(U-WIRE) – Five years ago, I visited Auschwitz. I was struck by how normal the fields around it looked, how pretty the grass and the trees were. Take away the ruins of the crematoria, the reconstructed barracks and fences, and it could be an ordinary field in Poland. You would never know that over a million people were slaughtered at the death camp.
The horrors of the Holocaust prompted a Jewish lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, to coin the term “genocide.” Lemkin created it as a legal standard to prohibit and punish such atrocities. His concept became law with the Genocide Convention of 1948. Today, stopping genocide is a moral imperative for many people, and some exploit this for cynical political gain.
A group called the Center for Bioethical Reform (CBR) claims that abortion is genocide. Greg Cunningham, its executive director, lays out the argument in his article “Why Abortion is Genocide,” available at the group’s Web site, www.abortionno.org.
What is genocide? According to Article II of the Genocide Convention, it is defined as acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” These acts include killing, harming physically or mentally or preventing the reproduction of members of that group. This definition does not cover abortion. A woman seeking abortion is terminating a pregnancy, not an entire people.
Because abortion does not fit the legal definition of genocide, Cunningham redefines genocide. He argues for “the evolving nature of the criteria by which victim classes are defined,” rather than the original intent of the law. By his definition, a fetus has personhood, and is part of a group – fetuses. A subset of this group – unwanted fetuses – is targeted for destruction.
Genocide is a crime above others because it poses an existential threat to a community. The European Jewish community was devastated by the Holocaust – the Nazis killed nearly all of Poland’s Jews. Abortion does not endanger a group – it is directed against individuals. The Nazis intended to destroy all Jews, but women do not intend to destroy all fetuses. Fetuses, moreover, do not have a culture, a community or indeed any life outside of their mother’s womb.
By diluting the definition of genocide, Cunningham and other anti-abortionists strip the word of its usefulness. They also distract from the undeniable genocide occurring in Darfur.
Since 2003, the Sudanese government has been carrying out genocide against the inhabitants of the province of Darfur. The Coalition for International Justice estimates that nearly 400,000 people had died by April 2005 – two years into the genocide. One can only speculate how many have been murdered in the two years since.
The whole abortion as genocide argument is disingenuous. If abortion really is genocide, then women seeking abortions are mass murderers. Cunningham tries to dodge this by claiming that women are coerced into having abortions by men or by abortionists. “Just following orders” was not a valid defense at Nuremberg, and “just blame the abortionist” won’t suffice if abortion truly is genocide.
If abortion is genocide, then violence would be necessary to stop it. Military action has historically been the only way to stop genocide – the Nazis had to be defeated before the Holocaust could end, for example. If CBR were serious about stopping genocide it would not “condemn all abortion related violence,” since such violence would presumably be necessary. Their goal is simply to make abortion illegal, but employing the word genocide encourages violence against abortionists and women.
The real debate is betrayed elsewhere on CBR’s Web site: it is between, in their words, “the right to life” and “the right to not be pregnant.” For them, the latter is “a far lesser right.” Considering our society’s high expectations for mothers, considering the possibility of losing time at work and career opportunities due to pregnancy, the right to not be pregnant is very important.
Moreover, the act of curtailing that right would oppress women. If all abortion is genocide, women who are raped would be forced to continue with the pregnancy – there can be no exemptions for something as immoral as genocide. There is no way of granting the unborn rights without attacking the rights of women.
In the end, genocide is simply a word – it has no intrinsic meaning. We can build whatever we like upon its foundation. The fields of Auschwitz-Birkenau did not have to be a museum to genocide; they could have become a strip mall.
Similarly, genocide does not have to be a legal mandate against the destruction of a religious, ethnic or national group. It can be an all-purpose political slander, extended from abortion to whatever else one disagrees with. We can cheapen the memory of the Holocaust and destroy its moral power; we can cry “genocide” to overturn laws and to oppress others. We can ignore the suffering in Darfur. But it just wouldn’t be right.