On July 15, I read Rabbi Marvin Hier's op-ed about how the Holocaust is often trivialized today when people use the word "holocaust" in reference to events that are insignificant compared to the horrors inflicted on Jews and others during World War II ["Holocaust: A huge word made small"].
I agree that the Gulf oil spill and our flawed health care system, however tragic, hardly compare to the extermination of 6 million human beings. The rabbi is wrong on one point, however: Abortion (the deliberate and systematic extermination of unborn children) is a holocaust.
Why shouldn't we equate the abortion industry to Nazi Germany? Like Hitler and his cronies, they use lies and scare tactics to lure frightened women facing unplanned pregnancies into their clinics, and then kill their babies for a few hundred dollars. Is this really less horrific than mass killings of men, women, and children in concentration camps?
An abortion not only kills an innocent child, but it also leaves the mother scarred for life. She is more likely to have complications in later pregnancies, depression, and cancer, to name only a few of the risks of abortion.
Meanwhile, organizations like Planned Parenthood and NARAL claim to be helping women by killing their unborn children.
Rabbi Hier quotes a passage by Rudolf Höss, a commandant of Auschwitz, where he recalls a mother asking, "How can you murder these beautiful, darling children? Don't you have any heart?" I would ask the same question to the perpetrators of the abortion holocaust.
On Dictionary.com, the fourth definition of "holocaust" is "any mass slaughter or reckless destruction of life." Forty-two million children are aborted worldwide every year. The rabbi says that abortion is not a holocaust. I beg to differ.
Sharon Babineau
Fredericksburg