Sunday, January 27, is Holocaust Memorial Day, when the world remembers more than six million people, mostly Jews, who were systematically exterminated under the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler in Germany.
It is stunning to the mind of any civilized human being that a national government could systematically, through its official channels, murder anyone—much less millions—of its own citizens, though the world has become more conscious in recent years of genocides in other countries (such as the millions allowed to starve to death or killed by other means in Russia, China, Cambodia, Rwanda, and other countries).
As one who has a number of Jewish friends, I know it is very touchy to compare any other genocide with the one Jews experienced in Nazi Germany. But one week ago, we commemorated another--for lack of a better word--holocaust that has been going on in the United States for the past 46 years, when our Supreme Court ruled that, due to a right to privacy, a woman could legally abort the baby in her womb, and the remaining laws in almost every state against it were unconstitutional.
This holocaust has claimed roughly 60 millions lives. In 2018, abortion was responsible for 25% of all deaths in the US ; and, globally, "Abortion Named Leading Cause of Death in 2018 With 42 Million Killed."
But, even as committed as I am to the pro-life position, having founded or served on the boards of alternative Crisis Pregnancy centers in three major cities, it is still tempting to see a difference.
Seeing videos of adults being ushered into "showers" that turned out to be gas chambers and seeing the piles of bodies waiting to be put in the incinerators somehow seems more vile, more heinous than merely seeing the figures on those whose lives were silently extinguished in utero by surgical means.
But both are vile; both are heinous. And both are the result of allowing an ideology to determine the value of a life—to decide who is a person and who is not.
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