Fact #14: Abortion is condemnable for the same reasons that slavery and genocide are.

Home » Facts » Fact #14: Abortion is condemnable for the same reasons that slavery and genocide are.

Networks of killing centers across the globe are eliminating “unwanted, unborn” children at a staggering rate. Were the context not abortion, the world would be outraged. Call it what you want, when an innocent group of human beings is targeted and exterminated by the millions, that is an injustice on par with any of history’s most egregious atrocities. At the end of the day, if the unborn are people (and they are), then abortion is not only comparable to past crimes against humanity but is also, by sheer volume, the greatest holocaust of all.

Against Slavery Dont Own A SlaveNearly all violations of human rights have been defended on the grounds of the right to choose.

The slaveowners in this country a century and a half ago were pro-choice. They said, “You don’t have to own slaves if you don’t want to, but don’t tell us we can’t choose to. It’s our right.” Those who wanted slaveholding to be illegal were accused of being anti-choice and anti-freedom, and of imposing their morality on others.

The civil rights movement, like the abolitionist movement one hundred years earlier, vehemently opposed the exercise of personal rights that much of society defended. It was solidly antichoice when it came to racial discrimination. Whites historically had a free choice to own slaves and later to have segregated lunch counters if they so chose. After all, America was a free country. But the civil rights movement fought to take away that free choice from them. Likewise, the women’s movement fought to take away an employer’s free choice to discriminate against women.

Nearly every movement of oppression and exploitation—from slavery, to prostitution, to pornography, to drug dealing, to abortion—has labeled itself pro-choice. Likewise, opposing movements offering compassion and deliverance have been labeled anti-choice by the exploiters.

At least with prostitution, pornography, and drugs, the victim usually has some choice. In the case of abortion, the victim has no choice. He is society’s most glaring exception to all the high-sounding rhetoric about the right to choose and the right to live one’s life without interference from others.

The pro-choice position always overlooks the victim’s right to choose. The women don’t choose rape. The blacks didn’t choose slavery. The Jews didn’t choose the ovens. And the babies don’t choose abortion.

The systematic injustice of abortion.

Everything Hitler Did Was LegalHistory teaches us nothing if it doesn’t teach us that human beings have a great capacity for abusing other human beings. When this abuse is severe enough, and moves beyond the mistreatment of a few individuals, we call it a crime against humanity.

Crimes against humanity generally refer to any large-scale atrocity committed against a group of innocent human beings. They are not crimes of passion, they are crimes of precision. They are not the result of accidental, momentary impulses, they are thought out and rationalized.

The scale of such crimes cannot be carried out by individuals. They require the cooperation and consent of many, many people, and this is exactly what history shows us. The most notorious example, of course, is the Jewish Holocaust, in which six million European Jews were executed for their racial heritage.

The history of genocide as an international crime.

Raphael Lemkin (1901-1959), a Polish-Jewish lawyer, is the man responsible for making the annihilation of entire people groups an international crime.

In 1933, influenced by his knowledge of the slaughter of Armenians by the Turks in WWI and the recent slaughter of Christian Assyrians by Iraqis, he appeared before The Legal Council for the League of Nations in Madrid and proposed to make the extermination of human groups an international crime, calling such crimes “acts of barbarism.” His proposal was not accepted.

Ten years later, in 1943, he coined a new term, “genocide,” in an effort to more specifically describe the Nazi attempt to annihilate entire ethnic groups. (The term first appeared in publication in 1944 in his Axis Rule in Occupied Europe in a chapter titled: “Genocide”).

The word “genocide” combines the Greek word for race (geno) with the Latin word for killing (cide). The Nuremberg trials, which concluded in 1946, used Lemkin’s term “genocide” in their indictment against top Nazi officials who were there convicted for “crimes against humanity.”

 

In 1948, the United Nations officially made genocide an international crime at the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The Convention defined genocide as any of a series of acts designed to “destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”

The acts listed include among others, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group or forcibly transferring children out of the group.

Since then, the term “genocide” has been applied to many other historic and contemporary crimes against humanity (retroactively to the Armenian Genocide). In some instances, such as Pol Pot’s Cambodian genocide, the victims have been targeted for non-racial reasons. This broadening definition of genocide is reflected in Webster’s New World Encyclopedia: [1]

gen·o·cide – n. – The deliberate and systematic destruction of a national, racial, religious, political, cultural, ethnic, or other group defined by the exterminators as undesirable.

Such definition, in fact, is broad enough to include abortion, and some pro-life groups have made a compelling case that abortion is genocide. Abortion is certainly deliberate and systematic.

There is roughly one abortion for every 4.5 births in America today (in New York City, the ratio is one abortion for every 1.5 births). Abortions are performed in a vast network of clinics around the country, more than 3,000 a day, 1.21 million a year, and more than 50 million since abortion was legalized in 1973.

Abortion targets a specific group of human beings.

History RepeatsFurthermore, abortion targets a very specific group of human beings: unwanted, unborn children, a victim class that is defined by the pro-abortion mantra, “Every child, a Wanted Child.” Their “final solution” for unwanted, unborn children is abortion.

While the appropriateness of calling abortion “genocide” depends on what definition of genocide you are using, it is a plain and simple fact that abortion is the systematic destruction of millions of human beings.

Genocide or not, abortion, like the Jewish Holocaust and like the mistreatment of native and African-Americans, is a phenomena which dehumanizes a group of human beings so as to justify their elimination. This nation, and the world as a whole, has a sad legacy of dehumanizing people who have something we want or get in our way.

Those in power don’t have the right to determine who is a person.

Justifications Never ChangeThe reason that some people take such offense at comparing abortion to past crimes against humanity is the same reason that the white establishment of America was scandalized when Dr. Martin Luther King compared the abuse of black Americans to the Holocaust. [2]
It is easy to condemn crimes that are far away (either by distance or time), it is much harder to condemn them when they sit right in your back yard.

Abortion supporters are infuriated at the notion that abortion is comparable to the Holocaust because they incessantly argue that the unborn aren’t people (they are wrong). This is exactly the same argument that is always made to justify crimes against humanity. They’re not really people. This is what Hitler said. This is what America said when it counted enslaved African-Americans as 3/5 of a person.* If we can’t compare atrocities past to atrocities present, then the term “never again” loses all its meaning.

*The Three-Fifths compromise of 1787 was reached after those in the North demanded that slaves not be counted at all for enumeration purposes while those in the South wanted slaves counted as full-persons. The reasons should be obvious. More people equals more voting power in the House of Representatives. Since slaves were not allowed to vote, counting them as only 3/5 of a person actually gave Southern states less voting power than if slaves had been counted as full persons, but far more than they would have had if slaves weren’t counted at all. Though counting them as less than full persons was actually beneficial for the cause of freedom, it still illustrates how warped America’s national perspective was.

At the end of the day, if the unborn are people (and they are), then abortion is not only comparable to past crimes against humanity, it is, by sheer volume, the greatest holocaust of all.

Networks of killing centers across the globe are eliminating “unwanted, unborn” children at a staggering rate. Were the context not abortion, the world would be outraged. Call it what you want, when an innocent group of human beings is targeted and exterminated by the millions, that is an injustice on par with any of history’s most egregious atrocities. At the end of the day, if the unborn are people (and they are), then abortion is not only comparable to past crimes against humanity but is also, by sheer volume, the greatest holocaust of all.

References:

  1. Webster’s New World Encyclopedia, Prentice Hall General Reference, 1992
  2. http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html Last accessed November 11, 2012

John C. Willke M.D.

John Charles Willke was an American author, physician, and anti-abortion activist. He served as president of National Right to Life and, along with his wife Barbara, authored a number of books on abortion and human sexuality. Selected content reprinted with permission from John C. Willke M.D., Barbara H. Willke R.N., John Jefferson Davis Ph.D., David C. Reardon Ph.D., Abort73.com, Eternal Perspective Ministries, Abolish Human Abortion, Life Issues Institute, BlackGenocide.org, Heritage House '76, Inc. & The Center for Bio-Ethical Reform. Please click here to donate to these organizations.