Like most Americans, the sight of reporter James Foley kneeling before his slayer enrages me. I am revolted by this barbarism. Whatever “message” ISIS thinks it is sending to us by such savagery is lost on me.

I will back President Obama in as forceful a response as he can devise. The perpetrators of this outrage should be regarded as hostis humani generis -- enemies of all mankind -- and as such outside the protections of law.

But I won’t view the video. I’ve already seen a beheading video. I was in Kansas City in June, 1984, when Dr. Bernard Nathanson brought to the National Right to Life Convention the first ultra-sound video of an actual abortion.

Dr. Nathanson had been the cofounder with Lawrence Lader of NARAL. It was Lader who said “abortion is central to everything in life and how we want to live it.” Dr. Nathanson supervised, by his own admission, some 60,000 abortions. But then he began to have pangs of conscience.

The new ultra-sound technology was showing Dr. Nathanson the living human being in the womb. More and more, Dr. Nathanson wrote, he found himself powerfully moved by the humanity of that unborn child.

His video was to be shown at the 1984 Convention of the National Right to Life Committee. The convention hotel staff struggled to find a room big enough to screen the video. And the only A-V device they had was a standard television set.

Convention delegates jammed the large conference room for the showing. Kansas City’s Fire Marshal should have cleared the room since people were dangerously crowded in.

No one stirred. Dr. Nathanson asked me and one other man to lift the TV monitor and place it on two chairs so that people at the back of the room could see. We did that. When he motioned for us to go back to our places, however, I told him the TV was unstable and might pitch into the crowd. It might injure someone. “My God,” he said, indicating we should stay and hold the TV steady.

I wish he hadn’t. Because I had to do my duty, I could not avert my eyes.

The video -- grainy, black-and-white--nonetheless showed an unborn child at 12-weeks gestation. It was amazing how recognizable the fetus is at that stage of development. The unborn child was sleeping peacefully in her quiet sanctuary.

Suddenly, the unborn child became aware of an intrusion. An ugly probe is thrust into the safety of the womb. Sensing danger, the unborn child tries to get away. She holds out her hands, beautifully formed little hands with stubby fingers. She is trying to fend off the lethal attacker. Her arms are extended. Is she pleading? Or merely trying to push away the probe that will end her little life?

My heart is pounding. I feel sick. I feel dizzy. I’m a military veteran. I have been through flaming blockhouses before. I cannot falter now. I cannot faint. Not in front of two hundred people.

Dr. Nathanson looks sternly at me as if to calm my shaking hands. This is only the second ultra-sound I have ever seen. The first one was of our beloved daughter. In June, 1984, our daughter was only six months old. She had been born seven weeks pre-maturely. Her eyebrows and eyelashes were not fully grown out. As a newborn, our daughter’s skin was the softest thing on earth. The thought of anyone harming such a one as this fills me with revulsion.

Dr. Nathanson’s narration is clinical, almost preternaturally detached. But up close, I can see the suffering in his eyes. He was there at this little homicide. He is an atheist, he keeps assuring us, but he senses the transcendent meaning of what is happening, of the awful slaughter of an innocent to which he now bears eloquent witness.

I can hear my own breathing; it’s the only thing I can hear in that crowded hotel conference room. I cannot wait for this thing to be over.

To keep the machinery of death going, Americans must be lied to every day.

WebMD continues the lie.

Machine vacuum. This procedure is a common method used in the first 5 to 12 weeks (first trimester) of pregnancy. Machine vacuum aspiration involves the use of a hollow tube (cannula) that is attached by tubing to a bottle and a pump, which provides a gentle vacuum. The cannula is passed into the uterus, the pump is turned on, and the tissue is gently removed from the uterus.

Two years ago, Time’s Joe Klein admitted the truth: “Ultra-sound has made it impossible to deny that that thing in the womb is a human being.”

All of modern liberalism is based on this impossible denial. “Gently removed?” I saw that unborn child beheaded. I saw her “Silent Scream.” There was nothing gentle about that violation. The people who cry “War on Women” seem curiously missing in action when the victim is that most vulnerable and innocent among us—an unborn child, even when it’s a female fetus.

So, I share President Obama’s outrage at the beheading of James Foley. And I would appeal to his conscience to reconsider his all-out support for Planned Parenthood, an outfit that beheads unborn children a thousand times a day. For the sake of humanity.