Seeing Is Believing

For decades, a majority of Jewish men and women have been carefully taught to see a major difference between the baby who resides in the womb and the baby who resides outside of it. We've been taught to believe that the baby in the womb isn't a person and that it's not alive until it's born. Once born, the baby magically becomes a living person - our child, grandchild, future medical doctor, future daughter-in-law, etc.

Despite incontrovertible, scientific evidence of life and personhood in the womb, many of us continue to believe the nonsense we've been taught. Most of us can't explain upon what grounds these ideas find purchase, so we default to worn out explanations based on nebulous best guesses of life in the womb by rabbis in the far distant past, or misinterpretations of Exodus about fighting men inadvertently injuring a pregnant woman.

Some of us use a sophisticated twist of meaning that applies social justice civil rights claims for the equal status of women while ignoring the right to life from the moment of conception bestowed on each human being by Almighty God, and clear prohibitions against child sacrifice throughout the Tanakh.

Others have learned to apply competency tests to gestational children, denying their personhood based on limitations in intelligence, consciousness, development and independence. We've determined in our own minds that legal status of personhood, and therefore legal protections, arise from popular opinion codified in judicial decision. This in the mist of fading memories of Holocaust victims redefined as subhuman, legally stripped of personhood and civil liberties, transported against their will to prisons beyond public view, tortured and murdered.

Having arrived at no life, no person, no dignity, no value, no worth, no nothing, we remain woefully unaware of the crime against humanity that is abortion. Millions and millions and millions of crimes in the name of justice, rights, healthcare, biomedical research, eugenics, convenience, and religious liberty. Millions and millions and millions of human beings poisoned, starved, dismembered, and dissected without pain medication for profit, to avoid criminal prosecution or social embarrassment, to keep a job, or regretfully due to fear, uncertainty, coercion, manipulation and threatening ultimatums.

Seen for what it really is, the abortion holocaust parallels and rises beyond crimes against humanity from which Jews have suffered dearly. After WWII, international consensus coalesced around the need to hold to account those responsible for genocidal activities. The Nuremberg Trials identified major players involved in implementing the Final Solution, as well as those engaged in gruesome medical research on prisoners condemned to death. Beyond holding those most culpable to account, many nations from Argentina to Uruguay constructed museums to commemorate and remember the horrors inflicted upon millions of innocents in Europe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Holocaust_memorials_and_museums

It's time we seriously hold to account those responsible for the abortion holocaust. Complicit are abortion industry leaders, promoters, financiers, biomedical research institutions, and political co-conspirators. For decades our Catholic and Christian friends have worked tirelessly to expose these criminals, working within our corrupted systems of justice and politics to end this appalling crime against humanity. 

As Jews, we have a special place in the pro-life movement. Our collective experience as victims of Nazi crimes, as well as our misguided perpetuation of the Final Solution through abortion in our own families, gives us an opportunity to recognize first hand the pain and loss of our innocent unborn brothers and sisters. No nothing in the womb becomes a precious, living person worth defending and rescuing, 'Never again' takes on an astonishing new meaning.

It's time we empathize with unborn innocents doomed to a painful, horrifying, legally sanctioned death behind clinic walls beyond public view. It's time we disengage from abortion industry promotion and support, assume responsibility for our part, and seek Teshuvah by helping to bring the major players to justice. It's time we identify ourselves within our religious and cultural organizations as providers of safety and support for abortion vulnerable women, men, and their pre-born children, 

It's time we start planning the abortion holocaust museum. Because there is no difference.

Cecily Routman

May there be abundant peace from Heaven, and good life upon us and upon all Israel. Amen.