program demanding, “fewer children from the unfit.” Her plans for American blacks are documented. She honed them in pow-wows with the Ku Klux Klan.

Yet self-proclaimed Christians like Governor Tim Kaine can make common cause with Planned Parenthood, can appear on the stage alongside Cecile Richards, and pledge to pour more taxpayer money into targeting the children of the poor. How could any Christian, whatever his politics, support the vast machinery of lust, death and despair that Margaret Sanger unloosed upon the world?

When Tim Kaine looks into his own eyes in the mirror every morning, what on earth does he say to himself? In this life, we’ll never know.