Op-Ed: Communism Has Killed More Than 100 Million People, But Society Celebrates a Greater Evil
Another sad but necessary reminder of the human propensity for cruelty and violence opened in Washington, D.C., last month.
On June 13, the Victims of Communism Museum joined the Victims of Communism Memorial on Capitol Hill in commemorating the more than 100 million lives lost to international communism and the 1.5 billion unfortunate souls still living under communist rule.
But even as the latter figure continues to add to the former, communism will never surpass abortionism as the world’s deadliest ideology. Nothing will.
Every abortion ends a life. This is not disputed. Any high school biology textbook will tell you that at conception a new human life is formed, distinct from both the mother and the father, with its own unique DNA, complete with a unique set of chromosomes.
The abortion debate is not about whether an unborn child is alive. It is about whether an unborn child can be legally and arbitrarily killed without any semblance of due process.
According to the World Health Organization, nearly 18 million people worldwide die each year of heart disease and another 10 million from cancer. By comparison, 40 million human lives are lost globally each year via abortion, making it the world’s leading cause of death. Nearly all abortions are elective in nature. Communism kills like cancer, but nothing kills like convenience.
In the U.S. alone, over 60 million lives were aborted during the era of nationwide mass abortion ushered in by the Supreme Court in 1973. By the time that era was ushered out by the court last month, 1 in 5 pregnancies ended in abortion nationwide.
In 1988, President George H.W. Bush called for a “kinder and gentler nation.” That nation never materialized for those with Down syndrome, most of whom are killed in utero.
French geneticist Dr. Jerome Lejeune’s 1959 discovery of its chromosomal origin made prenatal testing for Down syndrome possible. To his horror, he soon saw mass prenatal testing combine with mass abortion to transform the field of genetics from the Mendelian to the Mengelian. Unsurprisingly, the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele, Lejeune’s antithesis as a geneticist, spent his time as a fugitive performing abortions in Buenos Aires.
All ideologues attempt to bulldoze inconvenient facts. Abortion supporters are no different. Many attempt to hide the reality of abortion behind euphemisms like “reproductive justice,” as if killing an innocent party could ever approximate justice.
Others proffer utilitarian justifications. During recent testimony before the Senate Banking Committee, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen claimed that abortion is a boon for the economy. You do not have to be an economist to know that mass abortion has reduced the labor force, put downward pressure on economic growth, and imperiled the future of the social safety net.
But a recent report from the Republican members of the Joint Economic Committee put aside those obvious economic consequences and simply applied the statistical methodology used by the federal government to measure mortality risks and concluded that the economic cost of abortion in America was $6.9 trillion for the single year 2019. That figure is 425 times greater than the total earnings the mothers of all American abortion victims in 2019 could have expected to forego over the next six years had they given birth.
One sector of the American economy that has benefitted from mass abortion is, of course, the abortion industry. It also has the most to lose from the Supreme Court’s recent reversal of Roe v. Wade. Thus far, the biggest loser has been Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider. If, as Pope Francis has suggested, procuring an abortion is akin to hiring a hitman to “solve a problem,” then perhaps Planned Parenthood’s president should be given the honorary title of “Lepke” after Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, the notorious head of organized crime’s “Murder, Inc.”
In greater need of commemoration are abortion’s victims. Here the pope again provides useful guidance. His Holiness has praised Slovak artist Martin Hudacek’s sculpture “Memorial for Unborn Children,” a work that poignantly captures the immense pain and regret abortion inflicts upon all but the sociopathic.
The work features two statues. One is a stone statue of a mother, kneeling in mourning, her face buried in one hand while the other clutches her heart. Facing the mother is a translucent statue of a child lost to abortion, raising a hand to comfort her grieving mother.
Replicas of Hudacek’s memorial touch hearts around the world. A Victims of Abortion Memorial in the nation’s capital featuring Hudacek’s sculpture would honor the lives of all those hurt by abortion and serve as a necessary corrective to self-satisfied claims of civilizational progress.
The views expressed in this opinion article are those of their author and are not necessarily either shared or endorsed by the owners of this website. If you are interested in contributing an Op-Ed to The Western Journal, you can learn about our submission guidelines and process here.
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