Comments Elsewhere

Amp,

Thanks for this post. I made a similar argument in connection with Eric Robert Rudolph’s trial last year, in GT 2005-01-29: Hello, Birmingham. In the United States alone, there are over 1,360,000 abortions every year. The overwhelming majority of those are elective abortions that would be criminalized under South Dakota-style bans or even “reformed” bans with provisions for the usual rape / incest / health-of-the-mother exemptions. If you earnestly believe (as many anti-abortion folks claim to) that almost every single abortion is an act of murder, then you’re committed to believing that over 40,000,000 people have been murdered in the U.S. since abortion was decriminalized in 1973, that every single day that passes another 4,000 are being murdered. If that’s what’s happening, then we are living through the worst holocaust in all of recorded history.

And if that’s what you earnestly believe, then what the fuck are you doing writing checks to Michigan Right to Life or GOPAC? Why aren’t you shooting doctors? Why aren’t you blowing up clinics? Why aren’t you contributing funding or arms or safe space to militant networks such as the Army of God? If that’s what you earnestly believe, it would be very easy to do what you’re comitted to thinking of as saving a lot of innocent people from being murdered, just by going out tomorrow and injuring or killing a provider. If that’s what you earnestly believe, it’s precisely as if you were standing by and doing nothing (other than perhaps some “sidewalk counseling”) as you watch the SS shove men and women onto the cattle cars to Auschwitz.

Lots of people, even those in the anti-abortion movement, regard Rudolph, James Charles Kopp, et al. as murderers and dangerous lunatics. They’re right about that, but the only way that they can have any right to believe that is if they do not earnestly believe that abortion is murder. If you think Rudolph is a dangerous lunatic, then what can you say about someone who earnestly believes exactly what Rudolph believes about abortion, has no principled opposition to the use of violence to defend the innocent, and yet sits back and does nothing about it? That kind of person might be less dangerous than Rudolph, but they are also more contemptible: by their own lights, they ought to be regarded as cowards or moral monsters of the most depiscable sort.

I think the only charitable conclusion is that most people in the anti-abortion movement don’t really believe that abortion is murder; they believe that it’s wrong, for other reasons (because they think it’s cruel, perhaps, or tragic, or irresponsible, or something else), but the constant use of the terms “murder,” “infanticide,” etc. to condemn it can’t be anything more than empty and bloody rhetorical flourish.

A flourish which they really need to stop using, for the sake of their own compassion and humanity.