Abortion claims another victim.
This victim is a minister of the church, a well-meaning woman trapped by the notion that death can be a way to sustain life.
The Rev. Monica Corsaro of Seattle, Wash., was recently appointed by United Methodist Bishop Elias Galvan to be Planned Parenthood’s first statewide official chaplain. The Rev. Corsaro will provide “pastoral counseling” to mothers and abortion staff.
A longtime Planned Parenthood proselyte, the Rev. Corsaro, in her 30s, will also lobby to attract more religious groups to PP’s primary political platform, which is abortion on demand from conception to birth.
Planned Parenthood successfully lobbied against the ban on partial-birth abortion, a brutal procedure in which a late-term baby is partially withdrawn from its mother and killed.
How does one ordained to represent the Creator of Life become an ambassador for a corporation that, according to its annual report, performed 182,254 abortions in 1999 alone?
Before the Rev. Corsaro and I talked, I expected her to be a combative, feminist zealot. Instead, I discovered an engaging, compassionate woman – but one who is instantly recognizable as a trophy of Planned Parenthood’s lengthy campaign of misinformation and deceitful rhetoric.
The term “choice,” the most effective weapon in abortion’s doublespeak arsenal, has seduced the Rev. Corsaro and permeates her dialogue.
“God gives us choices,” she says. “Religious people are pro-choice … women need choice.”
“Our culture is being ravaged by a secularist philosophy of ‘choice’ that threatens to destroy not only babies in the womb, but our dignity as human beings,” writes retired Pepperdine University Professor of Law F. LaGard Smith in his book, “When Choice Becomes God.”
“Society sins when we ignore women,” says the Rev. Corsaro. “Without choice, the rights of one group of people [women] are being trampled on by another.”
No rights for the unborn? She insists they are merely “potential life” – the same imprecise idiom used by Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun in Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion.
Denial of humanity to the unborn is a ploy to make abortion seem legitimate. But surgeries performed on babies in utero debunk that abortion tactic.
The hand of unborn infant Samuel Armas was photographed as he grasped the finger of his surgeon, Dr. Joseph Bruner, during one such procedure at Vanderbilt University Hospital in Nashville, Tenn. Samuel’s hand was then tucked back into his mother’s womb where he successfully completed his gestation and was born several months later.
“I realized as never before that the child I was killing was somebody’s precious child,” said former abortionist Dr. Anthony Levantino, of Troy, N.Y., after his daughter was killed in a car accident.
“I began to feel like a paid assassin … that’s exactly what I was,” says Dr. Levantino. “I want the general public to know what the doctors know – that this is a person; this is a baby, not some kind of blob of tissue.”
The Rev. Corsaro rejects the word “baby,” preferring “fetus,” another favorite abortion euphemism. However, she “will bless the tissue” when asked by an aborting mother.
“Don’t you ever see the little pieces?” I asked. “No, never, there are never any pieces, just tissue,” says the Rev. Corsaro.
“She must be deceived,” says Carol Everett, former owner of four abortion clinics in Texas. “From six weeks on, we had to count legs, heads, arms, to be sure everything was out. It meant infection and potential lawsuits when something was left in the womb.” The Rev. Corsaro identifies “23 pro-choice religious groups” to bolster Planned Parenthood’s claim to longtime clergy support. That number is dwarfed by the several hundred Jewish, Christian and Muslim coalitions representing thousands of pro-life congregations.
The Rabbinical Alliance of America, the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, American Muslim Council, the National Association of Evangelicals and the Catholic Alliance are among the many that are actively pro-life or “anti-choice” – as the Rev. Corsaro would say.
“God does not want harm to come to God’s children,” she says, referring to women.
I ask the Rev. Corsaro and Bishop Elias Galvan to reread her statement in light of the words, “Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter. If you say, ‘Behold, we did not know this,’ does not He who keeps watch over your soul know it, and will He not requite man according to his work?” (Proverbs 24:11-12)