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Is it fair to compare the killing of an unborn child with the killing of a victim of tradition genocide? Of course, not least because huge numbers of victims of traditional genocide are also children. Time magazine, August 16, 1999, in an article (" Into The Shadows" ) on the genocide trials of Khmer Rouge leaders in Cambodia, comments on the numbers of children, slaughtered in the "Killing Fields," whose photos are displayed at a grim museum: " ... [H]undreds upon hundreds of black-and-white faces stare back at you, dazed or terrified, recalling the people, often children ... who were executed here."

In the Fall of 1998, The Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington, D.C., sponsored a special exhibit entitled "Remembering The Children [Of The Holocaust]." Many were, in fact, newborn infants. Time, December 31, 1999 reports that "Hitler killed a million Jewish babies just for existing." What meaningful moral distinction can be drawn between the extermination of a newborn Jewish baby and the killing of any contemporary late-term unborn baby?

RAPE AS GENOCIDE

Expanding the definition of genocide to include abortion may seem a stretch to some but its definition is being broadened all the time. The Associated Press reported on September 2, 1998, that United Nations judges with the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, had ruled that "In Rwanda' s 1994 bloodbath, rape and sexual violence were brutally wielded as tools of genocide." The story was headlined "Rape as genocidal crime: U.N. ruling sets precedent."

A story in The Los Angeles Times, August 13, 1999, datelined "United Nations," reads:

For the first time in history, a woman has been charged with rape as a crime against humanity .... Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, a former Rwandan minister of family and women' s affairs, already faces a genocide charge before the U.N. war crimes tribunal for Rwanda for her alleged role in the slaughter of Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994. The tribunal ... allowed the rape charge to be added on grounds that the accused knew her subordinates were raping Tutsi women and failed to take measures to prevent or punish them.

MURDERING THE VICTIMS OF RAPE

How does rape as genocide relate to abortion as genocide? Time, January 18, 1999, featured an unimaginably bizarre article on rape in Jordan, entitled "The Price of Honor:"

Sirhan, a 35-year-old murderer, is cheerful and relaxed and happy to tell his story. He' s especially proud to describe the efficiency with which he shot his young sister Suzanne in the head four times last March. ' She came to the house at 8:15' he relates, ' and by 8:20 she was dead.' Three days before, the 16-year-old girl had reported to police that she had been raped. ' She committed a mistake, even if it was against her will,' says Sirhan. ' Anyway, it' s better to have one person die than to have the whole family die from shame.' His is not a logic rare in the Arab world.

This, of course, is precisely the "logic" which motivates Americans to kill an equally innocent unborn child who is as much a victim of rape as his assaulted mother: It is better that an unborn child be killed than that its family endure the shame, emotional trauma, etc. of the rape. The same thing happens in Bangladesh where The Los Angeles Times, April 18, 1991, reported that ... "a raped Bangladesh girl is threatened with death by male relatives ... [and rape victims] are usually refused political asylum by Western nations. These are customs, they are told, not human rights violations." And in India, The Los Angeles Times explained in its November 26, 1992 edition, raped girls are often sold into prostitution by relatives humiliated by the girls' violations. This is a virtual death sentence for more than a third of the prostitutes who will become HIV-positive in many Indian cities. But raped girls can become an economic burden to their families because they are viewed as "unclean" and no man is likely to find them desirable for marriage.