Gregg Cunningham

Abortion is a form of genocide, argues Gregg Cunningham in the following viewpoint. Since 1973, more than 38 million unborn children have been systematically aborted in the United States—an occurrence that Cunningham maintains is a veritable modern-day holocaust. Moreover, today’s justifications for abortion—such as the claim that fetuses are not persons or will place undue burdens on society—echo historical justifications for American slavery, racist lynchings, and the Jewish holocaust, the author contends. Cunningham is the director of the Los Angeles–based Center for Bio- Ethical Reform, an anti-abortion advocacy organization.

As you read, consider the following questions:

1. In what way does the Planned Parenthood motto “every child a wanted child” reveal a hatred of the unborn, according to Cunningham"
2. How does the definition of personhood in Roe v. Wade dehumanize unborn children, according to the author"
3. In Cunningham’s opinion, what is wrong with the arguments of those who claim that they are personally opposed to abortion but support a woman’s right to choose"

As part of its Genocide Awareness Project, The Center for Bio-Ethical Reform exhibits large photo murals comparing aborted babies with Jewish Holocaust victims, African Americans killed in racist lynchings, Native Americans exterminated by the US Army, etc. Our purpose is to illuminate the conceptual similarities which exist between abortion and more widely recognized forms of genocide. This is important because perpetrators of genocide always call it something else and the word “abortion” has, therefore, lost most of its meaning.

Visual depictions of abortion are indispensable to the restoration of that meaning because abortion represents an evil so inexpressible that words fail us when we attempt to describe its horror. Abortion will continue to be trivialized as “the lesser of two evils,” or perhaps even “a necessary evil,” as long as it is allowed to remain an invisible abstraction. Pictures make it impossible for anyone with a shred of intellectual honesty to maintain the pretense that “it’s not a baby” and “abortion is not an act of violence.” Pictures also make clear to people of conscience the fact that abortion is an evil whose magnitude is comparable to that of any “crime against humanity.” Educators properly use shocking imagery to teach about genocide and we insist on the right to do the same.

We call this endeavor the Genocide Awareness Project (GAP) because Webster’s New World Encyclopedia defines “genocide” as “The deliberate and systematic destruction of a national, racial, religious, political, cultural, ethnic, or other group defined by the exterminators as undesirable.” That definition readily applies to abortion. The “national group” is American “unwanted” unborn children and they are now being destroyed at the rate of nearly 1 out of every 3 conceived. They are being terminated in an elaborate network of killing centers.

Is Abortion “Systematic”"

U.S. News & World Report, December 7, 1998, in an article entitled “Abortion: the untold story,” quotes the Alan Guttmacher Institute as follows: “By 1992 . . . there were 2,400 abortion facilities . . .” in the U.S. The story adds that “. . . 70 percent of women of childbearing age lived in counties with abortion facilities . . .” and “. . . only 8 percent of the women who got abortions in 1992 . . . drove more than 100 miles . . .” to terminate their pregnancies. The article concludes with the admission that “. . . abortion-rights advocates acknowledge they don’t personally know of women who wanted . . . an abortion but were denied one.”

The reason for the ubiquity of abortion is, in part, its universal availability. Abortion is legal through all 9 months of pregnancy in all 50 states. In 1973, Roe vs. Wade established the right to abort, but Doe vs. Bolton ruled that no abortion could be prohibited if sought to terminate a pregnancy which threatens a woman’s health. The Court defined “health” so broadly as to include “emotional, psychological, familial, and . . . age . . .” related factors, which made it functionally impossible for any government to prohibit any abortion. It should also be noted that the “Supremacy Clause” of the U.S. Constitution nullifies state law to the contrary. Additionally, these abortions are provided through a highly extensive system of extermination.

The Guttmacher Institute also reports that 16 states fund Medicaid abortions without restriction, and the foregoing U.S. News article reveals that the privately operated National Network of Abortion Funds finances abortions through 57 accounts in 29 states.

The apparatus which exterminates unborn children can’t get much more “systematic” than that.

Clarifying Definitional Confusion

It is easy, however, to understand why there is so much confusion over the definition of the word “genocide.” The Cambridge International Dictionary of English, Cambridge University Press, 1996, defines genocide as: “The murder of a whole group of people, esp. a whole nation, race, religious group, etc.” The “etc.” with which the definition ends emphasizes the evolving nature of the criteria by which victim classes are defined. But this definition’s reference to the murder of “whole” groups and nations was already obsolete as it was being published.

Pol Pot’s murder of 1 out of every 4 Cambodians is invariably described as “genocide” despite the fact that the perpetrators shared the same ethnicity and nationality as their victims and were not trying to kill “a whole nation.” They only attempted to murder Cambodians deemed a threat to the Khmer Rouge revolution.

Time magazine, August 16, 1999, reports on the trials of Khmer Rouge leaders in Cambodia:

Since Pol Pot eliminated all those with education or knowledge of the outside world, Phnom Penh became a city of country people, as well as a city of orphans and you still cannot find doctors or teachers or lawyers of a certain age.

And dictionary definitions of genocide have little to do with total numbers of victims. The recent killings of “only” 1 out every 20 Bosnians were widely described as “genocide” despite constituting only a small fraction of the numbers of European Jews (3 out of every 4) slaughtered in the Holocaust. Six million Jews died in all, but by 1998, at least 38 million unborn children have been killed in this country just since 1973.

Is Abortion a Hate Crime"

Some might argue that abortion is not genocide because genocide is a mass “hate crime” and most aborting mothers don’t “hate” their unborn children. That may be true (though immaterial) concerning mothers but it certainly isn’t true of abortionists and abortion advocates. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, declared war on “unwanted” children with her motto, “every child a wanted child.” Planned Parenthood of Minnesota/South Dakota, for instance, has run newspaper advertisements which read in part “BABIES ARE LOUD, SMELLY, AND EXPENSIVE. UNLESS YOU WANT ONE. 1-800-230PLAN.” This hate-filled attack on “unwanted” unborn babies is couched in the language of bigotry. This is the dehumanizing rhetoric of genocide. Substitute for the word “babies” the name of any racial group and every mainstream newspaper in the country would rightly reject this mean- spirited ad.

This relentless, hateful, propaganda assault against “unwanted” unborn children has now been merged with overt racism. On August 9th, 1999, the Associated Press reported a story headlined “Study suggests link between crime drop, legal abortions,” with a sub-headline which said “Researchers conclude that unwanted children are the most likely to break the law.”

The authors also conclude that unwanted children are most likely to commit crimes as adults and those most likely to give birth to unwanted children are teen-agers, minorities and the poor. Those are also the people most likely to choose abortion, the study found. . . .

Judge Richard Posner, chief judge of the 7th U.S. Court of Appeals in Chicago called it “. . . a demonstration of the common-sensical point that unwanted children are quite likely not to turn out to be the best citizens.”

Is the judge saying that a high percentage of racial minorities don’t turn out to be “the best citizens”? Would he advocate the killing of “unwanted” minority newborn children? How does he feel about killing “unwanted” minority children butchered in the process of being born (as in “partial-birth” abortion)? Where and why would he draw the age line in targeting minority children for genocide"

Should the phrase “hate crime” be defined by the character of the “feelings” a perpetrator harbors toward his victim or the nature of the “behavior” by which he victimizes? A New York Times article, appearing in the August 13, 1999, Orange County Register, reported the publication of the memoirs of Adolph Eichmann, the SS official who oversaw the deportation and murder of millions of Jews during World War II. He also promoted the use of gas chambers in the death camps. The sub-headline for the article reads: “The Nazi who led Germany’s genocide against Jews contended obedience, not hate guided him.” Surely the fact that he didn’t “hate” his victims (if true) would make him no less guilty of monumental hate crimes.

Did Slave Owners Hate Blacks"

Slavery and the legacy of “Jim Crow” was also an extremely “hateful” form of genocide but slave-owner Thomas Jefferson rationalized that he “loved” his slaves. On Jefferson’s “kindness” toward them, author Virginius Dabney quotes Edmund Bacon, overseer at Monticello from 1806 to 1822, in his book The Jefferson Scandals, A Rebuttal: “Mr. Jefferson . . . would not allow them to be overworked and he would hardly ever allow one of them to be whipped.” How’s that for “love"”. . .

In his 1953 book The Constitutional Principles of Thomas Jefferson, Caleb Perry Patterson argues that Jefferson was caught up in astounding self-justification:

. . . it was Jefferson’s humane feeling for his slaves that kept him from freeing them. To free the ordinary slave was not very different from starting him on the road to starvation. Or as Jefferson put it . . . like abandoning children.

Would Jefferson’s “humane feeling” for his slaves make slavery any less a crime against humanity"

Merrill D. Peterson adds in Thomas Jefferson And The New Nation that “. . . to turn loose the mass of slaves would have been, in his eyes, an act of heartless cruelty.” What could be more “heartless” and “cruel” than slavery? Yet Jefferson’s greed drove him to such self delusion that he saw its repudiation as “an act of heartless cruelty.” This is not, of course, unlike the supposed “duty to abort” “unwanted” children in order to spare them lives of “hardship.” Never mind that it is the selfish desires of born people which really motivate the “magnanimous” killing of the unborn. And so it was with Jefferson’s oppression of his slaves. But Jefferson was as embarrassed by his avarice as are today’s pro-aborts.

Dumas Malone, in his book The Sage of Monticello, describes the head games Jefferson played with the euphemisms he employed to rationalize his ownership of slaves:

He resented the designation of these unfortunate human beings as property. He did not even like to call them slaves. When referring to those in his own possession, he generally spoke of them as servants or as his “people.”

The dream world quality of Jefferson’s self-serving rhetoric calls to mind awkward feminist references to “pregnancy termination” as they refuse to even say the word “abortion.”

Jefferson fantasized an obligation to brutalize blacks. Virginius Dabney quotes in The Jefferson Scandals, A Rebuttal, an 1811 letter from Jefferson to John Lynch stating that “. . . to emancipate one’s Negroes would be a betrayal of duty, since only a few exceptional slaves could fend for themselves.” This is precisely the argument made by self- conscious pro-aborts who demand the deaths of fetuses who “might be born into poverty and thereby burden society.”

It is cold comfort to an aborted baby that his mother didn’t “hate” him.

Humanity and Personhood Defined

There is, of course, a consensus in the scientific community that human life begins at the instant a human egg is fertilized by a human sperm. The widely used 1998 medical textbook The Developing Human, Clinically Oriented Embryology, states at page 2 that “The intricate processes by which a baby develops from a single cell are miraculous. . . . This cell [the zygote] results from the union of an oocyte [egg] and sperm. A zygote is the beginning of a new human being. . . .” At page 18 this theme is repeated: “Human development begins at fertilization [emphasis in original]. . . .”

“Humanity,” however, is quite different from “personhood.” As seen above, the humanity of the unborn child is a matter of objective science. Personhood, however, is a legal status which society can confer upon or withhold from a class of human beings as a function of the subjective values which inform our “politics.” In the medical ethics text entitled Abortion, Medicine and the Law, personhood is discussed in the context of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Roe vs. Wade, “. . . [T]he Court specifically repudiated the claim that fetuses are persons within the meaning of the fourteenth amendment. . . .”

We, therefore, know when life begins but we must decide at what point in the development of that life, we, as a society, will confer rights of personhood, the most fundamental of which is the right to not be slaughtered. The competing developmental points at which society might grant personhood include fertilization of the ovum, implantation of the blastocyst, viability of the fetus (ability to survive outside the uterus), birth, or the passage of some period following birth (in his book Practical Ethics, Peter Singer of Princeton University shockingly advocates the denial of personhood until one month following a child’s birth).

So terms such as zygote, blastocyst, embryo, fetus, newborn, toddler, adolescent, adult, etc. merely describe arbitrarily defined stages in the biological development of a human life. But the inclusiveness with which we extend rights of personhood defines our collective morality. Are we greedy or generous? Are we brutal or compassionate"

Dominant societies have traditionally been selfish in the way they grant personhood. Ours is no exception. When a vulnerable group gets in our way or has something we want, we tend to define personhood in terms which exclude them. Indians got in the way of Westward settlement so we said they were subhuman to justify taking their land. We wanted the uncompensated work product of blacks so we said they were subhuman to justify taking their freedom. Unborn children have gotten in the way of our “liberation” so we say they are subhuman to justify taking their lives. . . .

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 a Birmingham Jail,” which compared the brutalization of Jews in Germany with the brutalization of Blacks in America. 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. . . .

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. . . .

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. . . .

Changing the Subject

The pictures of The Genocide Awareness Project (GAP) are sometimes condemned for supposedly creating an atmosphere conducive to the commission of anti-abortion violence. This fiction persists despite the widely known fact that GAP’s sponsor, The Center For Bio-Ethical Reform (CBR), condemns violence against abortion providers—and against the babies killed by abortion providers.

Dr. Martin Luther King was often castigated by racists who unjustly blamed him for the violent unrest which sometimes followed his peaceful but confrontational demonstrations. Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago argued that if Dr. King would stop exposing racial injustice, black people would be less likely to participate in the riots which left many dead and injured. In his “Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” Dr. King rebutted this dishonest attempt to change the subject:

In your statement you asserted that our actions, though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. . . . [I]t is immoral to urge an individual to withdraw his efforts to gain . . . basic constitutional rights because the quest precipitates violence. . . . Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such a creative tension that a community . . . is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.

In a speech delivered just months before he would be murdered, he restated the imperative of confronting a complacent culture:

. . . [U]ntil our problem is solved, America may have many, many days, but they will be full of trouble. There will be no rest, there will be no tranquillity in this country until the nation comes to terms with our problem.

Neither will there be tranquillity until the nation comes to terms with the “problem” of abortion.