Planned Parenthood was put on the defensive last week when a heavily edited video surfaced of a Planned Parenthood executive discussing the organizations procedures for organ and tissue donations.
The scandal provides a perfect moral dilemma for our culture to discuss the morality of the organization. The older I get, the more I realize that morality is tricky business.
That’s because in these types of culture wars, everyone couches their arguments in the name of moral goodness. Each side claims the mantle of goodness, while they demonize their opponents.
For example, the Center for Medical Progress, the group that recorded and edited the video, claims that the recording proves Planned Parenthood is lying about violating federal law by selling fetal organs for profit and using unethical practices of altering standard abortion procedures.
Planned Parenthood defended themselves against those accusations and in return made their own accusation against the Center. Planned Parenthood claims that the people at the Center for Medical Progress are the real liars. They describe the Center as “A well-funded group established for the purpose of damaging Planned Parenthood’s mission and services.” Planned Parenthood goes on to state that the Center, “has promoted a heavily edited, secretly recorded videotape that falsely portrays Planned Parenthood’s participation in tissue donation programs that support lifesaving scientific research.”
Personally, as I dive deeper into this scandal, I’m having a hard time finding the truth amid the complexity of this issue. And that’s because both sides have good goals of protecting victims.
It may seem paradoxical to many, but as a progressive Christian, I hate abortions. I realize that they are at times necessary for the safety of pregnant women, but I wish they never happened. Unborn children should be cared for with love and respect, not be killed as victims. I also wish that those who fight so desperately for the government to care for unborn children by making abortions illegal would fight with the same fervor for the government to care for children who are already born. And so, since I don’t like abortions, I sympathize with the Center for Medical Progress because they want to end abortions.
But I also hate Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other diseases that organ and tissue donation could cure through “lifesaving scientific research.” If we can discover ways to cure life-threatening diseases that victimize people, surely we should do that. And so I sympathize with Planned Parenthood’s practice of tissue and organ donation because it’s directed toward the noble goal of curing debilitating and fatal diseases.
Each side is directed toward a good goal. It’s complicated because those noble goals come with an ethical cost. Indeed, the unborn should be cared for, but the born should be cared for, too.
Our cultural pattern of becoming scandalized by the other side isn’t helping. Whichever side we are on, becoming the morality police is only making the scandal worse as we scapegoat and talk past each other. This pattern gets us stuck in a scandal of unhealthy righteous indignation over and against our opponents.
The alternative to getting stuck in a scandal isn’t to avoid scandals, but rather to go through them. As we go through them, we might just discover ourselves becoming un-scandalized as we see that the other is actually motivated by a good goal. In acknowledging the other’s good goal, we begin to see them as human and not the evil demons our minds have made them out to be.
When we acknowledge that our opponents are trying to protect the vulnerable, we begin to see them and ourselves in a more truthful light. That’s because in these difficult moral issues we must make a choice between two, and often more than two, imperfect options. Whichever choice we make, we find ourselves in the tragic moral dilemma of neglecting the needs of some in order to protect the needs of others. This situation doesn’t make us bad people, but it does tarnish any claim to pure goodness. Good people, it turns out, admit that they can’t help everyone and that moral choices often involve a less than perfect outcome.
We might also begin to question our own claim to moral authority by discovering the ways that we have demonized the other side to create in ourselves a sense of “goodness” in opposition to the evil we project upon our opponents.
In the midst of the Planned Parenthood scandal, the easy answer is to claim the mantle of moral authority by demonizing the other side. That answer isn’t helpful. What I am discovering is that as long as we continue to demonize one another, no one can claim the moral authority of being good. We sacrifice that claim the moment we start pointing the finger of accusation.
I’m also discovering that when we stop accusing one another, we can begin to create new space between us. That space, as opposed to being filled with scandalous hostile accusations, can be filled with creativity and cooperation.
What will that creativity and cooperation look like? I’m convinced we will never find the answer until we acknowledge the good goal of our opponents and that our own methods of winning these cultural battles are often tainted with impure motivations and tactics. Sometimes demonizing others allows us to feel better about the morally questionable decisions we have to make. Admitting that our position actually does cause harm to others is very unpleasant, but it is absolutely necessary if we are to work together to find solutions that are better than what we have now – solutions that we cannot imagine on our own.
Adam Ericksen blogs at the Raven Foundation where he uses mimetic theory to provide social commentary on religion, politics, and pop culture. Like his Facebook page Adam Ericksen – Public Theologian and follow him on Twitter.
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