Every Abortion Clinic is an Atrocity

Last updated on: April 30, 2013 at 8:28 am by David French

Every Abortion Clinic is an Atrocity 2013-04-30T08:28:20-05:00 David French

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Zion Presbyterian Church in 1936

A few years ago, my wife reviewed and updated our church’s official history — a book-length tome that details and summarizes the highs and lows of a 207-year-old congregation. Our church is in southern Tennessee, and many of the early congregants were slave-owners. The church cemetery contains dozens of graves of Civil War veterans — none of whom wore blue. So we knew that our church had a slave-owning past. It’s one thing to know that intellectually, another thing entirely to read contemporary accounts. Among the many, many entries detailing church discipline were a few where the elders disciplined slave-owners for treating their slaves harshly. We saw none where the elders questioned the institution of slavery itself.

Sadly, to those church fathers, the problem wasn’t slavery. It was how slavery was done.

We see this mindset in the abortion industry. As Planned Parenthood and others slowly react to the gathering outrage over Kermit Gosnell, the spin is clear: The problem was with Gosnell’s clinic, not with abortion itself or even with late-term abortion. In other words, the problem wasn’t with the abortions, it was how the abortions happened. To the likes of Planned Parenthood, I suppose there are humane ways to dehumanize and inhumane ways.

In reality, however, every abortion clinic is an atrocity; some are just more gruesome than others.

Now, I understand that some people get outraged at the slavery/abortion analogy, but it’s apt in that there is a systematic dehumanization inherent in both institutions. But don’t just take that from me, take it from one of America’s most prominent civil-rights activists:

If one accepts the position that life is private, and therefore you have the right to do with it as you please, one must also accept the conclusion of that logic. That was the premise of slavery. You could not protest the existence or treatment of slaves on the plantation because that was private.

The speaker? Jesse Jackson. Before he turned politically correct.

This article first appeared here on National Review, where it’s generated a lot of conversation.

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