Look over there. Do you see that empty chair? I know the girl who was supposed to be sitting there. Her name is Casey. She is a lively and outgoing 17-year old. She has light brown hair and deep green eyes that light up when she laughs. I must admit that she’s a bit of a tomboy. In fact, almost every afternoon, weather permitting, she heads to the park to play street hockey with her older brother, John. Sometimes he gets tired of her tagging along, but for the most part they get along really well.

Casey is a pretty good student, not great. She gets mostly B’s with A’s here and there. Most of the time her head is too full of guys and friends and the Stanley Cup to concentrate on Pro-Calc.

I wish Casey could have been here today because I know my speech wold have meant a lot to her. It might have made her angry or hurt her, but I hope that it would have made her proud. Unfortunately, while she was on her way here, someone brutally attacked and killed her. Yet no one was arrested or convicted of that heinous crime. In fact, a few people actually rejoiced.

Believe it or not, Casey was one of 1,575,000 17-year olds to face that same execution. Their journey to this classroom began in 1983 when they were all slaughtered in a sterile room inside an abortuary. These young men and women were our age. They could have been our friends, neighbors, and classmates. Before ever having a chance to see the light of day, one third of our generation was killed mercilessly. They are dead, but we, too, are the victims of abortion – the Holocaust of our generation.

Let me take you back 60 years to the sight of another Holocaust, one with which I am sure you are all familiar. In pre-war Germany, Nazi propaganda is everywhere. In a Jewish shop window, a poster hangs, which reads, “Jewish pig, down with the paws.” A placard on a nearby wall declares that “Only when Jews die will German suffering end.” One might hope that a newspaper would contain some words of rebuke for this disgraceful society. Rather than scorn, it contains racist cartoons which dehumanize Jews and equate them with snakes, dogs, and pigs. The radio is no better. It broadcasts anti-Semitic speeches which refer to Jews as parasites that live off others. The Nazis even sink so low as to call the Jews an infection and plague. Laws are already in place which demand forced sterilization “for the prevention of hereditary disease.” All around is the evidence that the Nazis were systematically training the German psyche to believe that the Jews truly were subhuman.

We in America have fallen victim to a similar sort of propaganda. We have been told that the baby is just a lump of flesh or part of the mother. Even worse, we have been taught that these babies are an unnecessary burden on the mother. These arguments are very similar to those expressed in Nazi Germany. You could change the Nazi quote from “Only when Jews die will Germany suffering end” to “Only when babies die will women’s suffering end” and broadcast it on American television. Where the Nazis said Jews were parasites, we go so far as to say that unborn babies are just one more body part growing on their mothers and proceed to cut them out as we would a tumor. Just as the Germans were brainwashed into believing that the slaughter of the Jews was acceptable, we have been programmed to believe that the systematic slaughter of unborn children is fine.

We know that these children are human just as the Nazis knew that the Jews were human. The fact of the matter is that from the moment of conception the baby fulfills any biology textbook’s definition of life. With 16 chromosomes and a personalized genetic makeup different from her mother’s, she is without question a separate and human life. Yet we persist in treating her as less than human.

The Nazi method of dealing with the Jews was to relegate them to death camps. Those camps were the ultimate site of humiliation, degradation, and dehumanization. The victims were tattooed with numbers and addressed by those numbers rather than their names. In the camp records, all Jewish women were referred to as Dora or Sara rather than by individual names. The Jews were even used as human lab rats by Josef Mengele and his counterparts. Those “doctors” did painful experiments on them without anesthetic. It was all part of a grand scheme to put the Jews on a subhuman level, so as to make their extermination easier. One Jewish survivor, Irene Zisblatt, states it clearly. “I think that was the start of making us lose our identity, of the dehumanization process – it’s easier to kill a nothing than a somebody.”

Our American abortuaries are no better than those death camps. A doctor tells a woman that her child isn’t a person; it’s just a nasty thing growing inside her that she may rid herself of whenever she sees fit. Her child may then be cut into pieces, burned with horrible chemicals, poisoned, or even have a pair of scissors jammed into her skull. Can you see the similarities between these awful methods of execution and the death camps? We poison our babies; they sent Jews to the gas chamber. Nazis shot Jews; we jam scissors into babies’ skulls. It isn’t a pretty picture, but that’s not where the similarities end. Abortion victims are used for stem cell research and even hand cream, just as Jews in Auschwitz were used by Dr. Mengele. A Holocaust survivor, Randolph Brahm, said that, “The Holocaust must be taught as the possible culmination of the horror that can occur when man loses moral integrity and the belief in the sanctity of the human life.” He didn’t realize how right he actually was. He was speaking entirely of the Nazi Holocaust, referring only to the victims of those awful camps. However, what he said is true of our society. We have lost the moral integrity necessary to claim responsibility for these lives or to hold our leaders to the belief in the sanctity of life. We, too, are silent as were so many Germans, not demanding that those in authority take the responsibility which others have shirked. Today, those death camps have been moved from Europe into every American mother’s womb.

We, like Mr. Brahm, are survivors. We are the survivors of a different death camp, the womb. One-third of our generation is dead. How can we who see the empty chair, the empty playground swing, and the empty desk in our classroom sentence our own children to death? We who can see cannot stand by and watch this horror spread. It is our sacred duty to teach those poor, blind people around us that abortion is the greatest of the twentieth century genocides, even greater than the Holocaust.

[Miss Elliott’s paper includes a Bibliography, which is available upon request.]

Published in VSHL Lifesaver, June 2001