Each form of genocide, whether Holocaust, lynching, abortion, etc., differs from all the others in terms of the identities, motives and methods of its perpetrators. But each form of genocide is identical to all the others in that it involves the systematic slaughter, as state sanctioned "choice," of innocent, defenseless victims -- while denying their "personhood."

When asked by the press what he thought of our GAP display on a university campus on which he was recently speaking, Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate, Elie Wiesel said "I feel that its wrong. Once you start comparing, everyone loses." But Ellen Meyer, a contemporary of Mr. Wiesel’s disagrees. She makes just that equation in the April, 1998 issue of The Centralian. As a result of her upbringing under Hitler and the extermination of her Jewish relatives, she recently wrote a comparison of the Holocaust and abortion, concluding that " ... in Nazi Germany and in America today, millions of innocent lives are taken by the arbitrary but legalized acts of those who have the power to do so." Jewish columnist Ben Stein echoes this sentiment in the May, 1998 issue of American Spectator magazine:

... [Pro-abortionists] cannot look at their handiwork or the handiwork they defend. Across the country, they shrink from photos of the babies killed in abortions. Through their mighty political groups, the pro-abortionists compel TV stations to refuse advertisements showing partial birth and other abortion artifacts. They will not even allow viewers (or themselves, I suspect) to see what their policies have wrought. They are, at least to mind, like the Germans who refused to think about what was happening at Dachau and then vomited when they saw -- and never wanted to see again.

Some argue that abortion is not genocide because genocide is a mass "hate crime." But the children who are killed by abortion are no less dead because their parents didn’t loathe them as bitterly as Hitler despised Jews. And it must also be conceded that the rhetoric of the pro-abortion movement is often as hate-filled as any spewed by the "Thousand-year Reich." Pro-aborts often hiss the term "fetus" with a meanness of spirit bigots usually reserve for the "k" word (referring to Jews) and the "n" word (describing blacks).

Others deny that abortion is genocide by insisting that the Holocaust and lynchings were "murder" and abortion is "choice." They say this because they believe Jews and blacks are "persons" but unborn children are not. Those who murdered Jews and blacks, however, denied the personhood of their victims just as vehemently as practitioners of abortion deny the personhood of the unborn. In his book Abortion Practice (Alpenglo Graphics, 1990), Warren Hern, M.D., analogizes the unborn child to a "parasite." "Parasite" was the exact word Hitler used to dehumanize Jews in his viciously anti-Semitic Mein Kanpf, translated by Ralph Manheim (Houghton Mifflin, 1971). These slurs paved the way for the Reichsgericht, Germany’s highest court, to strip Jews of their rights as persons in 1936. It was then broadly legal to kill Jews. The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Roe did the same to the unborn in 1973, ruling that "the word person ... does not include the unborn." It was then broadly legal to kill unborn children.

But this disturbing pattern repeats itself again and again in U.S. history -- almost every time a powerless minority gets in our way or has something we want. Frank Tannenbaum, in his book Slave and Citizen (Knopf, 1947), estimates that there were 13 to 20 million blacks captured for shipment to the New World from the 16th century to the middle of the 19th. Of this total, he says 1/3rd died inland on their way to the African coast, 1/3rd died crossing the Atlantic and 1/3rd reached the New World more or less alive. In 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court declared blacks "... a subordinate and inferior class of beings ..." in its decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford. It was then broadly legal to kill slaves.