On Genocide

The Genocide Awareness Project (GAP) is coming to the University of Delaware this week (April 21/22 on the UD Green. If you're around, stop by!). GAP is a traveling display of large photos of aborted children, that travels to college campuses around the country. The goal is to get the public - namely students - to think differently about abortion and all circumstances surrounding it. You can see photos from different campuses here. WARNING: they are graphic.

An example of the display.

An organization with which I'm involved is a co-sponsor. I attended an amazing pro-life apologetics seminar yesterday, held for all those who plan to volunteer at the display. Some of it was a refresher for me. But a lot of it was completely new. The facts weren't new - they never change. But the way of thinking and arguing the abortion issue was new. And amazing.

I'm going to post more on the content of the apologetics in a series of future posts. But for now, I want to address abortion as genocide. GAP, obviously, defines abortion as a genocide, comparing it to other genocides like the ones in Rwanda and Darfur, the Holocaust, slavery, and Cambodia. Many people are uncomfortable with this analogy.

"Genocide" is defined as: "The deliberate and systematic destruction of a national, racial, religious, political, cultural, ethnic, or other group defined by exterminators as undesirable."

Abortion is certainly deliberate. Not many women "accidentally" kill their wanted unborn child. If they do that, ironically, it's a homicide. But that's another post.

Abortion is systematic. We have killing centers that we call abortion clinics. It is funded and approved by the government. We have lobbying groups that exist solely to keep the practice legal.

Abortion is the destruction of a group - the unborn - deemed undesirable by the exterminators. An "unwanted pregnancy" is undesirable by the pregnant mother.

Take, for example, the slavery and the civil rights movement. During slavery, blacks were considered less than human. 2/3 of a person, in fact. Whites deemed black undesirable and were therefore allowed to own, trade, beat, and kill them when they didn't perform.

Take, for instance, the Holocaust. Jews were deemed undesirable by the Nazis and were therefore starved, gassed and forced into concentration camps.

Today, it is obvious that most of us in America believe that both of these circumstances were heinous and morally wrong. Why, then, do we allow, justify, and fight for the right to do the same thing to the unborn?

My husband sent me a comment to an article that he read today. It said:

"I prefer that someone aborts a baby that they don’t want than have it and treat the baby/child as though they are sorry they had it. While it’s obviously sad to kill any baby for any reason, someone having a baby they don’t want will ultimately only hurt the child more in the end."

Unfortunately I've heard that before. In fact, in a conversation with a friend, she basically made that argument about some of the poor kids at the school where she teaches. She was making that same case for abortion, that it's better that people who can't afford or take care of kids have an abortion. I replied, "those are definitely sad situations but do you really think to yourself 'they'd be better off if they were dead?'" I anticipated a reaction to the effect of, "Of course not! I never thought of it that way!" But instead she just shrugged. That was enlightening.

The best prolife argument to that is to ask the person if they think born children who are abused and don't have the "perfect" life everyone else has should be killed too? If they say no, ask, "Then what's the difference?" I should have asked my friend if she believed that we should have the right to kill those kids now that they're already here.

In this back & forth with my husband on this topic, he responded, "The real question is: what if it was you?"

Exactly. Jen at Conversion Diary has a post about becoming pro-life. One of the turning points for her was when her husband realized that everyone is pro-their OWN life! So who are we to decide who gets to live? Unfortunately, again, some will argue that they'd rather be dead than live in certain situations. Whether that's true or not who knows, but its an argument some ppl make.

And that argument quickly falls apart, because at the beginning of life they wouldn't "rather anything." Someone else is lucky enough to decide for them, whether they like it or not. They only have the power to even believe they'd rather be dead because at someone else's hand, they were allowed to live in the first place. It always boils down to the same thing. We first have to get them to admit that we're dealing with humans...not blobs of flesh. Now that that has been scientifically proven (even though some won't admit it, it's an easy argument to win), we're dealing with the more philosophical argument of who should be the deciding party of who lives and who dies. When people begin arguing that some people should be able to kill born people for one reason or another, then we're dealing with genocide accomplices. And the arguer always somehow vainly assumes they'll be in the deciding party, not thevictim party. Ironic.

Such is the way with genocide. What happens when you are deemed one of the undesirables?