Abortion is Genocide Redux

It is time to speak up, to vote, to be active protecting the unborn. If we do not speak up for the least among us, someday we may find no one to speak up for us!

I am reminded of a poem about the Nazi regime attributed to Pastor Martin Niemöller:

"In Germany, they came first for the Communists,
And I didn’t speak up
because I wasn’t a Communist;

And then they came for the trade unionists,
And I didn’t speak up
because I wasn’t a trade unionist;

And then they came for the Jews,
And I didn’t speak up
because I wasn’t a Jew;

And then . . . they came for me . . .
And by that time there was no one left to speak up."

My own addition to the poem:

Daily they come for the weakest among us.
And too many do not speak up
because it is too much trouble.

They will come again when we are old and weak.
And multitudes of children will not speak up
because they were murdered.


Here is an article that you should read before Election Tuesday.
For full text of this lengthy article go to: http://www.evangelizationstation.com/
Follow the links: >Moral Theology >Abortion and the Catholic Church >Why Abortion is Genocide

"Why Abortion is Genocide"

Gregg Cunningham

RATIONALE FOR THE GENOCIDE AWARENESS PROJECT (GAP)

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.

GENOCIDE AS INDESCRIBABLE EVIL

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.

(Much of this article has been edited out of this post due to its length.)

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 participate in the riots which left many dead and injured (The Civil Rights Movement, Steven Kasher, Abbeville Press, 1996). In his "Letter From The Birmingham Jail," supra, 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 is 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.