The claim that abortion is “genocide” is rubbish. The term “genocide” was coined by an international lawyer and linguist named Raphael Lemkin in 1944. He combined the Greek root geno meaning race or tribe, with the Latin derivative cide which means to kill. He wanted a unique term to describe the Nazi’s systematic plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe, which is the prototype of the phenomenon the term “genocide” is meant to describe.
Lemkin fought to make genocide recognized as a crime under international law, and his goal was realized in 1948 with the passage by the UN General Assembly of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (GA Res. 260 A (III) of Dec 9, 1948) in which genocide is defined as:
“any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bringabout its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
A woman’s private conscientious decision to terminate a pregnancy does not fall under this definition.
First, genocide requires proof of intent to destroy a group as such. There are many reasons why a woman might decide to end a pregnancy, but the intent to destroy a group as such is not one of them.
Second, genocides are perpetrated by states such as the Third Reich or quasi-governmental entities such as the Khymer Rouge, not by women exercising their individual reproductive rights. To suggest that women who choose to have abortions are comparable to Hitler or Pol Pot is a reprehensible insult.
Third, genocide is a crime, while abortion is, and should remain, a legal medical procedure. What would be covered by the definition of genocide are cases of mandatory sterilization or forced abortion in which state authorities coerce or compel women to undergo abortions. But the laws protecting reproductive freedom are the exact opposite of state-mandated reproductive coercion; the law leaves it to individual women to decide for themselves whether to continue or end their own pregnancies and specifically limits the role of state authorities in these decisions. Those people who wish to make abortion illegal are confusing personal freedom with state coercion.
The anti-abortion activists that came to TCNJ are not the first group to try to distort the meaning of the term “genocide” to conform to an extreme political agenda. But, contrary to Alice in Wonderland, words simply do not mean anything people want them to mean, and the claim that abortion is genocide is nonsense.
BY MORTON EMANUEL WINSTON
Dr. Winston is a professor of Philosophy and Chair in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at TCNJ. He is also Director of the Alan Dawley Center for the Study of Social Justice, as well as the former chairman of the Board of Directors at Amnesty International USA.