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Last week, my colleagues and I visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC at the tail end of a Genocide Awareness Project tour of American university campuses. Exhibit after exhibit featuring butchered humanity, dehumanizing propaganda, and as always, lists upon lists of the names of the lost made for a powerful experience. Afterwards, a few of us walked to the Lincoln Memorial and played just a few lines from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech from a cell phone to remind ourselves that nonviolent action can, indeed, slow and eventually stop great injustices.

Contrast that with last night, when my colleague Maaike Rosendal debated late-term abortionist Dr. Fraser Fellows of London, Ontario. I was very interested in what sort of arguments he would bring forward, since as I wrote when Dr. Fellows debated Stephanie Gray, Fellows seems to approach the abortion debate from an almost bored point of view, especially considering the fact that he specializes in the especially gruesome, late-term procedures that not even Henry Morgentaler would perform. Seemingly oblivious to the malignancy of his logic, Fellows said again and again that as long as society denies the labels of humanity and personhood to the human being developing in the womb, he would continue his work as a professional fetus-crusher. (That’s not hyperbole.)

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This logic, of course, has proven poisonous. African Americans, aboriginals, Jews, and women have all been denied their rights at different points in history due to the fact that their legal personhood status was denied them. Public opinion, which Dr. Fellows held up as his standard (perhaps ignorant of the fact that while Canadians are at this point supportive of abortion, they oppose the late-term abortions he specializes in) should be irrelevant to the human rights of human beings, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, and age. How we classify groups of human beings says nothing about those human beings, and everything about the society we live in.

During the question period, I asked Dr. Fellows just that: If human rights are dictated by public opinion, were things like slavery and segregation moral during the time when they existed?

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No, he replied, switching arguments, because in those cases, we’re talking about humans. Plus, pretty much everyone knows slavery is wrong.

“Well, we do now,” I pointed out. It took William Wilberforce twenty years just to get the slave trade banned, never mind slavery itself. But as Upton Sinclar noted, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Human rights must be extended to all human beings, or we see the sort of carnage displayed in museums telling us to “Never Forget.” Ideas have consequences. Unfortunately, Dr. Fellows’ logic has holes in it big enough to drive an extermination van through.

Reprinted with permission from Unmasking Choice