This video, a documentary called "180," made it to my Facebook feed a couple nights ago. It's over 30 minutes, and its content makes a drastic shift after the first 12 minutes.
The first thing I'd like to say is that I believe it is not a good tactic to equate the Holocaust with legalized abortion. Those two issues have great differences, and it's a disservice to each cause to compare them. You can't just say that since Hitler justified his crimes by calling the Jews "inhuman" it's the same as legalized abortion. There are many abortions that occur to save the mother! And there have been dramatically fewer deaths of women seeking abortion since it was legalized. Remember: abortions do not occur just because a woman hates children. Abortions happen because a woman is in an abusive relationship and doesn't want to bring a child into it. Abortions happen because a family can't afford a child. Abortions happen for a variety of very valid reasons. The Holocaust was a great tragedy, and legalized abortion should never be equated with it.
Let's imagine that abortion had never been legalized. They say 50 million abortions have occurred. Are all 50 million of those children born if abortion is illegal? The simple answer is no. Some of those women are going to get illegal abortions or induce miscarriage, as was happening prior to its legalization. Some of those will die, as also happened with illegal abortions. Some of the other women will unsuccessfully attempt to induce miscarriage, and instead have underweight, unhealthy children set up for a life of increased health risks. Many of the children born will come into homes where they are not wanted, and will not be properly cared for. Let's just assume that of those 50 million abortions, 40 million (80%) of them would have resulted in a live birth.
Today, over 16 million children live in homes where there is not always enough food.1 According to surveys, about 21% of abortions occur because the mother knows she cannot afford the baby.2 So let's figure that 21% of those 40 million children go into similar households. That's an additional 8.4 million children in homes without enough food. Some of those homes may have been financially okay without the addition of the child. So now we're up to over 24.4 million children living in homes without enough food. An additional 10% of abortions occur because having a child would disrupt education or career. We can figure that if those births occurred, some of these 4 million children would also be added to these financially and food insecure homes.
Let's look at some of the other reasons for abortion. The survey says that 14% of abortions occur because the mother is going through relationship issues, including a partner who may not want the baby, 12% are too young to be socially supported in having a baby, and nearly 8% do not want the child at all. These are high risk for abuse. Unwanted children are going to be abused from conception in many cases. You've just introduced 13.6 million children into homes where they are unwanted. These are children at high risk for abuse, at high risk for ending up in the foster care system, and at high risk for later criminal activity.
The answer these pro-lifers always give is adoption. If you can't afford to keep the baby, why don't you give them up for adoption? There is a problem with this. As science and medicine has advanced, more and more couples are having children through fertility medicine instead of adopting. There are still lots of children in the foster care system hanging in a sort of limbo waiting to find out if they even can be adopted, let alone whether they will be. Some of the parents of these unwanted children may try to tough it out, waiting until the child gets taken from their home by Child Protective Services, at which point older children are less likely to be adopted.
And even if all of these children who would have been born could be adopted, who do you think would be adopting them? It's not all the millionaires and billionaires who could afford to support these millions of children. They are not often the ones who have the heart to care for these unwanted children. Just consider how much economic issues we're having. Our cities are overcrowded. The national unemployment rate is nearly 10%. Do you think that flooding the country with over 40 million more children is going to improve our economic situation? I highly doubt it.
The last part of the video involves the interviewer asking the subjects about their various "sins," calling them liars and thieves and idolators, and asking them whether they thought they would go to Heaven or Hell. Even when I was part of the mainstream Protestant Christian church, I often did not like this tactic. This tactic of scaring people to Christ is not any more honest than requiring them to join the church by law. As a Unitarian Universalist, I find the practice even more abhorrent because I don't believe any of these people will be going to Hell, since I don't even believe there is a Hell. (This belief would take way too long to explain, so feel free to ask me about it if you can't find an explanation on the internet.) My outrage to this common Evangelical tactic is a whole post in itself, but I felt it was worth mentioning. Especially since the set the people up the way they did, starting with the holocaust and moving into abortion and finally their souls.
I find the whole video disturbing and inappropriate. What do you think?
[NOTE: This video even got mentioned at The Huffington Post for its crimes against sanity.]
NOTES & SOURCES:
1 USDA Food Security Study: http://www.ers.usda.gov/Publications/EIB56/EIB56_ReportSummary.html
2 Wikipedia, Reasons for Abortions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_the_United_States#Reasons_for_abortions
