A little less than a year ago, Representative Charlie Rangel of New York was chastised by the Anti-Defamation League when he likened the war in Iraq to the Holocaust. As a rule of political discourse, one should never be so bold as to equate an individual or event with Hitler or the Holocaust. Not only does such a comparison cheapen the experiences of those who survived and the memory of those who perished in the Holocaust, but it also weakens the argument because nothing short of genocide is so atrocious.
On Tuesday, the Concerned Bowdoin Students?an organization whose membership is unknown?wallpapered the Smith Union with pro-life posters. The posters, which featured a sketch of a sleeping infant, proclaimed abortion is "The American Holocaust" and numbered its victims at "47 million and counting."
I watched a film of an abortion in my gender and women's studies class on Monday. A suction-aspiration abortion?the type most commonly practiced in United States?employs a thin tube, similar to the small surgical suction used during a routine teeth cleaning, to draw out the embryo. This procedure?essentially the extraction of several ounces of fluid?cannot be compared with the starvation, gassing, and execution-style shooting of six million European Jews during the Holocaust.
The Concerned Bowdoin Students' poster has not only offended those for whom the Holocaust is an horrific event in their family and ethnic histories, but also those of us who are pro-choice and do not appreciate being likened to Hitler. Regardless of the moral ambiguities of abortion, a woman who chooses to terminate an unwanted pregnancy is not of the same moral depravity as the man who orchestrated a systematic attempt to exterminate Europe's Jewish population.
My scrutiny of this poster and the Concerned Bowdoin Students does not end there. Beneath the featured sketch on the poster, there is a sentence that reads, "this child represents 235,000 of the aborted babies since Roe v. Wade [sic]." This does not make grammatical sense. I believe that the anonymous author intended to say, "This child represents the 235,000 babies aborted annually since Roe v. Wade." So which is it'47 million or 235,000 annually? The difference is a factor greater than six!
The National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) would have Americans believe that 47 million abortions have been performed in the United States since it was legalized in 1973. But I don't imagine that an organization with a political agenda like that of the NRLC keeps a statistician on staff, so I'm not inclined to trust its numbers.
The United States' current population is just under 300 million, 150 million of whom can bear children. To say that there have been 47 million abortions in the last three decades is to assign one abortion per three women, a figure which does not take into account the significant portion of the current U.S. population either too old in 1973 or too young now to be considered of child- bearing age during the last three decades. In anticipation of my opponents' arguments, I acknowledge that (a) some women have had multiple abortions and (b) although one in three women I know have not had abortions, abortion is a practice shrouded in secrecy, so I might not know who has and has not had an abortion. Nonetheless, I think it is safe to say that 47 million is a gross overestimation of the number of abortions performed in the United States over the last three decades.
So, I offer this suggestion to the Concerned Bowdoin Students: next time, before printing and posting an entire ream of paper's worth of propaganda, check your grammar and check your facts.