Abortion as genocide not popular on Canadian campus
Whether one agrees or disagrees with comparing abortion to the Holocaust, Jose Ruba of The Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform (CCBR) has generated substantial media attention for his presentation entitled: “Echoes of the Holocaust”. On February 5, Ruba was met with hostile opposition at a talk he gave at spoke at St. Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
The event attracted the attention of pro-life and pro-abortion students alike; the latter of whom, instead of listening to Ruba’s presentation before voicing their own opinions (in a free speech kind of way), barged into the room within the first 5 minutes of the presentation yelling cheers like “my body my choice” whilst covering the projector and effectively removing all possibility for Ruba to continue with his presentation.
When the university security arrived at the scene, the protesters were momentarily silent but promptly resumed their shouting as Ruba displayed pictures from the Holocaust and a video of an abortion being carried out. With this, the security then shut down the event, forcing Ruba to continue with his presentation at a nearby Catholic church.
“What looks worse, shutting down a university-approved presentation or arresting people who are unlawfully disrupting that presentation?” asked Ruba, who, according to a National Campus Life Network news release, said he was appalled that the university gave into the mob rule. “St. Mary’s should be ashamed of itself for showing students that they need only scream when they don’t like something, rather than dialogue respectfully”.
Blogs are still buzzing, and letters to the editor are still flooding in; it seems everyone has something to say about the issue, pro-life and pro-choice titles aside. The day before Ruba’s presentation at St. Mary’s University, as if on cue, Barbara Kay of the National Post wrote an article entitled “Barbara Kay: Women deserve better than abortion” where she, while professing to be sensitive to the pro-life cause, criticized comparing abortion to the Holocaust.
Drawing upon the fact that throughout human history, “desperate circumstances [have prompted] desperate choices”, Kay outlines that “the circumstances in which we find ourselves at the moment of decision” must be considered in the appraisal of what is moral. With this ideology in mind, Kay compares the decision to abort one’s child as being akin to nomadic Inuit peoples of old having to make a difficult choice to leave one of their frail elders behind in an effort to survive a particularly harsh journey because the elder “might endanger the entire group”. Kay then goes on to compare abortion to a mother’s decision to suffocate her child during the Nazi occupation in order that she and her family not be discovered because of the cries of the infant.
But as Kay states in her article: “you cannot build an argument on an analogy alone. In any debate, emotional arousal must be subordinated to rational persuasion”. That is, of course if people will even listen to rational persuasion, which is, one can only hope Kay’s point in writing the article in question.
“Moreover,” Kay writes, “you are not only describing the action of abortion as evil [when comparing abortion to the Holocaust], you are implying that women, who abort, like Nazis, are evil people. There is neither truth nor dignity in accusing women of such moral turpitude”.
“Choose any factual perspective, you won’t find a single moral parallel between [abortion and the Holocaust] . And that is why it is not in your interest to pursue the [Genocide Awareness Project] campaign. Or in our mutual interest, because it stands in the way of an alliance between us.
To which Stephanie Gray, director of the CCBR and proponent of the Genocide Awareness Project, replies in a follow-up National Post piece:
“In Germany, Jews were deemed nonpersons. In Canada, so are the unborn. Jews were used for medical experiments. So are the unborn. Jews were labelled parasites, as are the unborn. Jews were killed in centres designed to terminate their lives. So, too with the unborn. Medical professionals were involved with killing Jews. Again, that is the case with the unborn. The Nazi philosophy was ‘lives unworthy of life’. The pro-abortion philosophy is ‘quality of life’”.
Gray goes on to say that Kay’s take on the angle adopted by the CCBR is to be expected. After all, Gray writes “Should Dr. King have ceased his tactics because people got angry? If not, why should pro-lifers change what they do simply because their opponents don't like it? That allows the other side to set the terms for debate, enabling them to talk about what they can defend ("choice"), rather than making them defend what they cannot (baby killing)”.
