THE HOLOCAUST AND ABORTION
Orthodox Jewish Rabbi Yehuda Levin of Brooklyn, New York, a prominent pro-life activist, agrees that abortion is genocide. He says that it can fairly be compared to the Holocaust, lynchings and every other crime against humanity. The rabbi argues that:
Each form of genocide, whether Holocaust, lynching, abortion, etc., differs from all the others in the motives and methods of its perpetrators. But each form of genocide is identical to all the others in that it involves the systematic slaughter, as state sanctioned "choice," of innocent, defenseless victims -- while denying their "personhood."
When asked by the press what he thought of the GAP display on a university campus on which he was recently speaking, Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate, Elie Wiesel said "I feel that it' s wrong. Once you start comparing, everyone loses." Perhaps Mr. Wiesel has never read Dr. Martin Luther King' s 1963 "Letter From The Birmingham Jail," which compared the brutalization of Jews in Germany with the brutalization of Blacks in America. (Later published in The Atlantic Monthly, August, 1963, under the title "The Negro Is Your Brother." ) In it, the great civil rights leader built on the consensus that the Holocaust wasn' t mere evil, it was intolerable evil. Dr. King helped create a similar consensus that the savagery of segregation wasn' t merely immoral. It was as intolerably immoral as the extermination of Jews. Our GAP pictures merely extend the logic of Dr. King' s comparison to help people of conscience understand that the victimization of an unborn child can' t fairly be trivialized as a nominal evil. It is an intolerable evil whose immensity is comparable to that of any other crime against humanity.
Jewish columnist Ben Stein echoes this sentiment in the May, 1998 issue of American Spectator magazine:
... [Pro-abortionists] cannot look at their handiwork or the handiwork they defend. Across the country, they shrink from photos of the babies killed in abortions. Through their mighty political groups, the pro-abortionists compel TV stations to refuse advertisements showing partial birth and other abortion artifacts. They will not even allow viewers (or themselves, I suspect) to see what their policies have wrought. They are, at least to my mind, like the Germans who refused to think about what was happening at Dachau and then vomited when they saw -- and never wanted to see again.
Jewish Rabbi Jacob Neusner posits a similar comparison of Holocaust genocide with abortion genocide. He is a professor of religion at the University of South Florida, Tampa and Bard College, New York. The Rabbi published an article containing the following excerpts in the October 26, 1998, issue of Christianity Today:
... [H]ow is mass abortion in the State of Israel such as is practiced by the secular (but not the religious) portion of the Israeli population not comparable to mass murder of Jewish Children in German Europe?
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As the numbers mount up, when do considerations of volume enter in and validate calling the annihilation of millions of lives a Holocaust? I think they do. Here is a Holocaust today. Every Jewish child born in the State of Israel is a survivor of the Holocaust sustained by Israeli law.
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The difference is, Germany has acknowledged its shame. But for the annual annihilation of tens of thousands of Jewish children, the State of Israel acknowledges nothing.
GENOCIDE AND THE MYTH OF "CHOICE"
Many Americans defend "choice" by denying that they are "pro-abortion." They assert that they are actually" personally opposed" to abortion but don' t believe they have the right to impose that "choice" on others. But most people who refuse to legislate morality on abortion, will rightly outlaw the "choice" to brutalize African Americans. The effort to outlaw abortion, like the campaign to outlaw racial injustice, isn' t merely about personal morality. It is not merely about what a person does. It is about what a person does to another person.
The government should stay out of people' s bedrooms (at least until abortions start being performed there) but government neutrality on genocide is a myth, whether the victim class is defined in terms of age (as in abortion), race, ethnicity or religion, etc. If the government suddenly withdrew legal protections for African Americans, would the government be "staying out of race," or would it be taking the side of those who think the lynching of African Americans should be a matter of "personal choice?" Such governmental "neutrality" would obviously abandon blacks to renewed genocide. (A "Whites Only" Web site asserted on the Internet that John William King, convicted of lynching African American James Bird, Jr. by dragging him to death behind a pickup truck in Jasper, Texas, was guilty only of "animal cruelty," according to Newsweek, March 8, 1999).
Would a person be seizing the moral high ground by saying "I am personally opposed to lynching blacks, I just don't think lynching blacks should be against the law?" Would the "moderate," progressive position on race be to say "I don't advocate the lynching of blacks but I do believe in the right to lynch blacks?" Neither is it "moderate" or progressive to make that argument against unborn children.
Racist "states' rights" advocates, in fact, once embraced the classic "pro-choice" position: They argued that if abolitionists didn' t like slavery, their remedy was to not buy blacks. Like abortion today, the government didn' t mandate slavery, it was a matter of personal "choice." Unlike abortion today, the government didn' t subsidize slavery for whites too poor to buy their own Negroes. But those who "chose" slavery argued that they had a constitutional right to protect their property. No "outside agitator" had the right to shove their abolitionist (or integrationist during the "Jim Crow" period) morality down the throats of the planter class or the Ku Klux Klan.
FEMINIST VERSUS RACIST HATE RHETORIC
So latter-day feminists dehumanize unborn children with the chant "it' s my body" but racists preceded them by dehumanizing slaves with the refrain "it' s my property." Dumas Malone, in his book Jefferson the President, Little, Brown and Company, 1974, says John Randolph opposed restrictions on slavery as impinging "... on the right of private property."
MURDER VERSUS "CHOICE"
Others deny that abortion is genocide by insisting that the Holocaust and lynchings were "murder" and abortion is "choice." They say this because they believe Jews and blacks are "persons" but unborn children are not. Those who murdered Jews and blacks, however, denied the personhood of their victims just as vehemently as practitioners of abortion deny the personhood of the unborn.
JUSTICE VERSUS CONVENIENCE
Another startling parallel between the genocide of slavery and that of abortion can be seen in court decisions adjudicating issues related to the creation and abolition of each. Newsweek, October 26, 1998, in an article titled "Slavery' s Real ' Roots,' "reports"
By ... [1775], however, the plantation system had taken hold. America had become too dependent on slave labor to give it up easily. So the American Constitution chose slavery (albeit provisionally). And the nation justified the choice by formulating an ideology that made blacks into something less than human beings. The result, as historian Ira Berlin argues in a new book on slavery, Many Thousands Gone, Harvard University Press, 1998, is that African slavery became ' no longer just one of many forms of subordination -- a common enough circumstance in a world ruled by hierarchies -- but the foundation on which the social order rested.'
This is the same argument the U.S. Supreme Court offered in justification of its refusal to overturn Roe vs. Wade, supra, in its later decision in lanned Parenthood vs. Casey 505 U.S. 833, 1992. The plurality in Casey (O' Connor, Kennedy & Souter) made no serious attempt to justify abortion constitutionally or morally. They simply argued that the cost of ending abortion was too high:
... [F]or two decades of economic and social developments, people have organized intricate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail. The ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives. The Constitution serves human values and while the effect of reliance on Roe cannot be exactly measured, neither can the certain cost of overruling Roe for people who have ordered their thinking and living around that case be dismissed.
In his book Antislavery, Dwight Drumond, Norton, 1961, the author quotes from the decision handed down by the British high court which ended slavery in that country. Lord Mansfield settled the argument in the Sommersett Case, 98 English Reports, 509, 1773:
The state of slavery is ... so odious that nothing can be suffered to support it but positive law. Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from the decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England: And therefore the black must be discharged [emphasis added].
Halting the brutalization of blacks was inconvenient but the British (and later the Americans) were more committed to justice than convenience. Halting the brutalization of the unborn will also be inconvenient. Most contemporary British and Americans are now obviously more committed to convenience than they are to justice.
Convenience heavily influenced Jefferson' s view of justice concerning his own slaves. We read the following in The Jefferson Scandals, A Rebuttal, supra:
Since the number of slaves owned by Jefferson was in excess of two hundred at various periods, this constituted one of his principal assets. To have set them free would obviously have been a crushing financial blow.
The perceived financial burden of children is also listed by the Guttmacher Institute Web site, supra, as a primary motivator in the decision to abort.
ANTI-ADOPTION BIAS:
But wouldn' t the placement for adoption of "unwanted" children minimize the economic loss associated with unplanned pregnancy? Yes, but many mothers contemplating abortion report that they could never give their child up for adoption. This mentality is difficult to distinguish from the spitefulness of a divorced father who murders his newborn to avoid the pain of losing custody of the child to his former wife. Or as psychologist Dr. Laura Schlessinger has observed, it is reminiscent of the murder of an abandoned wife by a former husband who can' t bear the possibility of her becoming the object of another man' s affection. Narcissism on this scale is shameful beyond imagining.
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