Abortion is Genocide - 2

In response to my May 2007 blog post entitled "Abortion is Genocide", an admiring reader recently left this anonymous note:

You are a lover of words, hmmm?

The Oxford English Dictionary's definition of genocide: "The deliberate and systematic extermination of an ethnic or national group." There are no alternate definitions.

Abortion is not an act that targets a specific ethnicity or nationality. You reduce your own credibility when you make simple mistakes.

More importantly - you are dogmatic to the point of lunacy. You will never successfully influence government legislation. You are the most toxic kind of intolerant pseudo-intellectual.

The first premise here appears to be that a particular edition of the Oxford English Dictionary must be taken as an absolute and final authority on the true meaning of words. Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether or not this constitutes a dogmatic assertion, I would remind my reader that the word "genocide" is a fairly modern one. It seems reasonable to grant significant authority to the word's originator and to the various contexts of its usage in recent times.

In the aforementioned post I did not labor extensively over why the word "genocide" is applicable to the widespread crime of abortion, nor will I do so now. Instead, repeating what I wrote 2+ years ago, I again recommend the "Abortion is Genocide" article by Mick Eugene Hunt and this CBR page as providing good insights into why "Abortion is Genocide" is a fair and accurate statement. It is unclear but doubtful whether my admirer bothered to read either article.

And then there is this sentence:

You will never successfully influence government legislation.

This sentence I will not refute at all. Frequent readers of this blog (if there be any) will know that I have tried for some time to agitate for a tax resistance movement because of the tax funding of abortion - what I call a "Pro-life strike". So much so that early this year I launched the ProLifeStrike.org website. The emphasis here, however, is not to influence government. That intent is perhaps a tertiary goal, but certainly not a primary or even a secondary one.

The primary goal of the Pro-life strike is to purify our pro-life prayers, fasts, and efforts. It is simply futile and foolish to continue our other efforts so long as we are willingly cooperating and financially supporting Planned Parenthood and the rest of the abortion juggernaut via our tax dollars. We pray for life, and then we willingly pay for death!

The secondary goal, if it please the Lord, is to begin to change our culture. We do that by prayer and evangelizing, and also by changing our own lives to reflect our convictions. (For an expansion of this thought, see the "Cultural tsunami" post.) Again, it is of no use to think we can change this culture of death to a culture of life unless we are ready to sacrifice and change our own lives.

Only when we are willing to make sacrificial changes will we be able to change our culture. Only when the underlying culture changes will our representatives in government get the message. Influencing public policy for the better is a noble aspiration, but I believe it is a serious error to place our primary emphasis upon directly influencing government.

Global Warming - 2

This time I will quote someone else (who, in turn, quotes another), as a better appraisal of the Global Warming question. The outer quote is from Mick Eugene Hunt of G.A.P. (Genocide Awareness Project), and a fellow blogger:

We need rain. The weather is uncanny. Early heat wave, late freeze and now a drought. Global Warming? I don't know; it could be. Are we causing Global Warming? Maybe yes, maybe no, but if yes, not the way the GW crowd thinks. I have shared this passage before, but it bears repeating.

There is no faithfulness, no love, no acknowledgement of God in the land. There is only cursing, lying and murder, stealing and adultery; they break all bounds and bloodshed follows bloodshed. Because of this the land mourns, and all who live in it waste away; the beasts of the field and the birds of the air and the fish of the sea are dying.
  - Hosea 4:1b-3 [NIV]

Abortion is Genocide

As demonstrated in some previous posts, I take a dim view of changing the definitions of words to suit an ideological bias. Words mean things, and their accurate and honest usage is important. So I do not lightly make the statement equating abortion to genocide, or to the Holocaust.

I recommend the Abortion is Genocide article by Mick Eugene Hunt and this CBR page as providing good insights into why this is a fair statement. Another thinker made this succinct observation:

Abortion will continue to be trivialized until the American people understand the parallels between historical genocide and abortion genocide which is happening now -- contemporary genocide for which we ourselves are responsible.

And while we're on the subject of using words properly and honestly, how about naming abortion what it really is - the killing of a defenseless human being (and the maiming of another), rather than the euphemistic "termination of pregnancy". And start calling abortion clinics the slaughter-houses of pre-born human beings, rather than "centers of reproductive health".

Thanatos

An early twentieth century movement seriously proposed the practice of selective breeding of the human species, usually known as eugenics. Margaret Sanger, a vocal eugenist, openly lamented the unrestricted propagation of "inferior types". She wrote about producing a "race of thoroughbreds", and eliminating "human weeds". (See this link for starters.) Founder of the American Birth Control League, today's Planned Parenthood, she mainly targeted her birth control measures to the poor, immigrants, and other minority groups. These remain the primary target clientele for Planned Parenthood today.

A similar eugenics philosophy lay behind Hitler's pogroms against Jews and other "inferior" peoples. It would seem that eugenics in practice must always become genocide. Well, the Allied forces defeated Hitler militarily, but the poisonous thinking of racism, eugenics, and genocide remains, still espoused by many, whether openly or covertly.

Moreover, beginning in the 1960's or so, another toxic idea related to human propagation began to be fed to us: that our very presence on this planet is a problem; that we by our nature are destroying the earth that we depend upon; we're using up finite resources and producing waste at an ever accelerated clip, the problem grows more acute every year, and the only apparent solution is to reduce our numbers.

Myth (mith), n.: A widely held belief based upon an imaginary or legendary story.

This story, usually told by well-fed academics of Europe and America, seems always to portend an imminent, deadly threshold. I am not discounting or minimizing the real crises and human need in many areas. Yet threshold after threshold is passed, and the anticipated doom doesn't materialize. Indeed, global per capita real income and standard of living appear to be holding steady or even modestly growing. Are there limits to human population growth? I suppose all finite things have limits. Are we near our own limit? I know of no reliable evidence that would suggest that we are, nor have i seen proof linking any particular crisis to a root cause of "too many people". Yet the myth, and the conviction of impending doom, continue to afflict many. (Ah, but there may well be an impending doom to fear - that of the righteous judgment of God upon our ungodly beliefs and practices!)

Now, here's where it gets interesting: Put the two toxic ideas together, and what you get is something very much like today's Planned Parenthood agenda, or the United Nations Population Control programs. Namely, you get the racist and genocidal campaign to 'help' the folks in poorer parts of the world (which just happen to be Hispanic, African, or Asian) to discover the sexual revolution and to have fewer children. You get foreign assistance offered only upon the adoption of liberal abortion laws, forced or coerced sterilization, etc. This was Margaret Sanger's eugenic goal from the get-go: target the 'inferior' peoples, doing whatever is necessary to ensure that they have fewer babies.

Herein lies the poetic irony (and divine judgment?): Demographic trends suggest that the people who have drunk most deeply of the toxic myth are precisely those from whose ranks the myth arose, but who were not targetted for extinction by Sanger and Hitler, nor by the myth makers, nor by current Planned Parenthood and United Nations population controllers. Germany and Japan, for example, are experiencing a severe drop in birth rates, far below replacement levels. France, at two births per woman, scarcely replacement level, has one of the highest birth rates in Europe. Worldwide, all birth rates seem to be slowing, but there is a definite demographic shift away from the formerly dominant and ascendant European stock, to folks from Africa, the Middle East, and Central and South America.

So, now the generalized fear of population growth takes on a more racist tone. Many in the U.S. feel threatened by the growing influx of people from Latin America. Europeans grow more wary of the rising tide of people, largely Muslim, from the Middle East. White Russia may soon become predominately Muslim and Chinese. Much is written, and feelings run high, regarding the perceived shift in demographic power.

I can't help thinking that there must be a connection here... That the eugenics/genocide ideology of Hitler, Sanger, et. al., rooted in racial fear, has now morphed into a sort of Thanatos syndrome, a culture-wide death wish on the part of the very people who were to become Sanger's "race of thoroughbreds", a paralysis of our collective will to propagate and thrive. Ironic that the debased thinking of Sanger and Hitler may actually have helped to fuel the very population changes they most feared!

What about a challenge to the premise: Do we, in fact, have to live in the consumeristic mentality that leads to such anti-life despair? Must we adopt the self-loathing mantra of the population control agenda? Or might we do better to try to rediscover a sustainable way of living, in which human beings are rightly seen, not as a liability, but as a vital resource? I hope to expand upon this hopeful thought.