Gregory Koukl

Some say that calling abortion a holocaust is an offense to the memory of six million Jews that perished at the hands of the Third Reich. It's simply not the same. That depends.

There does seem to be a sense in which one could decry the tragedy of the abortion holocaust, yet say that the Nazi Holocaust was a greater evil. Both are unspeakably evil, purely on the merit of the number of human lives sacrificed. However, in the case of the Jewish Holocaust, the evil is compounded by the circumstances under which it was done.

Aborted human beings die relatively quickly and, by comparison, with little or no mental anguish. (This is certainly not always true, but that's another issue.) Jews, on the other hand, were treated like animals--terrorized, persecuted, raped, beaten, and then eventually murdered. The second crime is truly worse than the first, not because the unborn were not human, but because of the barbaric conditions under which Nazis exterminated undesirables.

Clearly, not all holocausts are equal. The numerous examples of ethnic cleansing in this century are made more egregious by the additional suffering, loss, and assault on human dignity they entail. Still, the destruction of 1.4 million unborn children each year is a holocaust of significant magnitude simply because valuable human beings were wantonly destroyed.

©1999 Gregory Koukl. Reproduction permitted for non-commercial use only.
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