Abortion

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Abortion
Abortion is an issue that evokes, on all sides, very strong feelings and judgments and very heated recriminations. The most radical formulation of the anti-abortion or "pro-life" side of the debate views abortion as the murder of unborn children, and so as the equivalent of out and out infanticide, making the legal use of abortion since Roe v. Wade, at a rate of around 1.5 million a year in the United States, into a holocaust of the innocent fully comparable to the Nazi genocide against the Jews. Radical "pro-life" activists who blockade abortion clinics (or who even commit terrorist acts of vandalism, arson, and murder) see what they do as what "good Germans" didn't do in the face of Hitler's atrocities, or what John Brown did do in his attempt at Harper's Ferry to free the slaves through mass rebellion. While John Brown was regarded as a dangerous and treasonous fanatic during his lifetime, Union armies later marched through the South singing the song "John Brown's Body," whose tune Julia Ward Howe borrowed for the great "Battle Hymn of the Republic." Anti-abortionists thus feel that they would be similarly vindicated and honored by history [0].

On the other hand, the most radical formulation of the pro-abortion or "pro-choice" side views opposition to abortion as opposition to the freedom of women, as hatred of women, and as part of a historical effort to "subjugate" women as nothing more than baby-making machines or, failing that, to see that they die in botched abortions as part of, indeed, something comparable to the Nazi genocide of the Jews. They sometimes interpret the anti-abortion cause as so heinous that even non-violent anti-abortion protests are regarded as "hate crimes" which should be suppressed using the most draconian federal anti-racketeering and anti-terrorist laws [1]. In general, "pro-choice" activists believe that the availability of abortion is absolutely necessary for the general alleviation of ...