Is Abortion Like the Holocaust?
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00:00:05.000 | A listener by the name of John writes in to ask this, "Pastor John, can we
00:00:09.360 | reasonably draw moral parallels between abortion in America and the
00:00:13.200 | extermination of Jews by Nazis in World War II?"
00:00:16.400 | There are non-parallels, and there are parallels. And it might be good just to
00:00:24.640 | name a few, because evidently the question is coming out of a sense of
00:00:29.880 | there are people that get upset about this correlation, and there are other
00:00:34.960 | people who feel it's natural. So let me try to get inside the skin
00:00:40.400 | of both people. There are non-parallels. The Holocaust was overwhelmingly a
00:00:48.320 | hatred of Jewish people, not only, but overwhelmingly a hatred of an ethnic
00:00:55.080 | group and a religious group. This is generally not the case with the unborn.
00:00:59.720 | The unborn are killed across all ethnicities and religions. Secondly,
00:01:05.920 | there's a non-parallel in that the Holocaust was carried out mainly by one
00:01:12.200 | nation, while babies are being killed in every nation of the world. There's a
00:01:18.520 | non-parallel in that the Holocaust was mainly carried out on mature, rationally
00:01:26.360 | aware human beings, rather than pre-rational babies. And so the horror of
00:01:34.960 | contemplating their end was vastly greater for those who were killed in the
00:01:40.360 | Holocaust. And there's a non-parallel in that the Holocaust had a
00:01:50.440 | beginning and had an end, though ethnic persecution, of course, hasn't ended while
00:01:57.720 | the killing of babies goes on. So those are a few, and I'm sure there are more
00:02:00.680 | that we, if you just spent time, we could think of the non-parallels. But here
00:02:04.960 | are the parallels that I think are, in fact, completely valid. One, there's a
00:02:11.000 | parallel that both involve precious human beings created in the image of God,
00:02:16.280 | Jewish people and others that the Nazis despised, and then the unborn. They're
00:02:22.920 | both human beings. There's a parallel in the fact that they were slaughtered.
00:02:29.640 | I'm not even going to say like animals, because it was worse than animals in
00:02:34.480 | both cases. It was worse than animals. It happened in the concentration camps with
00:02:39.120 | medical experimentation. I've been to Dachau three times, Tony, because it was
00:02:44.880 | right outside Munich where I lived for three years. And I've read and seen the
00:02:51.000 | pictures of being frozen to death to experiment with how quickly people would
00:02:56.280 | freeze to death, or hanging, or asphyxiation, or all kinds of horrible
00:03:01.480 | experimentations that were done. And so it was a kind of slaughter that was
00:03:08.600 | worse than the killing of animals. And so it is with babies in the womb. Most of
00:03:14.000 | them are dismembered limb from limb. There's a parallel in scope. The numbers
00:03:21.000 | are in the millions, and they are unimaginable in both cases. There's a
00:03:25.560 | parallel in rationale, the diminishment of personhood and dignity. The
00:03:32.320 | non-Aryan race was deemed increasingly subhuman, or at least not the kind of
00:03:40.360 | human who was worthy of life. That's exactly the same rationale for the
00:03:45.680 | killing of the unborn. They are subhuman, or at least they're not the kind of
00:03:50.080 | human that is worthy of life. And I would add one more parallel. The time will come
00:03:59.960 | when the generations will look back on ours with even more unbelief that we
00:04:06.640 | could have let it happen than we look back on Germany in the 1930s and 40s and
00:04:11.560 | marvel that they could let it happen. God hates murder then, and he hates murder
00:04:19.880 | now. He condemns it in his Word, and so that's another parallel that God will in
00:04:26.720 | the end make everything right. He will settle accounts. Nothing will be swept
00:04:32.600 | under the rug in this universe. Yes, amen. Thank you, Pastor John, and thank
00:04:39.800 | you for listening to this podcast. Email your questions to us at
00:04:42.600 | PastorJohn@DesiringGod.org. Visit us online at DesiringGod.org to find
00:04:46.960 | thousands of free books, articles, sermons, and other resources from John Piper. I'm
00:04:50.320 | your host Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening.
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