THE SILENT HOLOCAUST
Plain Truth Magazine
September 1980
Volume: Vol 45, No.8
Issue: ISSN 0032-0420
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THE SILENT HOLOCAUST
Jeff Calkins      |   Remove Highlight

Worse slaughter than occurred under Hitler's rule is taking place right now. Up to 55 million innocent lives will be snuffed out this year! This article explains what this terrible slaughter is, and what it means.

   A SORROWFUL and tragic prophecy from the Bible has already come to pass in our day and age: "... in the last days... men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous ... disobedient to parents... without natural affection... incontinent, fierce... lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God..." (II Timothy 3:1-4).
   The prophecy describes character traits of modern human beings, especially in the Free World. Perhaps nowhere do these terrible qualities reveal themselves than in the subject of abortion. It is amazing how far we have sunk in just a little more than a decade.
   This article is not about abortions performed on 14-year-old girls who are pregnant by incest or rape. It is not about abortions performed on women who are virtually certain to die unless they have one. These kinds of cases are smokescreens thrown up by supporters of abortion to play on our sympathies, our humanity. The abortion issue today is not about such tragic instances. Only 5 percent of abortions done in the United States, for example, are done because of incest, rape, a threat to the mother's life or because the unborn child is deformed. It is the other abortions — the other 95 percent — done largely for convenience that reveal just how low our society has sunk.

Revealed Knowledge

   Man could have known the truth about abortion by looking into God's Word. The Bible's teaching is clear. Indeed, the very fact that men do not know the truth about abortion shows just how lacking in our society is the precious knowledge of God's glorious Master Plan for human development.
   The human begettal, embryo-fetus development and birth compares exactly to the potential begettal, growth, development and final birth of man as a spirit being in God's Kingdom. God does not kill His unborn spiritual children, and if human beings understood God's plan they would know that they should not kill their unborn physical children.
   But man has rejected God as a source of revealed knowledge. Man has gone off to seek his own knowledge, create his own religious and political systems, create his own ethics. As one doctor who runs an abortion mill in downtown Washington, D.C., put it, when asked how he justified his grisly work:
   "Man is the measure of all things! We give the value! Anthropos! Man! gives the value."
   But even without the revealed Word of God men can know that abortion is wrong! This is why the 40 to 50 million abortions done every year reveal so much about how far man has sunk. Human beings know better! God shows in His Word that men are responsible for certain kinds of right conduct even if they do not have God's Holy Law revealed to them by way of the Bible:
   "For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law are a law unto themselves: which show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the meanwhile accusing or else excusing one another" (Romans 2:14-15).
   Men can know that abortion is wrong because they know that murder is wrong, regardless of whether they believe the Bible. Listen to this revealing admission from an editorial in the New Republic, a liberal magazine that supports abortion:
   "Would 'a woman's right to control her own body' permit her to kill another adult person who has committed no offense against her? Would we sanction the murder of children who are unwanted and unloved, just as we sanction the destruction of fetus because they might turn out that way?"
   Yes, even supporters of abortion know that killing a human being after birth is wrong they just don't want to apply their knowledge to human beings before birth.

Scientific Knowledge

   Today, in 1980, more than any time in history, man is without excuse for claiming that an unborn child is not an individual, separate human being. Scientific discoveries over the past decade confirm what man could have known from God's revealed Word all along!
   We now have ultrasound to let us see an unborn child moving. We have electronic monitoring of an unborn baby's heart. We can identify the baby's sleep cycles. There are now techniques to sample the baby's urine, blood, and skin and even identify sophisticated chemical reactions between the baby and the mother. These new scientific methods now show that the separate individuality of an unborn child is a scientific fact!
   From conception, the 46 chromosomes in the unborn child are unique. They are different from either parent. There is a heartbeat 18 days after conception. Some seven to eight weeks into life the unborn child has its own brain waves. (And brain waves are among the legal criteria used to determine whether a person is dead or not!) The unknown child is sensitive to pain and noise. It recoils from pinpricks. It can distinguish between sounds. At eight weeks an unborn will grasp something placed in his small hand and hold on to it.
   A very personal example of just how man can come to know by scientific fact that abortion is wrong is found in Dr. Bernard N. Nathanson.
   Dr. Nathanson is one of the world's most knowledgeable authorities on prenatal medicine. Dr. Nathanson was also once one of the most militant supporters of abortion. He headed the world's largest abortion mill. He helped to found the National Abortion Rights Action League. But in the past decade he changed his mind. Reason? New scientific facts have come to light. Religion has played no role. Says Dr. Nathanson:
   "I have no religious views and never have had. All my opinions result from a secular, scientific point of view."
   But because the "medical literature" is absolutely replete with examples of the individual personality of the unborn child, Dr. Nathanson now concludes, "It is atrocious for anyone now to maintain that a fetus is simply a lump of meat, or something insignificant or an unprotectable life." What does the new scientific knowledge mean for Dr. Nathanson?
   "I have now concluded that in my work as head of the abortion clinic in New York, I presided over the death of 60,000 innocent human beings and the destruction of a like number of families."
   Remember, this was the man who was once one of the world's most powerful pro-abortionists! He is like the apostle Paul was to the early Christians. Once a ferocious destroyer of unborn life, he now has lent his influence to protecting it.

Common, Simple Humanity

   Men could have known the truth about abortion from God's Word. They can still know it from scientific fact. They can also know abortion is wrong from the inherent cruelness of the abortion process itself.
   When you realize just what a doctor must do to perform abortion, you realize just how much our society, confronted by two alternatives, has "chosen death" (see Deuteronomy 30:19). When you understand just how abortions are being performed today you can understand how calloused and cruel our "civilized" society has become!
   There are three ways now used to perform abortions. By far the most preferred way is the suction method. A vacuum tube is inserted into the womb, and the unborn child is literally vacuumed out, and in the process torn limb from limb. Afterwards, someone must go through the "remains" to see if all the parts of the body are accounted for, lest any remain behind in the womb.
   This is the "best" method of abortion because the victim remains unseen by all but the lab examiner. But the victim was a human being anyway.
   Thomas Gulick, writing in Human Events, relates how one nurse, who used to help with these kind of abortions, changed her mind. One day the doctor tried to perform a vacuum abortion on a woman whose child was already too big to fit through the vacuum tube. The nurse got a shock. "I saw a little foot — caught in the end of the suction tube." Tears came to her eyes. Before she hadn't had to look at the dismembered child. At that point, the nurse began to have her doubts about abortion ("Even Abortionists Having Second Thoughts," Human Events, April 12, 1980).
   Because the vacuum method doesn't work after the child grows to a certain point, usually after 12 weeks, two other methods must be used.
   For unborn children between 12 to 17 weeks old, there is the D&E (dilation and evacuation) technique. In D&E, a surgeon goes up into the womb with forceps and grabs the un born child and tears it out. The body of the unborn child must first be ripped apart so that it can pass through the cervix. Sometimes D&Es are performed on unborn children as old as 20 weeks. When they are, their skulls must be crushed as well as their bodies torn apart. One abortionist, Dr. Warren Hern of the Boulder Abortion Clinic in Boulder, Colorado, has said of the D&E:
   "The sensations of dismemberment flow through the forceps like an electric current" (ibid., p. 16).
   Another doctor, William Raschbaum, chief of Family Planning Services at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York, has stated during a D&E abortion he has often had the fantasy that the child was hanging onto the walls of the uterus with its tiny fingernails — fighting to stay inside (ibid., p. 16).
   Even though the surgeon literally carves up the unborn child in a D&E abortion, there still comes a point at which the child is too big even for this grisly method. After 20 weeks, a "saline" abortion must be used. It is the most physically painful for the mother. The doctor injects a salt solution into the uterus, which causes a stillbirth. The salt solution burns the child an ugly red. There are records of infants who have survived saline abortions and spent the first weeks of their life outside the womb in intensive care.
   There is no abortion method widely practiced today which is not extremely cruel to the unborn child.
   Such cruelty itself condemns abortion. Even men who are cut off from God, given over to "reprobate minds," can know that "maliciousness" and "murder" are wrong, and come under "the judgment of God" (Romans 1:28-30).

The Moral Toboggan Slide

   Just as the movement for abortion on demand was just getting under way in the late 1960s, Plain Truth Editor Herbert W. Armstrong pegged it as something "in line with the toboggan-slide in morals." Events afterwards have shown, tragically, just how right he was.
   The reasons for abortion have been liberalized. They now include things like "economic" difficulty or "emotional" distress. "Health" now includes almost anything. And now that parents are able to find out the sex of their children before birth, they are killing their children when they don't get what they want.
   During the early stages of the
"Medical journals publish papers where authors acknowledge they have engineered the deaths of babies under their care." — Dr. Everett Koop
abortion controversy, many opponents claimed that abortion would lead to worse horrors — infanticide and the killing of all the weak and helpless. Supporters of abortion scorned the argument. But it has already been proved true!
   Do you realize infanticide — the killing of unwanted children after they are born — is now widespread? Dr. C. Everett Koop, the surgeon-in-chief of Children's Hospital in Philadelphia has recently exposed the "gentlemen's agreement" that exists in certain circles of the medical profession to let "defective" newborn infants die.
   Dr. Koop writes that since infanticide is still a hush-hush subject, unless "you know someone who talks about his work in an intensive care unit for newborns, there is no way the public would know about this." Yet, Dr. Koop says, "reputable medical journals publish papers where authors acknowledge that they have engineered the deaths of babies under their care" ("Deception on Demand," by C. Everett Koop, Moody. May, 1980, p. 26).
   Increased child abuse is another domino that has already fallen. Liberal abortion was supposed to decrease child abuse. It hasn't. Statistics are hard to come by because of the sensitive nature of the topic, but we know that in Britain, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children reports "increasing numbers of children are suffering appalling violence" (Daily Telegraph, June 3, 1979). In the United States, the Associated Press reports "it looks as if a hundred times as many child-abuse cases may occur annually as the 60,000 estimated less than a decade ago" (April 12, 1979).
   Dr. Koop believes that a society that kills at will its unborn children inevitably will see its born children as having lesser value also.
   The next target is the elderly, and then later, all who are dependent or handicapped, or those who, in the chilling words of the pro-abortionists, "lack the capacity for meaningful life." (Mark that phrase "meaningful life." Someday it may be used to justify your killing!)
   The point is, once you start killing unborn children, dismembering them, cruelly burning them in solution, you acquire a certain attitude. The attitude is that people who are "unwanted" ought to be done away with.

Frightening New World

   Widespread abortion is making us a society calloused, hard-hearted and selfish. If there are people around whom we do not want, the modern idea is to just do away with them. If you think this is too extreme a statement, listen to the frightening words of Dr. John Franklin, head of the Philadelphia Obstetrical Society, who was one of the parties in a Supreme Court abortion case, as he was quoted in December; 1979, issue of Conservative Digest:
   "In our society, one of the prerequisites for life is that someone wants you to live. If you are not wanted, you don't have the basic prerequisite to live in our society, no matter what the age" (p. 19).
   What horrifying words! If you are not "wanted," you do not have the prerequisite to live. What a terrible confirmation of the Bible prophecy that in the last days men would be "fierce," and "without natural affection"!
   But Dr. Franklin is not alone. Other influential people are already extending the attitude of abortion to the rest of us!
   Thus Francis Crick, a Nobel Prize winner has been quoted as saying "no newborn infant should be declared human until it has passed certain tests regarding its genetic endowment, and if it fails these tests it forfeits the right to live" ("Whatever Happened to the Human Race?" by Francis A. Schaeffer and C. Everett Hopp, Catholic Digest, March, 1989, p. 47).
   You aren't even "human" unless you can pass "certain tests regarding genetic endowment"! How like Hitler's Germany! What a monstrous statement!
   The abortion attitude is already being extended to newborn infants. Pro-abortionists themselves are becoming bolder in admitting the connection. Thus Dr. Robert Crist, testifying before the Louisiana state legislature, said that he was just as comfortable killing a newborn child. a week old as a week before birth, and that only lawyers haggle over this point of birth as having any special significance ("A New Conscience of the Pro-Life Movement," Conservative Digest, December, 1979, p. 19).
   The liberal, pro-abortion New Republic reflects the same attitude. The following words were taken from its July 2; 1977, editorial on abortion. The words accurately reflect the magazine's position. They also reflect just where the abortion attitude leads:
   "Metaphysical arguments about the beginning of life are fruitless. But there is clearly no logical or moral distinction between a fetus and a young baby; free availability of abortion cannot be reasonably distinguished from euthanasia. Nevertheless we are for it. It is too facile to say that human life is always sacred; obviously it is not..." (emphasis added).
   Here are pro-abortionists who realize that there isn't any "logical or moral" difference between unborn children and born children. Yet they still support abortion! We have come to the point in our society where influential people no longer even seem to care about murder!
   Logically, if you favor abortion and you also realize that an unborn child is no different from a born one, then you also will permit the killing of a newborn child. But newborn children are really no different from other dependent people — elderly or handicapped. What terrible results spring from the underlying premises of the pro-abortionists!

A New Dark Age?

   "Regard for human life is considered a test of civilization," writes Andrew Hacker in Harper's. Given the attitudes that have accompanied widespread abortion, it would appear that man's civilization now totters. Killing unborn children is now just another form of birth control.
   Because many people, Mr. Hacker writes, "are casual about intercourse and seek to avoid its responsibilities," unborn children are slaughtered. About a million and a third unborn children are killed in the United States each year-somewhere between 40 and 55 million worldwide.
   Doctors are now concerned with a growing incidence of "repeat abortions." It seems that we have now come to the point where promiscuous people aren't even willing to take any birth control precautions — lest their precious lustful "spontaneity" be interrupted. It is easier to kill their unborn children.
   One of the fascinating aspects to the abortion issue is that it has at long last provoked the last vestiges of humanity in our sick society. More than 10 years ago, Editor Herbert W. Armstrong noticed that there weren't many "indignant, emotionally aroused well-organized protests" over new liberal abortion laws. Today, there are. There is a whole "prolife" movement going. It is one of the few hopeful signs in a society rapidly careening down the moral toboggan-slide. As the New Republic put it: "These misguided people represent the only major pressure group on the political scene whose cause is not essentially self-interest."
   But as a matter of probabilities, the pro-lifers seem bound to lose. One of the most perverse facts of American law is that the right to kill your unborn child is more jealously protected than freedom of speech! In technical legal theory, the American Supreme Court is tougher on state laws that in some way restrict your right to kill your unborn child than — it is on laws that restrict your right to express your ideas. The Supreme Court says your right to kill your unborn child is "fundamental" — the most sacrosanct a right can be in American jurisprudence.
   So the pro-lifers, to end the slaughter, seek to get around the Supreme Court by amending the Constitution. But it takes two thirds of both houses of Congress to amend the Constitution, and any good political scientist will tell you that at least a third of both houses will remain very much pro-abortion for years to come.
   Is there no hope? When the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision on abortion (Roe v. Wade), Editor Herbert W. Armstrong described it as the "most sweeping and sensational decision of the Nixon Court." Mr. Armstrong has also pointed out, that about the hardest thing in the world for a man to do is admit he is wrong after he has become set in his way. The principle applies to the Supreme Court also. Rather than admit any error in its prior decision the Court has seized every opportunity to extend the right to kill your unborn children. The tragedy is that it was unnecessary.
   If you read Roe v. Wade. you realize that the reasoning behind it was both scientifically and legally wrong. It was scientifically wrong because it relied on scientific theories that are now outdated! As Dr. Nathanson puts it:
   "That Supreme Court decision is anchored in medical views that now quite frankly, are so anachronistic that we who work in perinatology [prenatal science] would be amused by them if it were not for the continuous slaughter that has resulted from their propagation." The Court's decision is legally wrong because for hundreds of years the law of England and America recognized the personality of unborn children. Unborn children had rights both in property and personal injury law. Even today you can still give property to your unborn child. Just because the abortion laws of the 1800s were passed primarily for the sake of protecting the health of the mother didn't make their unborn children any less human. Yet it was that fact upon which the Court pounced to justify the slaughter of millions!
   The time has come for the Supreme Court to repent. The Supreme Court can change its mind. It does not lay down the "law of the Medes and Persians" (see Daniel 6:8), which could not be changed once handed down. Just as the Court once declared that black slaves were "property" and not human beings, and had to repent of that, so it must repent of sanctioning the murder of millions of unborn human beings.
   But even if the Supreme Court does not overturn Roe v. Wade. the time is coming when it will be overruled, anyway! When Christ returns, the "Supreme Court of Heaven" will overturn Roe v. Wade and all laws contrary to God's good and perfect Law. At that time God will pour out His blessings on the whole earth. There will be no abortion. There will be no need for abortion:
   "And he [God] will love thee, and bless thee, and multiply thee; he will also bless the fruit of thy womb..." (Deuteronomy 7:13).
   In the meantime, the slaughter goes on. The Non-Sectarian Committee for Life, a New York "prolife" organization, warns of where abortion is taking our society:
   "Western society has abandoned its God and is lost in a void of moral anarchy. The civilization we know is threatened by a new Dark Age. By the turn of the century we will be confronted with abortions-by-demand-of-the-State and the death-by-decree of the sick and elderly. The planned birth, the planned lifespan and the planned death will be upon us. Let us resist this barbarous threat to man's existence, more dangerous than all the nuclear bombs."

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Plain Truth MagazineSeptember 1980Vol 45, No.8ISSN 0032-0420