Editor’s note: This commentary is by Shannara Johnson, of Morrisville.
Pro-life activist Penny Lea said after a talk she gave, a man who’d lived in Germany during Hitler’s reign came up to her.
He said there were railroad tracks behind the Christian church he went to. Each Sunday morning, trains filled with Jews went by, headed for the concentration camps. When they passed the church, the Jews would cry out for help, which the gathered faithful found “terribly disturbing.”
So the congregation decided that whenever they heard the train whistle in the distance, they would start singing their hymns.
“By the time that train came rumbling past the church yard, we were singing at the top of our voices,” the man said. “If some of the screams reached our ears, we’d just sing a little louder until we could hear them no more.”
This seems to be the exact mindset of many decent, salt-of-the-earth — yes, even God-fearing — Vermonters and Americans at large.
But it just got exceedingly difficult to close our eyes and pull the covers over our heads and pretend there is no monster breathing into our face in the darkness of our bedroom. Because now, by the grace of God, the full barbarism of abortion practices is coming to light.
The facts are on the table, and they sound like something out of Dr. Mengele’s chamber of horrors.
We now know that the University of Pittsburgh — with the full endorsement of the National Institutes of Health — is harvesting the organs of pre-born babies while their hearts are still beating.
We feel revulsion when we hear about the Chinese Communist Party harvesting organs from the Falun Gong practitioners and Uyghur Muslims it keeps in its concentration camps (while they’re alive, and often without anesthesia) when, really, we need to look no further than our own backyard to see the exact same atrocities, performed on the weakest and most innocent members of our society.
Reportedly, the University of Pittsburgh received nearly $3 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) over the past five years “to become a ‘tissue hub’ for aborted baby body parts for scientific research. The university has been “collecting fetal tissue,” including liver, heart, gonads, legs, brain, kidneys, ureters, and bladders, from babies 6 to 42 weeks old. As a reference, a fetus at 22 weeks is considered viable today, and 40 weeks is considered full term.
David Daleiden, founder and president of the Center for Medical Progress, said, “Pitt is now admitting to the news media that the aborted babies are still alive at the time their kidneys are cut out for [National Institutes of Health] grant money.”
And the horrifying news doesn’t even stop there. It turns out a study funded by Dr. Anthony Fauci’s NIAID office — with taxpayer money — grafted the scalps of five-month-old fetuses onto the backs of lab rats. Along with the study, the researchers published photos that show tufts of silky baby hair growing on the rodents.
To make matters worse, this sordid tale also has a racial component. In its application to the NIH, the University of Pittsburgh stated that it would harvest 50% of aborted babies from white mothers and 50% from minorities, including 25% from black mothers. Note that Allegheny Country, the metro area the aborted babies come from is 80% white and only 13% black. That means black babies are disproportionally targeted by the researchers.
And we haven’t seen the end of this. In April of this year, President Joe Biden removed all limitations on fetal tissue research that President Trump had implemented to prevent such atrocities.
If anything, the perpetrators will simply fade into the shade of their scientific dungeons. But the practice itself won’t stop unless we make it stop.
And we as Vermonters don’t get to turn away from this horror, relieved that “it’s only happening down there in Pennsylvania” and has nothing to do with us. Vermont is the only state in the union that is about to enshrine unlimited abortion — across all nine months of pregnancy and for any reason whatsoever — into its State Constitution. We may well become the biggest supplier to Nazi-style experimenters like University of Pittsburgh.
When our progressive politicians spout platitudes about “women’s reproductive health” being a priority, we don’t get to nod understandingly anymore and say something like, “Well, I don’t really agree with abortion, but everyone should be free to make their own decision.”
That was me just a few years ago, and I’m deeply ashamed of that fact.
It’s time to stand up and demand an end to these inhuman practices that go on right under our noses.
Or we will have to sing very loudly indeed to drown out the screams of the preborn and still be able to sleep at night.
Obviously we don’t learn well from history. Plus it is human nature to avoid inconvenience. But faced head-on with reality most people will reach deeper and do the right thing. The problem is folks are not always told the truth and the facts to make the right decision. Why is this? First you have our leaders, the Politian’s who color their response to issues with answers that may address the subject but in such a way that their political careers are not jeopardized. They are further supported by media program managers sympathetic to the benefits of hiding the whole truth for their own gain. Same for the talking heads.
Any God fearing human being who would watch abortions and the carnage pulled out piecemeal would be sickened and their reactions would be expected. We don’t need to watch to know. But we are not dealing with those type of people. The abortion industry has hardened individuals who could watch mass murder, partake in it, then have a nice lunch. Why, because they excuse themselves that this is what the uninformed masses want and the state will pay them to do it. Hierocratic oath be damned. How does this low esteem of human life begin?
It takes time for us to forget how important life is. During the Second World War we were fighting for our very existence. People and counties knew they were endanger of extinction by an inhuman political philosophy. It was in doubt of ever being stopped. Those that fought to resist, appreciated freedom and life. We wanted to persist. The baby boom wasn’t mandated. People respected their life and their country’s future. Where is that now? Who bilked us into thinking it wasn’t important? Has convenience and self-comfort won out? Where is the self-sacrifice that our forbearers endured for us and our future? Are we that selfish?
The answer is no. We can respect life at any stage. We are a giving people. What we need is not be lied to and to be presented the reality of any convenience law and the consequences it imposes on us both now and in the future. Abortion is an inhuman act. It diminishes us. Will our elected Representatives lead us through this? The question remains open.
Back in 1936 Vermont passed a law to limit the birth rate of Vermonters they deemed inferior. Dr. Henry Perkins, zoologist no less, decided many Vermont poor were subhuman and best weaned from procreating. Sterilization was uses in our indigent communities. The academic elite judged the inability of some in farm communities who could not speak or write the King’s English were thus an inferior set. Of course most were just French speaking immigrants from Canada. In May of this year our Politian’s did a little virtue signaling and wrote into the legislative minutes a sincere apology for the actions of their legislative forbearers in the ‘20s and ‘30s.
And here we are today with broad abortion laws newly on the books leaving it to some future legislator to apologize for the actions of the current bunch when the reality of the horror of abortion is exposed in all its grizzly detail.
I posted on one of VT’s local news FB pages that Bernie Sanders was going to introduce the most radical abortion bill in the nation. They bashed me, told me to stop lying and blocked me. It disgusts me that our gov’t is allowing the UK to buy up huge portions of land in my little town of VT to do painful testing on sheep and god knows what else. Would love to know what affect these dead diseased animals are having in our ground water. What is even more disturbing is the USDA stopped letting the public view the inspection reports online. They are hiding something and someone got very rich for allowing this, probably Bernie since he was overseeing the USDA. They say its for cancer research for the UK…don’t believe it.
The nation is finally seeing the other side of Fauci. I remember him saying that it was the wet market that caused the virus and we must stop China from killing dogs and cats. Then Fox News reports that Fauci used taxpayer dollars to do painful research on 28 beagles and then euthanized them. He really is a creep.
Racism disguised as equity ….