Abortion

Abortion is an issue that evokes, on all sides, very strong feelings and judgments and very heated recriminations. The most radical formulation of the anti-abortion or "pro-life" side of the debate views abortion as the murder of unborn children, and so as the equivalent of out and out infanticide, making the legal use of abortion since Roe v. Wade, at a rate of around 1.5 million a year in the United States, into a holocaust of the innocent fully comparable to the Nazi genocide against the Jews. Radical "pro-life" activists who blockade abortion clinics (or who even commit terrorist acts of vandalism, arson, and murder) see what they do as what "good Germans" didn't do in the face of Hitler's atrocities, or what John Brown did do in his attempt at Harper's Ferry to free the slaves through mass rebellion. While John Brown was regarded as a dangerous and treasonous fanatic during his lifetime, Union armies later marched through the South singing the song "John Brown's Body," whose tune Julia Ward Howe borrowed for the great "Battle Hymn of the Republic." Anti-abortionists thus feel that they would be similarly vindicated and honored by history