She may have merely been attempting to be funny, or perhaps she was being flippant to make a point. What ever her reasons, Whoopi seemed to believe that "abortion rights," as it is commonly portrayed, is synonymous with women's rights. She is not alone. Many abortion advocates construe the issue so that any disapproval of the abortion movement is equivalent to attacking all women's rights, as if even questioning abortion were an attack on the Constitution itself.
Clearly, some people have no problem comparing abortion and slavery. I'm one of those people, though I take an entirely different position from Whoopi's. I've even written a short book about that very comparison, which you can find here.
One issue not addressed in my book is the question of supporting evil versus being evil. In our modern "enlightened" culture we are taught that slavery practiced by western culture, including the slave trade and the physical and legal treatment of those slaves, was unequivocally evil. And so it is with Nazism; if someone were to even suggest that a member of the Nazi Party was not an evil person, many would be outraged. What we must not forget is that there is a difference between being an evil person, and supporting others who advocate, promote, or do evil things. I say this in the contemporary context of voting for a supporter of abortion.
So I ask, should the legal murder of millions of people be secondary to another issue in which millions of people are not killed? Let us distinguish between a hypothetical tragedy (such as future predictions of massive death caused by global warming) and reality (i.e., millions of abortions occurring each year worldwide). I suppose any answer to this question could depend on the situation.
Some History
Let me pose a hypothetical scenario. An employee or even a family member of a slave owner may make an effort to improve the lives of the slaves around them, even to the point of helping some slaves escape captivity. Or German citizens in Nazi Germany may help Jews remain hidden or even to leave the country. In both of these situations, those helping the oppressed persons would likely need to maintain an appearance of loyalty to the status quo, while keeping their contrary actions secretive. This sort of activity is quite understandable to our modern enlightened culture, one which acknowledges such compassionate activity as good, and possibly heroic. But what of those who did nothing to oppose the evils of their day, and though they did not personally commit such acts they none-the-less supported those who did?
Imagine an election season in which one political candidate believes much the same as you. That candidate supports the same worthy causes and professes the same ideals as you, except one. That one exception is that this candidate also supports the institution of slavery, or perhaps the Nazi Party, and does so openly. Would you ignore this one issue, or would it give you reason to reconsider voting for the candidate? Now imagine the year is 1856 or 1860, and the Presidential candidate that agrees with you on so many issues also advocates slavery. Or imagine the year is 1933, and your fellow German citizens are considering giving a promising candidate astounding political power in the nation. His future genocidal plans are plainly laid out in his book, Mein Kampf, published years before. If there were merely the one "disagreement" between you and the candidate, would you vote for him? How significant would this issue be to you?
Is abortion the same type of heavy issue? Is there any problem with voting for an abortion supporter who may also espouse compassionate social policies? What about supporting a Nazi who espouses what he calls compassionate social policies, and vows to rescue the country from terrible economic troubles? And what of a slave holder who defends the institution of slavery, but also supports compassionate social policies and vows to protect the ordinary citizen from any threat to their way of life?
I ask these questions because I believe abortion today is just as much a holocaust as the one during the 1930s and 40s and the holocaust that was slavery. When the law of the land deprives a group of people their humanity, permitting them to be legally murdered by the millions, that issue should carry such weight as to be a primary consideration in who we choose to lead our nation. But living among the controversy makes it more difficult to see current events for what they really are. Having the benefit of hindsight, it is easy for us to see the evil of slavery and the Jewish Holocaust. It may be easy to also label as evil those who voted for a pro-slavery candidate or those who favored giving Adolph Hitler such wide powers over Germany.
I acknowledge there is a difference between committing evil acts and voting for those who do or merely support them, but I also suggest this distinction does not amount to much. I can understand that a citizen may be desperate enough to vote for Hitler in the tragic economic times the German people were suffering in the 1920s and 30s. There were many topics Hitler addressed, and many troubles on the minds of the German people, so much that the idea of murdering millions of people could be confidently disregarded as mere political propaganda from Hitler's detractors. And yet, giving him the power to fulfill his plans enabled one of the greatest evils in the history of human civilization. Would we today acknowledge the Nazi's evil for what it truly was if Hitler never decided to attempt conquering the rest of the world as well? How fiercely would Nazism be condemned if World War II never happened? Do we call Nazism evil only because the rest of the world was threatened too? We find ourselves today in a situation where millions of people are legally killed, but many voices express support for it, as if there were nothing to be concerned about.
Confusion
Rather than insist those who supported Hitler's rise to power were also evil I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. But what does that mean? The most kind and yet honest assessment I can make is to consider them morally confused. The situation in Germany at the time was admittedly grim, and many of the concerns of the German people were legitimate. However, allowing Hitler to take control and implement his agenda (which was supposedly to help the German people) undoubtedly enabled and spread tremendous evil. Likewise, I acknowledge Americans today who vote for an adamantly pro-abortion candidate are not directly guilty of murdering unborn children. Yet enabling abortion proponents to continue strengthening the abortion movement does spread evil. In our modern holocaust we have witnessed the legal killing of more than 40 million unborn children since 1973.
What do abortion supporters say to this? They essentially claim the fetus is not a person, and so it has no rights, and abortion is not murder. I am left wondering why anyone would defend a position using the same argument the Nazis used to justify their attempted genocide of the Jews. It does not help the situation that there is so much confusion and misinformation thrust upon us:
So-Called Pro-Life Advocates Who Backed Obama Say Banning Abortion Failed
Christian website endorses Obama as pro-life
Do you remember Barack Obama's outrageous and dishonest mock "Pro-Life" websites paid for by George Soros? Yeah, they were all a lie.
Idiocy
We all act like idiots sometimes. None of us knows everything and we all are susceptible to confusion. But when the wizards of smart (thanks to Rush Limbaugh for coining that term) suggest the question of whether a child in its mother's womb is a person is up for debate, we should acknowledge this is the same line of thinking the Nazis used to promote their racist position on what they called the "Jewish question." The Nazis used rhetoric and debate and an already strong anti-semitic attitude to craft laws discriminating against Jews. This legal maneuvering made it easy for the afflicted group to be dehumanized. As a result, more than 6 million of them were exterminated. The reasons used to justify this genocide seem like overt idiocy to me, and that so many Germans embraced this rhetoric baffles me. Another tragedy of the situation is that many people today are suffering the same moral confusion in the context of abortion.
For example, Alan Colmes, formerly of the Fox News Channel's Hannity and Colmes. An admittedly smart and thoughtful guy, and no doubt someone who acknowledges Nazism as the evil that it truly is, he sounds like an idiot on the issue of abortion. In September 2008, abortion survivor Gianna Jessen appeared on Hannity and Colmes to discuss Senator Barack Obama's position on the issue of children born alive during a failed abortion. Jessen was born during an abortion procedure which failed, and clinic workers had her taken to a hospital to get proper medical care. Jessen, and millions of people around the world, would consider a child born even under these circumstances to be a person, a living infant. As you can see in the interview, Senator Obama voted four separate times against Illinois legislation designed to protect such a child's right to live. I see no legitimate reason to deny a child born like this is a person, entitled to all rights and privileges as you or I. Therefore, children born in this manner and left to die or even put to death is rightly called infanticide. If Senator Obama acknowledges this tragic thing occurs and yet opposes efforts to prevent it why shouldn't people say he supports infanticide? In this interview with Jessen, Alan Colmes can only offer shallow platitudes like "Obama doesn't want to kill babies" and "we disagree on the law." Being asked more than once in the brief interview, Colmes refused to answer Jessen's straight forward question "what would you call it?"
Former registered nurse Jill Stanek appeared on Fox News Channel's The O'Reilly Factor in September of 2000, discussing her experience in learning her employer, Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, Illinois, performed abortions much like that described by Gianna Jessen, where the child is born alive and left to die. This video shows a rare moment in which O'Reilly is speechless.
http://www.jillstanek.com/archives/2007/09/stanek_on_the_o.html
It is a common tactic of abortion proponents to ignore the evidence of the atrocity Stanek describes, such as denying it really happens, and refusing to review the alleged evidence. While avoiding exposing themselves to the reality of what they support, those favoring legalized abortion often evade the issue by retorting with stories of how a woman's life can be ruined by having a child. If you take the time to view the video above, I only ask that you consider whether what is being described is better than allowing the child to live and to be adopted. No one is advocating a pregnant woman be forced into motherhood. If you are someone who would vote for a pro-abortion candidate (even someone who opposes protecting a child born alive during a failed abortion, i.e., Barack Obama) I ask that you watch the short interview and reconsider whether voting for a candidate who supports what is discussed here is something you wish to do in the future.
Many people object to the comparison of abortion and Nazism. If abortion rights supporters would stop using Nazi-like propaganda and reasoning this comparison would likely be made far less frequently. Here is a list of reasons the Nazis used to justify their attempt to annihilate the Jewish race. It is also a list of modern reasons used to justify abortion:
1. Allowing this to happen helps humanity
2. Those of the targeted group are not really people
3. The targeted group does not have the same rights as you or I
4. Killing members of the targeted group is legal, but let's not call it "killing"
5. Preventing this would harm society
Killing people who have committed no crime seems inherently unjust to millions around the world. Denying even that they are people to justify killing them by the millions was considered a crime against humanity when the Nazis did it. Why is our culture so resistant to acknowledging we are doing the same thing to the unborn?
Update
Here is a YouTube video from Planned Parenthood showing what they are thankful for:
A year in Review
