Pro-abortion MSNBC television host Rachel Maddow recently used her platform to describe pro-life public policies and the government officials who promote them as “authoritarian,” going so far as to liken them to Nazis.
“Anti-democratic, pro-authoritarian movements the world over and throughout history always stomp on reproductive rights,” she claimed, going on to cite China’s history of forced abortions and other totalitarian regimes’ occasional application of abortion restrictions as evidence.
But Maddow’s assertions are both nonsensical and historically tone-deaf, for a number of reasons.
WARNING: Images below may be disturbing to readers.
FLAWED ARGUMENTS
Firstly, and perhaps most obviously, forced abortion and abortion restrictions are neither functionally nor morally equivalent. The former violently ends innocent life, while the latter is intended to protect it. One imposes murder; the other is designed to prevent murder. The two are polar opposites, and therefore cannot be treated as analogous.
Secondly, abortion restrictions have nothing to do with reproductive rights. Induced abortion is only possible after reproduction has already occurred, and no pro-life law restricts individuals’ rights or abilities to sexually reproduce.
The invocation of so-called “reproductive rights” to justify induced abortion is semantic sleight-of-hand designed to obscure what induced abortion actually is and try to whitewash it morally. It is just one of countless examples which demonstrate abortion advocates’ proclivity for abusing language.
Reddit user BackgroundPea7785’s photo of aborted baby at 9 weeks gestation (enlarged)
WEAPONIZING WORDS
Abortion advocates, in fact, have often weaponized language in attempts to justify the murder of certain pre-born individuals. Take, for example, the phrase “incompatible with life,” a designation which is often applied to preborn children who have been diagnosed with a variety of conditions, including Trisomy 13, Trisomy 18, and anencephaly. In the past, it was even used to describe children with Down syndrome, who are certainly very capable of leading long, meaningful lives.
Often, the phrase “incompatible with life” is used as a means of promoting the direct and intentional killing of these children through induced abortion. The argument is that, since these children are likely to suffer, and are likely to die shortly after birth, it is more compassionate to violently kill them beforehand.
But all living human beings experience suffering, and likewise, we all die. The argument that murder is compassionate because it preempts suffering and hastens an inevitable death could therefore be stretched to include each and every one of us.
“Life unworthy of life” is a similar phrase which was weaponized for a similar purpose. The use of this phrase can be traced at least as far back as 1920 to an essay co-penned by Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche titled “Permitting the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life.” In this essay, the authors claimed that residents of so-called “institutions for the feebleminded” were “not only worthless but even manifest negative value.” They argued that society had not only the right, but the duty, to end the lives of these individuals.
This eugenics-based idea – that society reasonably can, and even should, kill the disabled – was the motivation behind one of the worst human rights atrocities of the 20th century. In Hitler’s Germany, this idea was put into action through the government-sanctioned Euthanasia Program and its extension, Aktion T4. These programs were responsible for the brutal murders of an estimated 250,000 adults and children, many of whom met their deaths in gas chambers.
Not coincidentally, these individuals were often referred to as “lebensunwertes Leben” – which is translated as “life unworthy of life” – in Nazi documents and propaganda.
Both “life unworthy of life” and “incompatible with life” are designations crafted to justify the murder of vulnerable, often defenseless, human populations. They both are/were employed to target those with disabilities for violent death.
What’s more, both phrases are/were propped up by the invocation of “medical science” – which is ever-evolving, subject to a degree of individual interpretation, and therefore far from infallible. “Medical science” is also easily misapplied to serve malicious agendas, because it is not intrinsically bound to any particular system of ethics. Consequently, it has served as a driving force behind numerous human rights atrocities throughout world history.
American Holocaust aborted babies found in storage container
MISSING THE HISTORICAL POINT
The big-picture historical point that Rachel Maddow and other abortion advocates are either clumsily missing or intentionally warping is that failing to value and defend all human life equally never ends well for humanity.
This is the lesson we should have learned from the blood-soaked histories of authoritarian/totalitarian regimes, whose common denominator is their failure to respect and protect individual human rights, the most fundamental of which is the right to life.
Induced abortion, which violently robs innocent human beings of their right to life, is a contemporary human atrocity, and is perfectly analogous to its countless historical predecessors.
