Comfortable with genocide?

By ERIC RETZLAFF- | Comments: 0 | Leave a comment

When I began participating in this year's "40 Days for Life" campaign to end abortion, I had an epiphany.

I have always been opposed to abortion. I've prayed for its end, voted for pro-life candidates, aided pro-life groups and attended prayer rallies. But for the most part, I've been busy with my own life.

Now, I'm seeing the abortion issue with greater clarity and urgency. The 20th century was an era of mass murder. Tens of millions of innocent people were killed in the name of state socialism.

The worst perpetrators - Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong - are dead. The only major state-sanctioned genocide that began in the 20th century and continues to thrive in the 21st is abortion.

The National Right to Life Committee states that more than 53 million abortions have occurred in the U.S. since its legalization in 1973.

What I find scarier than the magnitude of the killing is the lack of any significant public outcry against it. We've grown comfortable with genocide as long as it doesn't directly affect us or our families or friends.

Helping us overlook the pain are many media outlets, religious groups, politicians and educational institutions, which focus on the plight of women with unplanned pregnancies rather than the emotional and physical toll abortion can take.

Organizations such as Rachel's Vineyard that aid traumatized women after abortion are well aware of this. "My abortion has left me empty, alone and in despair," said one woman on the group's website.

Abortion forces have made the developing baby the culprit here - a kind of parasite, as if no consenting adults were involved with its conception. The idea of solving problems by getting rid of people is Stalinesque: The Soviet dictator was once quoted as saying, "Death solves all problems - no man, no problem."

An indictment of slavery by 18th-century French philosopher Charles de Montesquieu applies to abortion: "It is impossible for us to suppose these creatures [blacks] to be men, because, allowing them to be men, a suspicion would follow that we ourselves are not Christians."

The moral and spiritual decline of the nation is primarily a Christian problem. St. John Chrysostom noted: "There is nothing colder than a Christian who does not seek to save others."

Can a nation that condones genocide judge rightly on other matters, and can it continue to be blessed by God? More than 620,000 men died in the Civil War before slavery was abolished. Will Blessed Mother Teresa's statement about abortion become a prophecy? She said that "nuclear war is the fruit of abortion."

(A former journalist, Mr. Retzlaff is a parishioner of Our Lady Queen of Peace parish in Rotterdam.)[[In-content Ad]]