Many who stopped by the Genocide Awareness project display last week while it was on campus were shocked to see abortion compared to genocides performed throughout history.

To this, it must be asked: What else do you call the killing of 1.2 million human beings per year?

Many said that abortion doesn’t kill a human being which is patently false, since the unborn entity in question has human parents, which means it must, in fact, be a human being. Furthermore, it has a human genetic code. If a living being has human parents and human DNA, then how can it not possibly be a human being?

So what justifies killing an innocent, defenseless human being simply because they are in the way of something we want? Many pro-choice advocates typically cite one or more differences between the adults that we are today and the unborn humans that we once were to justify killing them at that earlier stage of development.

In his book The Moral Question of Abortion, Philosopher Stephen Schwartz highlights these developments with the acronym “SLED” which has been popularized by pro-life advocate Scott Klusendorf:

Size: Yes, the unborn are much smaller than born humans but why does that mean we can kill them? Women are, on average, smaller than men. Does that mean that men should be treated better than women? Since when does size determine how we should relate to one another?

Level of Development: Yes, the unborn are less developed, but so what? Two year olds are less developed in a variety of ways than twenty-year-olds. Does that mean that we can treat two year olds worse than twenty year olds?

Environment: Suppose a child is born today, two months ahead of their due date. Are they a person now because they are in a different location than they were yesterday?  Since when does where you are determine what you are?

Degree of Dependency: Yes, the unborn are far more dependent on their mothers than born children. Again, so what? Wouldn’t we be horrified if a mother killed her disabled child simply because he was “too dependent”? This is a dangerous line of thinking and it is something that we should not tolerate.

What the organization’s display does is show the “pro-choice” mindset for what it really is: allowing injustice for the sake of promoting self-interest.

In the past we used to discriminate based on skin color and gender and now we discriminate based on size, development, location, and how dependent we are. We’ve simply traded one form of bigotry for another. This is a choice that a civil society based on equal treatment should do without.

Injustices throughout history have always been based on the notions of eliminating “problems”. Why is abortion really any different?