RATIONALE FOR THE GENOCIDE AWARENESS PROJECT (GAP)
As part of its Genocide Awareness Project, The Center for Bio-Ethical Reform exhibits large photo murals comparing aborted babies with Jewish Holocaust victims, African Americans killed in racist lynchings, Native Americans exterminated by the US Army, etc. Our purpose is to illuminate the conceptual similarities which exist between abortion and more widely recognized forms of genocide. This is important because perpetrators of genocide always call it something else and the word "abortion" has, therefore, lost most of its meaning.
 GENOCIDE AS INDESCRIBABLE EVIL
Visual depictions of abortion are indispensable to the restoration of that meaning because abortion represents an evil so inexpressible that words fail us when we attempt to describe its horror. Abortion will continue to be trivialized as "the lesser of two evils," or perhaps even "a necessary evil," as long as it is allowed to remain an invisible abstraction. Pictures make it impossible for anyone with a shred of intellectual honesty to maintain the pretense that "it's not a baby" and "abortion is not an act of violence." Pictures also make clear to people of conscience the fact that abortion is an evil whose magnitude is comparable to that of any "crime against humanity." Educators properly use shocking imagery to teach about genocide and we insist on the right to do the same.
GENOCIDE DEFINED
We call this endeavor the Genocide Awareness Project (GAP) because Webster's New World Encyclopedia, Prentice Hall General Reference, 1992, defines "genocide" as "The deliberate and systematic destruction of a national, racial, religious, political, cultural, ethnic, or other group defined by the exterminators as undesirable." That definition readily applies to abortion. The "national group" is American "unwanted" unborn children and they are now being destroyed at the rate of nearly 1 out of every 3 conceived. They are being terminated in an elaborate network of killing centers.
IS ABORTION "SYSTEMATIC"?
U.S. News & World Report, December 7, 1998, in an article entitled "Abortion: the untold story," quotes the Alan Guttmacher Institute as follows: "By 1992 ... there were 2,400 abortion facilities ..." in the U.S. The story adds that "... 70 percent of women of childbearing age lived in counties with abortion facilities ..." and "... only 8 percent of the women who got abortions in 1992 ... drove more than 100 miles..." to terminate their pregnancies. The article concludes with the admission that "... abortion-rights advocates acknowledge they don't personally know of women who wanted ... an abortion but were denied one."
The reason for the ubiquity of abortion is, in part, its universal availability. Abortion is legal through all 9 months of pregnancy in all 50 states. Roe vs. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, 1973, established the right to abort but Doe vs. Bolton, 410 U.S. 179, 1973, ruled at page 192, that no abortion could be prohibited if sought to terminate a pregnancy which threatens a woman's health. The Court defined "health" so broadly as to include "emotional, psychological, familial, and ... age ..." related factors, which made it functionally impossible for any government to prohibit any abortion. It should also be noted that the "Supremacy Clause" of the U.S. Constitution nullifies state law to the contrary. Additionally, these abortions are provided through a highly extensive system of extermination.
The Guttmacher Institute (http://www.agi-usa.org) also reports that 16 states fund Medicaid abortions without restriction and the foregoing U.S. News article reveals that the privately operated National Network of Abortion Funds finances abortions through 57 accounts in 29 states.
The apparatus which exterminates unborn children can't get much more "systematic" than that.
CLARIFYING DEFINITIONAL CONFUSION
It is easy, however, to understand why there is so much confusion over the definition of the word "genocide." The Cambridge International Dictionary of English, Cambridge University Press, 1996, defines genocide as: "The murder of a whole group of people, esp. a whole nation, race, religious group, etc." The "etc." with which the definition ends emphasizes the evolving nature of the criteria by which victim classes are defined. But this definition's reference to the murder of "whole" groups and nations was already obsolete as it was being published.
THE CAMBODIAN "KILLING FIELDS"
Pol Pot's murder of 1 out of every 4 Cambodians is invariably described as "genocide" despite the fact that the perpetrators shared the same ethnicity and nationality as their victims and were not trying to kill "a whole nation." They only attempted to murder Cambodians deemed a threat to the Khmer Rouge revolution.
Time magazine, August 16, 1999, reports on the trials of Khmer Rouge leaders in Cambodia:
Since Pol Pot eliminated all those with education or knowledge of the outside world, Phnom Penh became a city of country people, as well as a city of orphans and you still cannot find doctors or teachers or lawyers of a certain age.
And dictionary definitions of genocide have little to do with total numbers of victims. The recent killings of "only" 1 out every 20 Bosnians were widely described as "genocide" despite constituting only a small fraction of the numbers of European Jews (3 out of every 4) slaughtered in the Holocaust. Six million Jews died in all but by 1998, at least 38 million unborn children have been killed in this country just since 1973.
IS ABORTION A HATE CRIME?
Some might argue that abortion is not genocide because genocide is a mass "hate crime" and most aborting mothers don't "hate" their unborn children. That may be true (though immaterial) concerning mothers but it certainly isn't true of abortionists and abortion advocates. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, declared war on "unwanted" children with her motto, "every child a wanted child." Planned Parenthood of Minnesota/South Dakota, for instance, has run newspaper advertisements which read in part "BABIES ARE LOUD, SMELLY, AND EXPENSIVE. UNLESS YOU WANT ONE. 1-800-230-PLAN." This hate-filled attack on "unwanted" unborn babies is couched in the language of bigotry. This is the dehumanizing rhetoric of genocide. Substitute for the word "babies" the name of any racial group and every mainstream newspaper in the country would rightly reject this mean-spirited ad.
FETAL HATE LANGUAGE: UNWANTED UNBORN AS DYSFUNCTIONAL
This relentless, hateful, propaganda assault against "unwanted" unborn children has now been merged with overt racism. On August 9th, 1999 the Associated Press reported a story headlined "Study suggests link between crime drop, legal abortions," with a sub-headline which said "Researchers conclude that unwanted children are the most likely to break the law."
The authors also conclude that unwanted children are most likely to commit crimes as adults and those most likely to give birth to unwanted children are teen-agers, minorities and the poor. Those are also the people most likely to choose abortion, the study found.
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Judge Richard Posner, chief judge of the 7th U.S. Court of Appeals in Chicago called it '... a demonstration of the common-sensical point that unwanted children are quite likely not to turn out to be the best citizens.'
Is the judge saying that a high percentage racial minorities don't turn out to be "the best citizens?" Would he advocate the killing of "unwanted" minority newborn children?" How does he feel about killing "unwanted" minority children butchered in the process of being born (as in "partial-birth" abortion)? Where and why would he draw the age line in targeting minority children for genocide?
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