What would you consider to be the greatest tragedy in living memory? You might say the attacks on Sept. 11. Perhaps you’d say the crisis in Flint, MI., where thousands of people are without clean drinking water. Most would agree that this too is a great misfortune.
If you were to survey any number of people and ask them this same question, I would wager the majority would name the Holocaust as the single worst, most horrific disaster in living—if not recorded—history.
Yes, I would agree that the ethnic cleansing of what Nazi Germany considered “undesirables” to be an atrocity, unlike anything the world had seen prior. However, when discussing disaster and tragedy, we must decide how to measure such events: how to rank them.
Many different criteria may be used but for the sake of this discussion, I will focus on the numbers. In terms of numbers, there is only one event that stands above the rest. It is responsible for the death of millions of innocent people. It is an American Holocaust.
Since 1973 with the passing of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court, 60 million children have been murdered in the name of “reproductive freedom.” Compared to abortion in America, Hitler’s “final solution” pales.
There is no definite figure on the lives lost to Nazi genocide, but most agree there were no less than six million Jews killed due to racial bigotry. A rough estimate could be around seven or eight million people in total. Eight million compared to 60 million.
At least with the Holocaust, we can find comfort in the fact that it ended over 70 years ago. No more people will suffer at the hand of Hitler and his Reich. But we cannot say the same for the issue of abortion. In America, we allow and fund the murder of millions of innocent children, over 630,000 in 2015 alone.
Humans have been killing each other since the beginning of time. In each case, we have always justified our actions by saying a victim is simply “not a person.” Sound familiar?
In the early days of America, slavery was condoned as an enslaved individual was considered property, “not a person.” How about the Holocaust? Germans felt justified in killing Jews because a Jewish individual was “not a person.” And now we find ourselves at a similar crossroads.
When faced with the decision to kill or raise a child, we choose the former in the name of convenience because, after all, it’s only a fetus, a clump of cells, not a baby, “not a person.” No human has the right to define another’s worth.
Just because we assign a certain person value, we deem to be less than a human does not deprive that person of his or her humanity. A person is a person despite their race, religion, creed, sexuality or their location in relation to the womb. America has found the “final solution” to the problem of personal responsibility.
Some may argue “my body my choice.” This argument is invalid as the body growing inside the womb, which has its own DNA and a heartbeat 22 days after conception, is not your body. A person inside the womb is the same person it will be outside the womb.
In America, we have always, albeit not always successfully, striving for equality and justice for all. We cannot claim to care about the lives and liberties of those we deem oppressed while we facilitate infanticide with tax dollars. In the words of the esteemed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” We must not fall silent about this.
