Abortion: The Tragic Case of Poland

For more than a thousand years, armies have marched back and forth across Poland, leaving behind them as they went the acrid, lingering, haunting stench of death and destruction.  In each case the Poles suffered unutterable indignity and atrocity at the hands of their invaders:  imprisonment, torture, confiscation, banishment and execution.  Under the Nazis, for instance, Polish Jews and others were herded into ghettos.  Like cattle they were marked, numbered and tracked.  They were spied on, abused and finally shuttled off for extermination to ungodly places like Treblinka and Auschwitz, where they perished by the thousands and tens of thousands, as if they were not human, as if they did not have what all humans have--the right to life, liberty and property.
 
The Polish Jews’ only crime was that those in power decided that some Poles were socially, emotionally, even financially unsuitable.  In Poland the unsuitable were not permitted to live. 

If any nation on earth knows first hand the horrors that emerge when those with power treat those without it as less than human, that nation is Poland.

But one of the saddest and most discouraging facts of human history is that when they themselves come to power, the persecuted often become the persecutors, wreaking upon the newly defenseless the same evils under which they themselves once suffered, often employing the same wicked pseudo-justifications in the process.
 
Unfortunately, the Poles have proved themselves to be made of the same corrupt stuff as the rest of us.  The Polish congress has passed, and the Polish president has signed, a bill legalizing the first-trimester abortion of those whose parents are socially, emotionally or financially unsuitable.

Think about it.  If you are an unborn Pole and your parents don’t fit in; if they are contentious, dissenting nonconformists who agitate and upset those around them; if your parents are free spirits who dress, talk or act differently from their peers; if for any reason they make themselves socially suspect; if they find themselves by their own evaluation or by that of others to be socially marginal or unsuitable, you do not have a right to life.  They can kill you.

Never mind that aborting you does not transport your parents into the social mainstream or transform them into cultural acceptability or conformity.  Because of their supposed social unsuitability, you become less than human.  You have no right to life.  You can be killed, and your elimination appears to be not a problem but a solution -- for you, the final solution.
  
If you are an unborn Pole, and your parents are -- or even appear to themselves or to others to be -- emotionally unstable; if they are angry, bitter persons whose condition is scary or unpredictable; if giving you life raises fear in their minds or in the minds of others, you do not have a right to life.  Because your parents are deemed unstable, you are not human.  You can be killed.

Never mind that aborting one’s young often induces even greater emotional trauma and distress than giving them life; never mind that dealing death to others is not emotional therapy.   Because your parents are, or seem to be, emotionally unsuitable, you are not a human and you have no right to life.  You can be killed.  Your extermination is not a problem, but a solution -- for you, the final solution.

If you are an unborn Pole and your parents are poor, or even if your parents are not poor but wish to be more upwardly mobile; if they prefer financial prosperity to raising you; if their bank account or their income appear to be insufficient, or if their net worth renders them financially unsuitable, you are not human and you have no right to life.  You can be killed.  Your extermination is not considered part of the problem, but the solution -- for you, the final solution.

Never mind that this Polish law puts a price on the priceless -- as if that which had no price had no worth.  Precisely how many dollars an unborn Pole’s parents need to have before that unborn child has a right to life, the law does not say.  In Poland money is now more valuable than human life, at least the lives of those who are children of the socially, emotionally or financially unsuitable.

Because the erosion of the rights of some persons inevitably leads to the erosion of the rights of all, no nation can long remain free if it treats the most defenseless within it as garbage, good for nothing but tossing out.  As but a moment’s reflection makes clear, if your parents’ social, emotional, or financial unsuitability negates your right to life before your birth, nothing but the state’s merest political whim prevents your parents’ continued unsuitability from negating your rights after birth because the condition that allegedly justified your death earlier still persists.
 
Despite its bitter history, some things have not changed much in Poland.  Those in power still think they can decide which persons are not human beings, who does or does not deserve protection, and who does or does not get to live.
 
The new Jews in Poland are the unborn.  They too now will perish by the thousands and tens of thousands.  Their extermination, some think, is part of the solution to Poland’s most pressing problems, nationally and personally.  For the unborn, of course, this solution is final.

date modified:
5 July 2006