If you’re going to wage war, you must dehumanise your enemy. You can’t have your soldiers run out there thinking they are about to kill someone’s child, sibling, spouse or cousin. We weren’t created for that, so you must manipulate psychology. You must label them something other than human.

An Inyenzi or cockroach if you are to kill every Tutsi you come across during the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
A scheming parasite if you are to systematically round up and kill every Jew on an industrial scale during the Holocaust of World War II.
A Foreign Uterine Matter or Products Of Conception if you are to brainwash whole generations of mothers it is their right to kill their preborn child.

He or She, Not “It”

So therein lies the core issue, the key point – the child in the womb is a child.

Thankfully, someone has come up with a useful tool to remember the points in discussing this core point. Called S.L.E.D. I’ve added an additional point to make it a S.L.E.D.G.
It neatly tackles the common, arbitrary arguments against the humanity of the preborn child:

• Size: Size is not a determinant of a human being. It might make you more imposing, it might make you more impressive but it does not make you more human. Just because the preborn are small, does not exclude them from the family of humanity.
• Level of development: How developed or old you are is not a determinant of a human being. Just as size doesn’t determine your humanity, nor does your age, including the age before which you are birthed into the world.
• Environment (or place in the world): Where you are does not determine if you are a human being. You are still a human whether you’re in a house, car, bus, plane, or your mother’s womb.
• Dependency: Dependency is not a determinant of a human being. You may need money from your parents. You may need money from the government. You may even need to be in intensive care just to survive, but you never at any of those times lose your membership in the family of humanity.
  Patients fighting for survival in an intensive care unit are temporarily dependent on others and machinery for survival. It is illogical to consider them any less human and equally deserving of respect and care because of that. The same applies to those in their mother’s womb. You were human when you were there, why not the child in question?
• Genetics: It’s an undisputed biological fact that the preborn child has a unique, human genetic make up. Therefore, there is no reason to believe that s/he is simply a part of his/her mother which she can simply dispose of like her tooth or appendix. It makes no sense to argue that.
  With ongoing research, we are finding and will continue to find more and more evidence which support the fact that we are dealing with a separate human being and not merely a clump of cells.

The Magnitude

World War 2 has been considered the deadliest conflict in human history. Estimates are that its death toll claimed 50-75 million people. Putting this in context, the 2014 population estimate for New Zealand is only 4.5 million, Australia’s is only 23.6 million and the US is 317 million.

Current World Health Organisation data estimates that abortion claims at least 40-50 million lives….per year.
That’s approximately 130,000 per day.
That’s 3 lives every 2 seconds. At least.

This is why S.L.E.D.G. matters. Learn it. Use it. Pass it on.

So What?

There are some who acknowledge that the child in the womb is indeed a child but s/he can still be killed on demand. They are not recognised as the gift that they are. For them, the above discussion will mean little.

For them, it would be worth exploring what they think of child abandonment, calls to routinely kill off certain people groups or of particular accounts like a child being flushed down a toilet or indeed, being microwaved. If it horrifies them, they need to explore why that’s the case as there is no room for that within the values they propose they have.

28-11-2014: Related news.

Images modified from Internet