In a shameless bid to capitalize on the hype surrounding the just-released Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, Planned Parenthood tweeted out the following picture, using red and blue condoms in place of the movie franchise’s iconic lightsabers:
May the force be with you. #safersex #condoms #starwars #StarWarsTheForceAwakens pic.twitter.com/W2aQhPTJNc
— Planned Parenthood (@PPFA) December 17, 2015
Classy.
This is just the latest in the abortion giant’s creepy tradition of promotional material using condoms in ways that define sex as a recreational activity rather than a life-changing decision to be made with any meaningful degree of thought or discretion. Sure, these are the people we want teaching our kids about it.
But since their attempt to hijack the series for their agenda has opened the door, let’s take a look at some of the ways Star Wars actually reinforces several basic pro-life truths.
First, the central element separating it from other science fiction is the Force, the mysterious power used by the Jedi. In the 1977 original, A New Hope, Obi-Wan Kenobi explains:
It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together.
In the sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, Yoda adds:
Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.
Two outright declarations that life itself is the source of the heroes’ power and one that people are more the an the sum of their material parts seem to be pretty conclusive signs that the characters would hold a fundamentally pro-life worldview.
And there’s more. The 2005 prequel Revenge of the Sith finds Anakin Skywalker returning home to the news that his wife Padme is pregnant. Considering they’re in the middle of a war, their relationship is a secret in violation of Jedi celibacy rules, and the scandal of it becoming public would also threaten her career as a senator, these two certainly have incentives to abort.
Instead, though, Padme broaches the subject by saying, “something wonderful has happened.” Anakin responds with his own “that’s wonderful” and reassures his wife:
We’re not gonna worry about anything right now. All right? This is a happy moment. The happiest moment of my life.
Later, he again reassures her, “Our baby is a blessing.” A Planned Parenthood-compatible declaration that ain’t.
Finally, let’s recall that Planned Parenthood is a devout practitioner of moral and factual relativism, the idea that a mother’s perception and wanting defines what a baby really is. It absurdly extends this to the objective, scientific field of embryology:
All kinds of people — theologians, philosophers, scientists, lawyers, legislators, and many others — hold very different views about when life begins […] Some of our oldest religions have changed their views about this question many times over the centuries. Today, some people sincerely believe that being a person begins when the egg is fertilized. Some, just as sincerely, believe that it begins with birth. And lots of others believe it begins somewhere in between.
This too has a parallel in Star Wars: from the bad guys. Also in Revenge of the Sith, we learn that moral relativism is a key part of the villainous Palpatine’s attempts to corrupt Anakin into becoming Darth Vader. In one conversation, he calls “good” merely “a point of view,” trying to recast the Jedi as morally indistinguishable from the evil Sith, and in another tells him he must embrace “a larger view” than the “dogmatic, narrow view of the Jedi.”
None of this to say that anyone behind Star Wars was deliberately trying to send anti-abortion messages, of course. But like similar messages people have found in works such as Dr. Seuss and Harry Potter, any story about core moral values like compassion, protection, and justice simply can’t help but be pro-life by default. The worth and dignity of every life is something we all instinctively know to be true, even if we don’t consciously apply it to political controversies that generations of propaganda have conditioned us into seeing as unrelated.
The pro-life ethic is embedded in every affirmation of human decency, especially timeless tales of good eventually triumphing over evil such as Star Wars. So as an antidote for Planned Parenthood’s failed foray into the dark side, we close with a pro-life taste of their own medicine, the first from our friends at the National Pro-Life Alliance, the second from Students for Life of America:
