"You're very emotional about this"

William Harrison, an abortionist in Arkansas, has a recent entry in his blog at Daily Kos which includes an unprinted letter he wrote in 1997 to an editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in response to this column by Paul Greenberg.

In the editorial, Greenberg discusses his recent attendance at a court hearing on a law to ban partial-birth abortion and how bureaucracy plays a role in allowing horrible things to happen to human beings. He mentions the testimony of a former abortionist who compared what she did (and how she was able to do it) with how German doctors were able experimented on Jews during the Holocaust. Greenberg writes,

Label any group Tiermenschen, define them as sub-human, make them unpersons, declare them chattel, and they can be disposed of without qualm.

Harrison took exception with this comparison in his letter, claiming Greenberg should not compare the abortions Harrison undertakes on a daily basis with the Holocaust because the unborn child in the first two trimesters can't feel pain and various emotions. Harrison writes,

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.

Harrison seems completely unable to understand that he is justifying the killings he commits by making the unborn into non-persons unworthy of protection using arbitrary criteria (many of which numerous born humans don't meet). His defense of his actions almost proves Greenberg's point. They can't experience the same pain and emotions the victims of the Holocaust endured (and are therefore sub-human or non-persons) so Harrison feels his daily work of killing the unborn can't be compared to the Holocaust.

Harrison can't wrap his mind around the reality of why some prolife people compare legal abortion with the Holocaust. It's not about the pain or emotions most aborted unborn children never feel. It's about the intentional killing of an unfathomably massive number of human beings and how it is accomplished by dehumanizing them.

Tags: william harrison, abortion, paul greenberg