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Friday April 23, 1999

Anti-abortion leaders should not call babies 'survivors'

Lyssa Friedman

"Sticks and stones may break my bones," says the childhood rhyme, "but names will never hurt me."

So let's play word association. I say Holocaust. You say Jews?

But if you're a member of Operation Rescue West, you say abortion. Its Web site -- www.operationrescue.org -- describes "Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust."

"One third of our generation has been exterminated while still in the womb," it reports, "and we, The Survivors, must tell their story for them. If you were born after January 22, 1973 you are a Survivor..."

The site's newsletter invites anti-abortion activists to picket a physician's home and protest his or her "crimes against humanity." And the site's photo gallery, "Inside a Death Camp," compares non-specific bloody tissue to "the decaying bodies of Nazi victims" and the laboratory where the photographer captured the images to "European mass graves."

So let's play word association again. You say Holocaust.

I say Nazis. I say 6 million Jews.

And I ask why anyone would exploit words so evocative of the precarious toehold Jews have to life in this century.

Consider Barnett Slepian, a Jewish gynecologist who provided abortions in Buffalo, N.Y. On a Friday evening last October, Slepian had just returned with his family from Shabbat services. As he stood in his kitchen window, a sniper shot and killed him.

Or think of the "Nuremberg Files," the now defunct Web site co-sponsored by the Creator's Rights Party and the Christian Gallery. Until recently, "Wanted" posters listed the addresses of physicians who provide the legal procedure. Doctors murdered by anti-abortion activists appeared as "fatalities."

The site's content designers argued that a society that permits abortion encourages Nazism. They wrote that abortion providers are "guilty of crimes against humanity."

Abortion providers, tired of burying colleagues, claimed in a federal suit that the site's language incited violence against them. They won $107 million in damages, and U.S. District Court Judge Robert E. Jones shut the site down.

First amendment experts say the ruling infringes on free speech and will be reversed on appeal. But the site's writers exercised their First Amendment rights by choosing the name Nuremberg. Their reason?

During the Nuremberg trials, they say, some Nazis were acquitted due to lack of evidence. When abortion becomes illegal and "abortion war crimes" are prosecuted, the Christian Gallery hopes to have amassed enough "abortionist" data to prevent this same misstep.

Yes, the abortion war is our era's holy war. But when you say words like Holocaust and Nuremberg, I hear in this lexicon of war not the overt battle against abortion, but the covert operation against Jews' right to life.

Today, abortion providers don bulletproof vests the way Israelis use gas masks. Guns are pointed toward women's clinics the way Scud missiles are aimed at Tel Aviv. And battle language translates bombing to "civil action" and murder to "fatalities."

Yes, bullets and bombs, like sticks and stones, can hurt us. But the childhood rhyme was wrong. Names hurt too. Phrases turn doctors and clinic receptionists into casualties. Sentences destroy cultural pluralism and religious freedom. Rhetoric creates mass graves.

Speech must remain free. But speech must also assure everyone's right to life.

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