This was our point in recently displaying GAP signs on the campus of a large eastern university. But the president-elect of the student Black Caucus told news reporters that she was "offended" by our signs and denounced the pictures as "racist." This allegation was beyond bizarre since the signs condemned racist genocide and at various times dozens of the volunteers who helped us hold our signs were pro-life African Americans (two of whom were black pastors -- one of whom had been active in the civil rights movement).

Attacks on the humanity of any victim class have historically been used to lay a foundation for attacks on that group’s rights of personhood. Personhood is a legal status conferred or withheld by the larger society and arguably unavailable to "subhumans." In a crude propaganda piece featured in the April 12, 1990 issue of Parade magazine, the late Carl Sagan, a viciously pro-abortion astro-physicist, dismissively compared unborn children to segmented worms, fish, amphibians, newts, tadpoles, reptiles and pigs.

This practice of dehumanizing disfavored minorities also helped facilitate genocide against Native Americans. According to Donald Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence (Wesleyan University Press, 1973), William Bradford, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, set the tone for countless whites who would denounce the Indian as "a wild beast ...." In 1881, writing in The American Law Review (15 January: 21-37), legal scholar George F. Canfield opined that "an Indian is not a person within the meaning of the Constitution." He added that:

Congress may prevent an Indian leaving his reservation, and while he is on a reservation it may deprive him of his liberty, his property, his life .... Congress may break its treaties with him as it may repeal a statute.

It was then broadly legal to kill Native Americans.

Nor have women escaped this tragic trend. Stephen Gold notes in The Mismeasure of Man, (Norton & Co.,1981) that Darwin disciple Gustave Le Bon (the father of social psychology) believed:

[Even in] the most intelligent races [there] are large numbers of women whose brains are closer in size to those of gorillas than to the most developed male brains.

Women represent the most inferior forms of human evolution and ... are closer to children and savages than to an adult, civilized man.

Impugning the "humanity" of women made it easier, of course, to deny them the right to vote, hold property, obtain an education, become employed, be justly compensated, etc., etc., etc.

William Brennan, in his book Dehumanizing the Vulnerable (Loyola University Press, 1995 - see generally for more information on the foregoing examples from Dr. Brennan’s work), explains that the belittling of female personhood also created a climate in which Mississippi legalized wife beating in 1824 and "other states soon followed suit." It is impossible to know how many women were killed by this genocidal custom but we do know that it considerably pre-dated the Mississippi act and remains widely -- though now unlawfully (at least in this country) -- practiced to this day.

It is easy to condemn historical genocide that was perpetrated by others -- long ago and far away. It is difficult to acknowledge our own responsibility for genocide that is happening here and now. Southerners would have angrily rejected that responsibility in 1850. Germans would have done the same in 1940. We likewise struggle to rationalize our abortion brutality. It will seem much less defensible to our great grandchildren. But if history is any guide, our grandchildren may be rationalizing the brutalization of their own victims.

We can break this sad, sad cycle. We don’t really have to kill our babies to protect our futures. We really can do better than abortion.