One of the favorite images of the "Pro-Life" community is to compare safe, legal, abortion care and its destruction of pre-sentient and pre-viable embryonic and fetal life to the suffering and murders inflicted on the millions of innocent victims in the Nazi Holocaust.
The editorial page editor of one of our two more-or-less statewide daily newspapers, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (ARDemizette), is a American born Jew named Paul Greenberg, who grew up as a small shopkeeper's son in Shreveport, LA.
When he was the editor of a much smaller newspaper in Pine Bluff Arkansas, Paul's had been a powerful liberal voice and the man himself a strong supporter of civil rights, including women's rights and reproductive freedom. But oddly enough, when he was offered the opportunity to become the editorial page editor of the much larger ARDemizette (now owned by a devout Catholic conservative) though it meant he himself would have to take a radically "conservative" approach to almost everthing he had once stood for, including a new "Pro-Life" stance on the abortion issue, he jumped at the chance.
On Roe v. Wade, Greenberg says it was because he had discovered that since Roe, there were a large number of safe legal abortions performed in this country! (Unlike the pre-Roe days when there had been a large number of unsafe illegal abortions done.)
WOW! Who could have imagined this would be the case?
In 1997, just after all the small number (3) of us abortion care providers in Arkansas had defeated in federal court, the attempt by the state of Arkansas to pass and then enforce a "Partial Birth Abortion Ban," Greenberg wrote a column about his attendance at the hearings conducted in the Federal Court House in Little Rock, Arkansas. The Arkansas law was a direct copy of all the other bans overturned by most federal courts until the US Supreme Court's upholding of the Federal "Partial Birth Abortion Ban" at the end of its 2006/2007 term. Since then, Paul has written many more columns and editorials in support of every anti abortion care "TRAP" law passed by the Arkansas legislature, as well as every act of the then Repugnican majority in the US Congress as well as the outrageous, illegal and criminal activities of the fools, theives and thugs in the Bush administration, including the invasion of Iraq, the high crimes created by the illusion that the Geneva Convention International Laws were "archaic" and naive, and that tortures, including waterboarding, was now permissible under illegal new White House directives.
I am a child of WWII. I well remember the outrage that the American public expressed toward the Nazi's treatment of Jews, homosexuals, Seventh Day Adventists, Red Army soldiers, and the outrageous torture by the Japanese army of American soldiers, including the torture of waterboarding. And we hung many of the Nazi and Japanese torturers and murderers as war criminals, including a few of those who ordered the waterboarding of our troops.
Mr. Greenberg has never seen an act by TGDSOBGWB he couldn't support.
When he wrote the first of the columns comparing safe, legal abortion care to the Holocaust, I wrote a never published letter to another of the editors of his newspaper with a copy to him personally. This is most of that letter with a small editing by me to remove some of the now irrelevent material.
Ed Gray
Perspective Editor
Ark Demi-zette 10/16/97
Dear Mr Gray
I have been trying to analyze why Paul Greenberg's column, A Perfectly Normal Morning, published on Sunday, 10/12/97, made me so angry. Certainly I have seen "Pro-Life" proponents use the Abortion = the Holocaust argument before. I think the reason that it so infuriated me was because he impugned my honor, my integrity, my ethic, my values and my morality.
I have been called a murderer, a baby killer and a butcher among a few other choice curses, and certainly my motives have been questioned, but no one has ever before, and especially not a Jew, accused me of perpetrating horrors like those inflicted on the victims of the Holocaust. Let me tell you why I think anyone is dead wrong, embarrassingly wrong for a Jew, in comparing abortion to the crimes of the Holocaust.
While there is no way that anyone can ever prove when a fetus reaches the point in its development where it can experience pain, there is very good evidence that this threshold is not reached until sometime after the 22nd week of intrauterine life. I know of no reputable expert in neuroembryology who considers it even remotely possible that a fetus in the first two trimesters of pregnancy can experience terror, horror, revulsion, despair, sorrow, depression, love, hate, fear, joy, sadness, happiness, friendship, anger, indignation, outrage, ecstasy or any of the other emotions that those encaged in Dachau, Buchenwald, Auschwitz, or dozens of other horror chambers administered by the Nazis, most assuredly did experience, before, during or after, if they survived. Of course, few positive emotions were ever experienced by those at the mercy of the Nazis.
It is the emotional and intellectual experience accompanying pain which render the anticipation and actual sensation of pain most unbearable, especially the thought that one is to be subjected to a terrifying ordeal while realizing that one's acquaintances, friends, neighbors, mother, father, brother, sister, son, daughter, wife or husband may be undergoing the same dehumanizing tribulations, never knowing for sure whether those you love are dead or alive. And living under those conditions for days, weeks, months or years. The very thought of unremitting terror and the anticipation of enduring what must have seemed an eternity of cold, exhaustion, humiliation, hunger, thirst and withering pain, unrelieved and inexorable, is a horror that no embryo or fetus can ever experience, but which the Holocaust victims lived with for hours to years.
And then there is the memory, and the bitterness, and the unrelieved survivors guilt that those who did survive will bear to their graves. For we know that survivors feel guilt for the loss of family and loved ones, and others unknown but still mourned, for the rest of their lives.
Does anyone really believe that the four week, ten week, or even twenty six week fetus experiences any part of that?
If Mr Greenberg can truthfully answer "yes" to that question then I owe him an apology.
If the answer is "no," then he owes me, and every Jew, and every survivor of the Holocaust, every woman who ever received abortion care, and every doctor who ever safely performed this service, an apology!
William F Harrison, M.D.
I never received an answer from Paul Greenberg.
Nor, I suspect, will any of the families who have lost sons and daughters, wives and fathers to this criminal war in Iraq, receive an apology from Mr. Greenberg or TGDSOBGWB!