Episcopal and United Church of Christ Clergy Praise Planned Parenthood for “Doing God’s Work”

National   |   Sarah Zagorski   |   Jul 31, 2015   |   3:34PM   |   Washington, DC

According to a group of liberal clergy, killing babies in abortions and selling their body parts to the highest bidder is “God’s work.”

On July 29, the Planned Parenthood Clergy Advocacy Board said the undercover videos portraying their executives haggling over the cost of aborted babies’ body parts are simply an attack on health care.

Jeffrey Walton from the Institute on Religion and Democracy reports that the board is made up of religious leaders from the United Church of Christ, Episcopal Church and American Baptist Churches as well as clergy from Reformed Jewish and Unitarian Universalist congregations.

In a statement the clergy said, “As faith leaders committed to justice, honesty, and liberty, we are troubled by the decades-long campaign of harassment against Planned Parenthood and those they serve. Our faiths demand care for those marginalized by poverty and other oppressions. Faith leaders have supported Planned Parenthood for nearly 100 years because of our shared goals: every person — regardless of income, race, or religion — deserves access to safe, affordable, high-quality health care.”

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They concluded, “Our religious traditions call us to offer compassion, not judgment. People who work for Planned Parenthood give care and respect to those in need, doing God’s work. For this we are grateful.”

Thankfully, this group is in the minority and countless prominent religious leaders have expressed disapproval for Planned Parenthood’s outrageous practices. For example, Cardinal Seán O’Malley, OFM Cap., archbishop of Boston and chairman of the Committee on Pro-Life Activities of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), said that the videos reveal “the now standard practice of obtaining fetal organs and tissues through abortion and fail to respect the humanity and dignity of human life.”

Then he reminded Catholics that Pope Francis has called abortion the product of a “widespread mentality of profit, the throwaway culture, which has today enslaved the hearts and minds of so man.”

As LifeNews previously reported, Father Frank Pavone, the National Director of Priests for Life, was one of the first to rebuke Planned Parenthood and call on Congress to get involved.

He said, “I have been involved for decades in the effort to expose the evidence that the abortion industry sells the body parts of the babies it kills and I welcome this new evidence provided by David Daleiden and the Center for Medical Progress. The undercover videos and documentation, which have begun to be publicized today, show how people at the highest levels of Planned Parenthood are negotiating the sale of body parts, and adjusting the way they perform abortions so that the body parts are more accessible. This violates both the law and the most basic sense of human decency.”

Additionally, Rev. Franklin Graham and Baptist theologian Albert Mohler commented on Planned Parenthood’s lucrative business after the footage was released. Rev. Graham said, “Abortion is a sin and is clearly murder in God’s eyes. The people who perform it have no conscience, so I’m not at all surprised that they would be selling organs, tissue, and body parts from babies. Planned Parenthood should be put out of business. They’ve done enough damage.”

In some ways, Mohler used even stronger language than Rev. Graham to describe Planned Parenthood and said that they “stand at the epicenter of the Culture of Death.” He also dismissed the abortion giant’s justifications for their executive’s unbelievable comments.

He said, “They are not going to be able to explain this video away. I have no reason to believe that the video is anything less than totally credible. But, even if Planned Parenthood somehow finds a way to evade justice in terms of criminal activity, the part of the video that Planned Parenthood does not –and cannot — deny reveals their senior medical director enjoying a conversation over a meal in which she describes tearing apart the bodies of unborn human beings in order to get the desired organ: “I’m gonna basically crush below, I’m gonna crush above, and I’m gonna see if I can get it all intact.”

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