This is a response to the editorial and letters that have appeared in the Kernel commenting on the Genocide Awareness Project.

Ironically, our detractors actually agree with us on the most important aspect of our campaign. They describe the pictures of abortion as scary, shocking and sickening. We agree. Abortion is all of those. Pictures of abortion are shocking because the act of abortion is shocking. Anyone with a functioning conscience is appalled by injustice of this magnitude. Is it logical to argue that the pictures of abortion are disturbing and shocking, but the act of abortion is somehow OK? Or that abortion is OK to do, but showing a picture of abortion is too scary to see?

The editorial board says we should give them facts, but the pictures are the facts. We’re giving them facts; they just don’t like the facts. They say they want intellectual discourse. The trouble is, they want to have that discourse in some la-la land where the unborn child is just a blob of tissue, parasite, mass of cells, etc. How convenient.

The pictures actually make rational discourse possible. We can’t have an intelligent discussion about abortion — is it right or wrong, is it moral or immoral, should it be legal or illegal — with people who deny the basic facts about the humanity of unborn life and the brutality of abortion. To have a rational discussion of abortion with people who deny the facts is like discussing our solar system with members of the Flat Earth Society; it can’t be done.

The board says that the pictures do not encourage conversation or intellectual discourse. Question for the board: Where were you? For two solid days, we spoke with hundreds of people who wanted to talk with us about abortion. Nobody who wished to discuss the topic was turned away. Next time, put on a raincoat and join us.

The board uses only one definition of genocide to say that abortion doesn’t fit, but many definitions are much broader. For example, the Webster’s New World Encyclopedia (1992) says genocide is “the deliberate and systematic destruction of a national, racial, religious, political, cultural, ethnic, or other group defined by the exterminators as undesirable.” With abortion, the targeted “other group” is unwanted, unborn children.

By the way, we did not invent the comparison of abortion to genocide. Martin Luther King Jr. compared racial injustice to the Holocaust. Later, using the same rationale that we use, Rev. Jesse Jackson extended the comparison to abortion:

“That is why … whites further dehumanized us by calling us ‘niggers.’ It was part of the dehumanizing process. The first step was to distort the image of us as human beings in order to justify that which they wanted to do and not even feel like they had done anything wrong. Those advocates of taking life prior to birth do not call it killing or murder, they call it abortion. They further never talk about aborting a baby because that would imply something human. Rather, they talk about aborting the fetus. Fetus sounds less than human and therefore abortion can be justified.”

Others who compare abortion to the Holocaust include Orthodox Jewish Rabbi Yehuda Levin of Brooklyn:

“Each form of genocide, whether Holocaust, lynching, abortion, etc., differs from all the others in the motives and methods of its perpetrators. But each form of genocide is identical to all the others in that it involves the systematic slaughter, as state-sanctioned ‘choice,’ of innocent, defenseless victims — while denying their ‘personhood.’ ”

Our purpose is never to condemn anyone who has had an abortion. Our purpose is to clarify the confusion so that people can make better decisions in the future, both individually and collectively. If you need healing from an abortion in your past or help with an unplanned pregnancy, call Assurance at 278-8469 (24/7/365) or visit its Web site (www.assurancecare.org).