Abortion-clinic violence the logical result of popular perception

Arizona Daily Wildcat

Before this column goes any farther, I believe that, in fairness, I should make two points. One: This column will deal heavily with abortion. Two: I am a Roman Catholic. You can see where this is going; please feel free to bail now.

I will not attempt to prove that abortion is murder; that's pass‚, and well beyond the scope of this article. Rather, I'm going to tell you why violence on and around abortion clinics is the leading kind of domestic terorism in the United States.

Terrorism occurs for a reason. When you marginalize people to the point that they believe their opinions have little or no value, that their beliefs are mocked and their very existence a sort of political caricature, these very rational people will act to make their opinion count. It is not historically inaccurate to say that the British deal with Irish terrorism today because for centuries the Irish were viewed, portrayed, and treated as human trash. The violence that accompanied the civil rights movement in this nation stems from the same root; America doesn't exactly have an exemplary record in human rights for our minorities.

The same trend has moved into the discussion on the ethicality and the intrinsic morality of abortion. Because of the very nature of the issue, dialogue between pro-life and pro-choice groups is virtually impossible. Further, a trend has developed to portray pro-lifers as Bible-beating hicks and idiots, when in fact the demographics indicate quite the opposite. There is a growing perception on the pro-life side that any rational discourse they offer is dismissed out-of-hand, and that "by whatever means necessary" might be the only way to be taken seriously.

To paraphrase Tom Clancy, when the avowed purpose of your enemies is either your destruction or the destruction of something about which you deeply care, no means are too extreme. The question frequently arises, though: If abortion is wrong because it's cold-blooded murder, isn't it hypocritical to use violence to end it?

The answer is straightforward. It's like the old saw: If you could kill Adolf Hitler before the beer-hall Putsch, with the full and complete certainty that doing so would save the lives of 6 million Jews, about the same number of Slavs, and the millions of civilians and soldiers who died fighting in the European Theatre of World War II, while believing in your heart that cold-blooded murder is a horrible crime, would you do it? It's a horrifying dilemma.

Every American generation since the end of the second World War has grown up in the shadow of the Holocaust. Footage of the atrocities leveled against innocent human beings abounds, and it gets media attention like nothing else. The generations that lead the pro-life movement either fought in the war, grew up right after it (with the missionary fervor the '60s imparted), or saw "Schindler's List" when they were at the height of their youthful idealism. Abortion kills more than a million children a year, which brings the death tally to over 25 million since Roe v. Wade. The linkage between abortion and the Holocaust is frequent and explicit; one of the battle cries of the extremist fringe is, "No more Holocausts."

As if the fuse wasn't already getting short, the Clinton administration pulled that little trick legally linking protests outside of abortion clinics to racketeering. Brilliant. That's constitutionally like making Allen Iverson NBA rookie of the year: You might make some people happy, but you defile the spirit of the law in so doing, which can only make the situation worse.

Consider an equivalent: If Congress made it legal to rape and crucify women after they left family planning clinics, without denying them their legal right to abortions, protests would begin. (Granted, this would make abortions illegal de facto, but bear with me.) If a gag rule and a minimum distance law were imposed on these protestors, with the legal penalties associated with racketeering, you can be damned sure that violence in the streets would erupt.

A brief caveat is in order: Only a very small percentage of the pro-life movement uses or condones the use of violence to end legalized abortion. However, we live in very factionalized times, and political pundits from the left still haven't learned the lesson the British are learning in Ireland. The battle over abortion is becoming more and more a guerilla war, and in partisan conflicts, there are only two sides, with no middle ground.

I promise you this: If the current attitudes toward the pro-life movement continue, the level of domestic terrorism, along with the death toll, will continue to rise. And we'll have only ourselves to blame.

Chris Badeaux is the Wildcat opinions editor and this is his last 'Cynic on Parade' of the year. He reminds his readers that there are still seven days left for people out there to write some really nasty letters; he hopes that they'll come up with some new arguments. Good luck.

By Chris Badeaux (columnist)
Arizona Daily Wildcat
April 28, 1997