Sometimes in the life of our nation there comes a tipping point during which a horror of such great magnitude is revealed so clearly the response can only be universal revulsion and outrage. 

Such a moment has come into being in the stomach churning revelations of Planned Parenthood’s sale of babies’ body parts.  

Out of the hours of video tapes have emerged portraits of human beings so morally degraded, so pitilessly brutal, so wiped clean of heart and soul that it causes a shudder down the spine to see and to hear them. They are like zombies who have the appearance of being human. But they are actually the living dead.

Something else has emerged from those tapes -- the unforgettable and soon to be iconic image of a tiny human hand. There it is, in all its created glory, each perfectly formed finger complete with a delicate fingernail. Held by antiseptic tweezers, the hand is slightly clenched, the way newborns’ hands are. It looks as if it could grab a finger and hold on. It looks as if it is surrendering. But of course, it can’t and isn’t, as the arm to which it is attached has been ripped off by an abortionist. A technician talks to supposed researchers in search of baby body parts about how she can procure intact specimens much like this baby, whose fragile body has been cut apart and whose individual parts are mixed up in a bloody, soupy mess in a stainless steel tray. 

The little hand summons silence in Heaven and on earth for at least a half an hour.

The image declares it is time for all the newspeak and all the bloviating about reproductive rights, the freedom to do as one wishes with one’s own body, the lies about masses of tissue, the faux arguments about women’s “health” to cease.  Talk is terminated -- silenced by one little hand.

Stop, it voicelessly utters. Silence.

What follows the silence? 

Repentance follows; repentance in dust and ashes. Recognition follows; recognition that once again, as the nation once realized when it compromised with the evil of slavery, that there is no compromise possible with evil. None. The time for debate has passed. It’s time for disobedience. It’s time for revolutionary action.  It’s time for war.

Yes, war. War against evil.

There has been two generations’ time to analyze the evil. There have been over forty years of attempts to dissuade evil. It has not listened, but instead has doubled down and multiplied. 

For decades those who have opposed abortion on demand have set up alternatives, have attempted to change laws, have gotten out to the public images of babies in the womb smiling and sucking their thumbs, and have continually sought to overturn the decision of the Supreme Court responsible for the carnage. 

But nothing has eliminated the evil. The corruption of the nation has been just too great. Barbarity has seeped into the culture so completely that its toxicity has poisoned nearly every institution, every court of law, every educational institution and very nearly every family. 

Those who have continued to protest are now outliers. They still are watchmen and women on the walls, shouting out warnings.  But they have time and again suffered the fate of Moshe the beadle, depicted in Elie Wiesel’s Night as a survivor of Nazi barbarities.  Moshe had seen babies thrown into the air and bayoneted for sport.  Wiesel relates that when the beadle returned to his village, there was “madness in his eyes. He talked on and on about the brutality of the killers. ‘Listen to me!’ he would shout. ‘I’m telling the truth. On my life, I swear it!’ But the people were deaf to his pleas. I liked him and could not bring myself to believe him.”

The good beadle’s tales were seen as beyond belief, for he was only one witness telling stories.  But there are now millions of witnesses and countless victims who cannot be dismissed. 

And there is that little hand.

It silently says that now has come a time when the only alternative is to exterminate the evil, to cleanse the land of it. 

Reader, do you think it will get better? Do you think matters will improve among the Left now that they all have seen clear evidence of Planned Parenthood’s barbarities?

No, they won’t improve. If left up to the Left, matters will only get worse, as evil unchecked careens down into a bottomless pit.

Even now, according to a report posted on Breitbart.com, baby parts are being used to grow human organs in rodents.  What was once deemed chimerical fantasy on the order of The Island of Dr. Moreau, is now considered progress. Some years ago (2009), the Huffington Post published an article entitled “Are We Ready for a Market in Fetal Organs?” Apparently the author thought we are and have been.  

The question is whether or not we are prepared to continue to accept a Swiftian bargain that amounts to the consumption of babies. No, unless we are completely committed to total moral destruction of our nation, we are not ready for such a market. 

Further, unless eliminated entirely, the barbarities of abortion and the sale of human flesh will seep into the national consciousness and societal fabric just as slavery seeped into the mentality of the South and sometimes the North, corrupting and poisoning the entire society.

We see from history what it took to eliminate slavery. We know what Lincoln said in his second inaugural address:

“If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’ "

Slavery was finally abolished, but not without the shedding of much blood and the exhaustion of much treasure. Yet the mentality that allowed it lingered on and on, evidencing itself in Jim Crow laws; Plessey vs. Ferguson, and apartheid. The battle still continues.

In a similar manner, the stain of abortion on demand and the butchery of millions will linger, as the land itself is soaked with blood. We know that. But first things must come first. First, the barbarities must end. Else we and our nation will find ourselves in the malebolge of Dante’s Inferno, where those who commit deliberate acts of evil receive their just torments.

Pure evil has been happening in the clinics of Planned Parenthood. Now the wickedness is no longer veiled, but revealed right before our eyes in the form of a little hand.

The only question that remains is whether or not America will rise up against the evil; whether there will be a mighty struggle to end the brutality that has ended the lives of some 55 million innocents, some of whose bodies have been and are for sale.

There will be struggle. There always is when evil is confronted.

As Frederick Douglass, once a slave, said in 1857, a mere four years before the beginning of the American Civil War:

“If there is no struggle there is no progress...This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.”

Douglass went on to advocate the use of prayers and pistols.

Those in the pro-life movement may not be ready for the pistols, but for those who believe there is no recourse but to ban abortion entirely, the call to prayer and action is now. We must struggle with all our might against the atrocities so lucidly and irreversibly set before us in deathly color. 

If we do not act, we are responsible at least in part for the continued death of little ones whose innocence is as unsullied as any humans can be.

We must remember that little hand. 

It was held up in surrender to death. But it also may be seen as held up in blessing for those who refuse to forget. It may be seen as a sign for those who lament and ask forgiveness for what they have done or permitted. It may be seen as a summons for those who will march to fight for other babies whose lives, unless we struggle against their killing, will be sold to the highest bidder.

Fay Voshell holds a M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary, which awarded her a prize in systematic theology. Her articles have appeared in many online magazines. She also has been interviewed on television and radio.  She may be reached at fvoshell@yahoo.com.