By Dave Andrusko
Abortionist Willie Parker
As a lengthy addendum to our post on a recent interview abortionist Willie Parker gave, I’d like to talk about the interview the New York Times Magazine conducted with itinerant abortionist, Willie Parker.
As you need to know about the magazine’s motivation is in the headline: “Willie J. Parker Changed His Mind About Abortion.” Of course, it goes without saying (since Ana Marie Cox is writing for the New York Times Magazine), Parker’s “conversion” is from “someone who, for religious reasons, didn’t want to provide abortion” to becoming a practicing abortionist who flies into a location and takes the lives of up to 45 babies in a single day.
The name of his book? “Life’s Work: A Moral Argument for Choice.”
So why is Parker so popular with pro-abortion publications and pro-abortion writers? He professes to be a Christian, which is a detriment when the New York Times is writing about you unless you adopt policies the Times agrees with. And Parker is African-American, which allows him to assume the moral high ground by telling us he “comes from a heritage of people who know what it’s like to have your life controlled by somebody else.”
He is even more popular with the anti-life set because he “saw the light.” Aborting babies is now an act of selfless service and the abortionist ought to be seen as (I kid you not) a Good Samaritan.
If you read the interview, clearly lopping off the heads and crushing the torsos of tiny babies allowed Parker to overcome a kind of paralysis. It is fair to conclude that becoming an abortionist was a kind of second, second birth: “It felt as life-altering for me to move from being unable to do abortions to being able to do them as it did to move from being a nonbeliever to becoming a believer.”
Take that all you crazy Christians who oppose abortion!
The interview covers some of the same terrain other interviews with Parker have walked. For example, Cox asks about how Parker “talks about ‘verbicaine’ during procedures, or conversations with patients in which you try to lighten the mood.”
Parker offers one of his off-the-rack explanations for this gibberish. But if you read the interview he gave Esquire magazine’s John Richardson, what comes through is that Parker’s “verbicaine” is intended to enable many women to keep submerged a central truth in their lives that keeps trying to surface: what they are about to do violates something at their very core.
There are a few shots at “elite white women and the sacralization of motherhood,” which is apparently a topic in his book. He also is indignant at the very idea that Planned Parenthood and other “providers” would target poor women of color.
Needless to say, there is nothing about the warp speed with which Parker practices his grisly trade. He aborts and aborts and aborts some more.
And, of course, nothing about the “moral choice” of late-late abortions.
Sarah Kliff, then of the Washington Post, began a highly sympathetic 2012 interview with Parker, describing him as “a doctor who has performed late-term abortions.” If you read other stories, Parker freely acknowledges performing abortions at 24 weeks, 6 days…and beyond.
Willie Parker: African-American, man of faith, a convert to the cause of equality for women–the total package. He is the kind of icon that readers of the New York Times Magazine devour and by which and through whom they are made to feel superior.
That all this is in service of a man who thinks that opposition to abortion, ultimately, “comes back to the early Judeo-Christian narratives that say the fall of man was caused by a woman,” as he told Richardson. “That’s woven into our culture, and it has to be deconstructed at every level.”
So at the end of Richardson’s story when Parker matter-of-factly points out the aborted baby’s skull and eyes and the beginnings of a spinal cord, we are to understand that the nausea you and I experience is not a reflection of our revulsion and our common humanity but actually a reflection of how we blame Eve for everything.
No wonder the New York Times Magazine loves him.