In Juan Gonzalez’s Harvest of Empire, the author writes, “On the island of Hispaniola, which was inhabited by 1 million Tainos in 1492, less than 46,000 remained twenty years later.” Tzvetan Todorov called the Spanish conquest of the 1500s, “the greatest genocide in human history.”
During the Holocaust, 6 million Jews were exterminated along with countless Poles, Soviet POWs, Romanians and gays. The death toll was so high that historians to this day can’t come up with an accurate figure.
And last week in Hornbake Plaza, anti-abortion activists likened abortion to genocide.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in 1952, the United Nations defined the term “genocide” as “the direct physical destruction of another racial or national group.” The dictionary itself defines genocide as, “The deliberate and systematic extermination of an ethnic or national group.”
In the etymology given on the Oxford English Dictionary’s website, every instance of the word contains some reference to cultural targeting, specifically referring to the purposeful decimation of racial, ethnic, or national groups.
So what about abortion?
The U.S. Census Bureau reported approximately 1.2 million documented abortions in the United States in 2005. The mothers of the aborted were of various ethnic backgrounds.
In the United States, the decision to abort is left to the discretion of the mother. If we accept the dictionary’s definition of the word, which defines genocide as the systematized destruction of an ethnic or national group, then abortion doesn’t even come close.
Abortion occurs on a case-by-case basis, in which each mother decides whether to abort and there is a statistically diverse distribution of cases among different races.
So where is the ethnic component? Who’s systematically targeting unborn fetuses in an effort to wipe them off the grid? What group would you codify the “unborn” under? Babies?
If one were to make that leap, which I’m sure some fringe radicals would, then the defense for using a word like genocide to describe the 1.2 million abortions that occur in the United States each year would be: “By legalizing abortion, the United States government is overtly targeting babies in an effort to kill them all.”
Sounds like bad sci-fi, doesn’t it? Sci-fi notwithstanding, abortion and genocide are two very different things. No matter your political orientation, when you’re firmly attached to spreading awareness and generating support for a cause, you must be tactful .
Language is important. No anti-aboirtion activist or anti–abortion activist for that matter, would argue that point. If the pro-lifers who set up last week’s demonstration on Hornbake intended to exacerbate a divisive issue, they succeeded. If their intention was to educate, they failed miserably.
Six days into Hispanic Heritage Month, during Mexico’s bicentennial, genocide isn’t a word you want to throw about flagrantly. I have to admit, when I passed through Hornbake, I felt a deeply unsettling feeling — an anger that stemmed from my own cultural heritage and the Spanish destruction of virtually all the Tainos who used to inhabit Puerto Rico.
This isn’t a political argument. I’m not writing through an abortion rights or anti-abortion lens. I have no stake in the matter. If a group of abortion rights activists likened denying women contraceptives to denying prisoners of Dachau food, I’d find the tactic equally repugnant. Do not sacrifice human decency and consideration for political points. It just isn’t right.
Michael Casiano is a junior English major. He can be reached at casiano at umdbk dot com.
