Posted by Travis Lambert in Anti-Ignorance | 1 Comment
Abortion and the Holocaust
As I continue to work my way through the BBC documentary, The Nazis: A Warning from History, I can’t help but see frightening parallels to the institution of abortion. The Nazis didn’t want to alarm the Jews, further traumatize the German soldiers who had to kill them, or awaken the conscience of non-Jewish German citizens, so they took measures. First, the official propaganda offered to the German masses was that the Jews were being deported east to work in work camps or to resettle in villages. In death stations such as Treblinka, the Nazis built a facade so that it looked like any other train station to those who saw it from the train. The Jews were forced off the train and told that this was a “hygiene station” they they needed to pass through before continuing on to their final destination. The German officers forced them into undressing houses–one for the men and one for the women–from which they were herded into underground tunnels toward the gas chambers, where they were to be “cleaned.” There they were massacred. Thus the Germans didn’t have to suffer the shock to their humanity by having to see them as they died. Once the Jews were dead, the Germans sorted their clothes and possessions and sent the plunder back to Berlin.
After they lost the war, many German citizens smugly denied the extent of the Holocaust. Part of this was probably genuine, as they had been fed lies by Nazi propagandists, but many probably had heard rumors of the massacres. Any lingering doubt, however, was removed when allied forces forced local Germans to walk through the concentration camps and even help bury the dead. This must have been quite a shock to their senses, as they were used, during this time, to watching propaganda films in which nice little Aryan children decorated Christmas trees, oblivious to the horrors from which the Nazi leaders were shielding them.
I must say, however, that we did not perfect the art of covering up the deaths of the innocent until the wheels of the abortion industry started to turn. What more invisible a death chamber than a woman’s womb? You can even hide the murder from the woman herself, provided that you don’t let her see an ultrasound or any other image certain to awaken her maternal instinct. How invisible to us are the murdered unborn? When was the last time an abortion was aired on public television? When was the last time one was exposed to the full bouquet of abortifacients? When was the last time you got an inside look at an unborn child being dismembered and sucked out of the uterus? Or heard a child scream while it was being killed? What about–how shocking to our senses!–a child who survived the procedure and had to be killed outside the womb? Or a bloody fetus wrapped up in plastic and thrown in the dumpster?
Ask yourself, if there is nothing wrong with abortion, why don’t we see it happening? Why don’t we talk about it, except in euphemistic terms in sterile college classrooms? What are we afraid of? I say show the public exactly what happens in an abortion, force them to see it, and then let them decide if it is right. History has shown us time and again that the best way to dehumanize a category of people, to make people not real people in the eyes of their oppressors, is to make them invisible. Who has ever been more invisible than the unborn? Who has ever had less of a voice or means of defending themselves? Make them visible again, and you will see a frightening sight: the dormant conscience of a nation awaken like a lioness over her slain children.
Some folks try to do this on the sides of vans as they drive around large cities. Obviously, these folks are usually attacked under the banner that “my children shouldn’t see that!” While that may be true (I certainly would not want my own children or even the children of my friends to see such images) how might one go about showing the act or result of an abortion without scaring children? We don’t force little children to see these sorts of pictures of the death camps until they are in upper level history classes in school and even then many of the pictures don’t reveal the whole story.