Abortion & Muslim Terrorism
May 2006By Andy Nowicki
Andy Nowicki, author of The Psychology of Liberalism, is an English teacher at Waycross College who lives in Hinesville, Georgia.
At this time of the "changing of the guard" of the two Supreme Court justices in quick succession, many wonder about the future of legalized abortion in the U.S. With a Republican President and a GOP-controlled Congress, could prolife forces finally be about to get the upper hand? Social conservatives hope, and social liberals fear, that a newly formed Court will overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision which quite arbitrarily -- in what one dissenting justice called an exertion of "raw judicial power" -- mandated that states have no right to restrict abortions. This hope, indulged in primarily by Christian Right voters who are faithful adherents to the GOP, is easily negated. I won't belabor the reasons why prolife Bush-backers are naïve in their positive assessments of the current President and his Party, since such observations have already been exhaustively made in these pages. I will simply note that President Bush himself hardly seems eager to touch the subject of abortion, except obliquely when necessary, in order to garner support from his base, and that the GOP today has altogether more enthusiasm about invading other countries in a hubristic effort to spread "democracy" and export dubious American cultural values than it does about preventing the continued, willful, and brazen destruction of innocent human life at home.
Instead of refuting the naïve Christian voters who put their trust in opportunistic political hucksters, I wish to address something deeper and more profound regarding the overall ethos of the prolife movement today. While throwing in their lot with the GOP may be a tactical mistake on the part of prolife activists, this mistake is a symptom of a larger, more complex failure on the part of the prolife movement. The biggest problem is one of attitude. In a nutshell, the American prolife movement suffers from a peculiarly American vice: excessive optimism.
Accompanying this notion of "if there's a will, there's a way" is an impatience with abstractions. In fact, we're so uncomfortable with abstract concepts that our elected leaders frequently declare war on them. Once we had the "war on poverty"; now we are waging the "war on terror." Similar rhetorical fronts have opened up against "hate," "ignorance," and "racism." Such "wars" are, however, pathetically inadequate in the face of unspeakable tragedy and evil. There are in this world, after all, tragedies so immense and evils so black that no sense can be made of them, that one can only weep endlessly at the spectacular, stupendous horror of it all.
Abortion is a perfect case in point. It is a viciously wicked, barbarically cruel, ghastly, inhuman, murderous practice. Yet it is deeply entrenched in our culture, its accessibility zealously protected and promoted by the principalities and powers of our age. In some ways, abortion may well be the defining issue of our day, the staple on which all of our post-sexual revolution living arrangements subsist. With contraceptive failure (or failure to use contraception) always a possibility, abortion is the failsafe. Without it, freedom to have sex wherever, whenever, and with whomever we want is severely compromised. Thus, the "unwanted" babies are considered "collateral damage" in the crusade for the maintenance of "reproductive freedom," much as similarly unwanted civilian casualties of U.S. military strikes in Iraq are callously considered "collateral damage" in the international crusade for "freedom."
But in comparing the evil of abortion to the evils inherent in modern warfare, one should only go so far. War is not an inherently wicked thing, replete as it is with massacres (including those, such as Hiroshima and Dresden, that were carried out by the "good guys"). Even just wars waged unjustly can be seen as bringing about positive ends; although during World War II many atrocities were committed by Allied forces, few would argue that the world wasn't a better place once rid of the Nazis and an imperialistic Japanese regime.
Abortion, by contrast, involves both an immoral means and an immoral end; the end is to get rid of an innocent life, and the means is murder. Moreover, abortion has claimed far more innocent lives than all of the wars of the 20th century put together. Abortion is a true holocaust, and it is an ongoing one, the more insidious because of its hidden nature; the slaughter continues unabated, taking place daily in perfectly innocuous-looking buildings, and we go about our everyday lives as if nothing out of the ordinary, much less monstrously evil, were happening in our midst.
A comparison is often made between abortion and the 19th-century practice of slavery. Many in the prolife camp have been eager to draw a parallel between the scandal of humans being allowed to "own" other humans in the antebellum South, and of women who are said to "own" their unborn babies. Yet even this comparison, apt as it is in many ways, inadequately conveys the extent of the current crisis in our body politic. For as bad as slavery was, abortion is in fact far worse. Most slaves, even in the worst of circumstances, were at least permitted to live. Many were treated quite humanely -- some were even loved and cherished by their masters, and accorded every dignity possible within the bounds of an admittedly dehumanizing institution. The same cannot be said for any of the little victims of the abortion holocaust. Abortion represents a much more fundamental assault on human life than slavery; its enshrinement as a "right" is a far more ominous sign for our civilization than was the willingness to tolerate slavery in our midst a century and a half ago.
What can we do to stop this ongoing evil?
We can do all the things the prolife movement has long been doing. We can vote for truly prolife political candidates and support judges who rightly understand Roe v. Wade as an unconstitutional travesty. We can picket outside abortion clinics. We can boycott businesses that support the abortion industry. We can pray, constantly and unrelentingly, for the slaughter to cease.
Many prolifers are no doubt sincere in their principled stance against abortion. They don't approve of it, don't think it should be done, and don't think it should be legal. That's fine. But how many actively hate, loathe, and despise abortion from the deepest pit of their guts? And, speaking correlatively, how deep is their hatred of the depraved, diabolical culture that permits, even promotes, killing children for profit? How many find it difficult to salute the flag ("under God" even) of a nation that has such blood on its hands? How many think it impossible to justify the notion of subduing other nations, in the name of a "war on terror," to bring such goods as Western-style "freedom," with the inevitable accompanying ills of Western-style moral degeneracy, of which the legalization of abortion is chief? In short, how many see abortion not just as one issue among many, but as an issue that dwarfs all others?
It is hard for us to see abortion as the horrible, hard, brutal, revolting thing that it truly is. Though we may be against it, we don't want to see it as a blight, a holocaust, something whose continued practice is warping our national soul beyond repair. We would rather view it as representing a mere bump on the road, something that will be smoothed over eventually.
In the meantime, we reason, prolife or "pro-choice" -- well, we're all Americans, aren't we? In our post-9/11 ethos, the temptation is even greater to fall for the "come together" rhetoric favored by our current President. So many American conservatives are suckered by this appeal to make stopping al-Qaeda our highest priority and to put abortion on the proverbial backburner that they neglect to consider the hierarchy of relative evils involved in the two cases. On any given day, abortionists kill a larger number of innocent civilians than any Muslim terrorist; more people are destroyed every day in the abortion business than were killed by bin Laden and his cohorts on 9/11, one single day. Abortion is far worse than Muslim terrorism for the sheer breadth and scope of the death and devastation it has wrought.
DOSSIER: Abortion
