violence vs. abortion

In yesterday’s post The Post-Abortion Era, I hoped that I had made clear my position regarding violent opposition to abortion. One of my readers has demurred, so perhaps I did not make my point clear enough. Let me state this clearly: I do not advocate the use of violence as a means to oppose abortion. I did bring up Hitler and the holocaust for apparent comparison. I believe the comparison is worth contemplating, for when is a murder not a murder? When is mass murder less monstrous?

But I also made a point of saying the American abortion issue is different. In yesterday’s post I didn’t go into those differences in detail, so here are some reasons not to use violence when opposing abortion:

1. We are not under the rule of a totalitarian government. As a people we are very conflicted on this matter. The left seems to support abortion with great solidarity, but the right has always been divided, with many uncertain what to think about it. This struggle is not a matter of resistance against an oligarchical minority. In fact, this struggle is more daunting than that. It is difficult to assume the moral high ground over the “ruling class” which enforces our abortion laws, because in our democracy, “them” is us!

2. Violence in service of the cause of pro-life would be counter productive. The people who resisted Nazism or the Vichy government of France did so in the knowledge that the allies were massing forces for an invasion of Europe. This provided a distinct endpoint (i.e. the defeat of Hitler) toward which the resistance movements in various Nazi-occupied countries could strive. With America’s abortion conflict there is no such allied army riding to the rescue. The distinct point in history toward which we must work is the point at which our people arrive at the concensus that abortion is wrong, and should be done away with. Violence confounds persuasion, creating a situation tailor made for the moral equivelance practiced on the left.

3. If we were to take up violence in support of the pro-life movement, we would have to consider how much violence would be required to finish the job with that method. One does not engage in lethal violence half-heartedly, or to attenuate or enhance one’s arguments, for that is terrorism. When the path of violence is taken, it must be followed to its completion. To bring violence into the abortion debate would ultimately entail civil war, or at least the wholesale slaughter of millions of poeple. It is horrific to contemplate following through with the methods of violence, and so, for any thinking person, it must also be horrific to contemplate dabbling in violence by fire bombing a few clinics or assassinating a few doctors.

None of this was the point of yesterday’s post. My point was that leftist causes frequently fall out of fashion. In a post-abortion America, I would imagine that the vast majority of us would look back on the abortion era with sad and quiet dignity, with the humility of a people chastened by history, much as we are by our history of slavery and eugenics. But I do believe the extreme left will not hesitate, in those days, to raise the issue from the campaign stump or the lecture hall as it suits their immediate purposes. They already do it with racism, they do it with eugenics, and they do it with the ugly aftermath of Europe’s experiments in socialism. They have no sense of history.