Who Does What To Whom

In the book Memory and Identity: Conversations Between Millenniums, Pope John Paul draws a comparison between abortion and the Holocaust. According to Fox News: “After noting that a legally elected parliament allowed Hitler's rise to power in Germany, which led to the Holocaust, the pope says: ‘We have to question the legal regulations that have been decided in the parliaments of present-day democracies. The most direct association which comes to mind is the abortion laws ... Parliaments which create and promulgate such laws must be aware that they are transgressing their powers and remain in open conflict with the law of God and the law of nature.’”

Fox News reports that Paul Spiegel (head of Germany's Central Council of Jews), among others, believes this is an unacceptable comparison. “…such statements show that the Roman Catholic Church has not understood or does not want to understand that there is a tremendous difference between factory-like genocide and what women do to their bodies."

The major fallacy in Spiegel’s argument is his assumption that abortion is what women do to their bodies. Abortion isn’t about what women do to their bodies. Abortion is about what’s being done to the persons growing inside their bodies. Furthermore, to imply that abortion is no more “factory-like” than a person’s decision to lose weight is to deny the reality of the entire abortion industry – at least in the United States. When an abortion doctor’s calendar is filled with dozens of abortions in the course of a week, that sounds pretty “factory-like” to me… albeit a factory of destruction.

The pope has it right. Any government or government agency that provides for the wanton destruction of innocent and helpless lives has crossed the line. They have arrogantly placed themselves in direct opposition to the laws of God and the laws of nature. May God have mercy on the U.S.