The Slippery Slope Leading to the Hamas Rallies

How legalizing abortion has led to calls to kill the Jews

One of the benefits—or maybe not—of reaching my late 70’s is that I remember a lot of things that have been lost in the mists of time. Because of this, I can make connections that are not obvious to those whose life experience has been shorter.

Thus I am not shocked at the cries “Death to the Jews” spewed by the thousands, if not millions, of young adults who support Hamas’s massacre of October 7. Disgusted, but not shocked. This outrageous demand is simply the latest end of the slippery slope that began about 50 years ago with Roe v. Wade.

Arguments Before the Roe v. Wade Decision

The US Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion, Roe v. Wade, did not appear from a vacuum, but rather from vigorous debate. Outside of the religious-based discussion about when life begins, the biggest argument against legalizing abortion was that doing so put the USA on a “slippery slope” that could lead to euthanasia. This was derided as a stupid argument because it assumed that this decision opened the doors to the unthinkable.

Photo by Aiden Frazier on Unsplash

The thing about slippery slopes is that once a sled is sliding down one, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to stop.

The Slippery Slope of Abortion

From my vantage point, I see this progression clearly. When I was a college student, abortion was illegal and The Pill was in its infancy. As the only Jewish female undergraduate at Iowa State University, I had polite relations with many, but few friends. This made me a good confidant for someone who needed to talk but did not want to be the subject of gossip.

One of these was a woman in my dorm who told me that she was pregnant and did not know what to do. Her father was a minister and before she left for college her parents had warned her that if she got pregnant they would disown her. However, they had neglected one thing: to explain how pregnancy occurred. Back then, when few young women were sexually active and even petting in high school was mostly confined to the few loose girls, my acquaintance had been swept away by emotions she did not understand and “got caught.”[i] She was terrified. I listened, but had no idea what to say to her.

A few days later I heard she was dead of a septic illegal abortion.

From then on, I followed the abortion controversy closely.

The news media laughed at the slippery slope argument that abortion, a life-saving measure for young women like my poor, ignorant acquaintance, could lead to infanticide or euthanasia. But by the removal of the boundary prohibiting the taking of life, even fetal life, American society moved inexorably towards disaster.

The change happened in tiny increments. At first people said, “First-trimester abortions are okay, but some women, especially young women and teens, may not realize they are pregnant until the fourth month. So let’s loosen this just a little.” Later, after 4^th month abortions became normalized, arguments were provided for later and later dates until now, when no terminal date is set for the legality of late-term abortions.

Once abortion was legal, amniocentesis became a fixture in prenatal care. Abortion was strongly recommended when there was a suspicion of fetal problems. A good friend of mine, another Orthodox Jew, was told that amnio had shown that her first pregnancy had Down Syndrome. She had told the doctor that she did not believe in abortion and did not want amnio, but he had done it against her will and had lied about it. He then pressured her to abort the fetus. PS: The young man in question was born with no congenital or chromosomal issues and today is a successful businessman, husband, and father of several children.

21^st Century Developments

My friend’s story is not uncommon. Pressure to have amnio, and pressure to abort a child that “might” be severely or even moderately handicapped, became the norm. The slide down that slippery slope continued.

In the United Kingdom, children with serious birth defects are routinely denied health care, and parents may not be permitted to take the children out of the country even when care is available elsewhere.[ii]

Abortions after 20 weeks are called “late-term abortions.” Babies born this early need medical care to survive and often have problems that continue at least through their early years, but with advances in medical care many grow up to be fully functional adults. Sometimes babies survive abortion at this stage. They do not receive life-saving treatment and may be killed after birth, or simply discarded and left to die. But most are not born alive, and many abortions at this stage, usually D&Es (dilation and evacuations), are performed by dismembering the fetuses in utero and removing the pieces.[iii]

In an appearance on October 7, 2020, Mike Pence, U.S. Vice President under President Trump, claimed that President Biden, then campaigning for office, supported abortion up to birth. In its fact-check of this claim PolitiFact wrote, “A law professor and director of a center that opposes abortions said that Doe vs. Bolton, a 1973 U.S. Supreme Court companion case to Roe, should also be considered. She said that case has a broad health exception for abortions that makes Pence’s claim fair.”[iv]

Now, in another election year, President Biden’s platform is based on tax-supported abortion up to birth; his vice-president has become an outspoken advocate of abortion.

Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide

The first right-to-die case in the USA was in the late 1970s, about 10 years after Roe v. Wade. Since then, procedures to hasten death have become more common.[v] In Canada, since 2018 many funeral homes have made available comfortable rooms where people can have medically-assisted deaths surrounded by loved ones.[vi]

These choices are not all propelled by a desire to reduce suffering. A report from the Canadian province of Manitoba related that medically assisted deaths could save millions in health care spending.[vii]

Publicity for These Actions

These developments are not secret. They are very public. Those in support of them consider them socially necessary advances, and they announce and defend them online, in print, on television, and in lengthy discussions on social media.

Additionally, these activities are promoted in colleges and universities.

I worked as librarian-in-charge at the Leicester, Massachusetts campus of Becker College in the early 2000s. Leicester was then a very small, rural community with absolutely no night life, so for the 140 students who lived on campus, the library was the place to be. Working from 5 pm until closing, I was the adult in their lives. A major task for me was to help with research. When I moved to a day shift, sending in purchase orders for the books recommended by faculty was added to my job. I saw what students were working on, assignments from their professors, and the books their professors ordered and put on Reserve. I also saw the journals that the professors read. Overwhelmingly, professors were assigning topics, books and readings that supported abortion, euthanasia, and assisted suicide.

The Death of Compassion

Before prenatal testing for congenital disabilities and legal abortion, disabled children were not uncommon. Some attended neighborhood schools and were mainstreamed part of the day in regular classrooms, where the other children learned to accept and help them. While others attended special schools, they lived at home with siblings who often had friends who visited. “…compassion is defined as the emotional response when perceiving suffering and involves an authentic desire to help,”[viii] according to Psychology Today. Interacting as a child with disabled children gives the opportunity to develop that response.

A friend whose oldest child has Down Syndrome has two younger children, now adults. One is a social worker, the other a teacher. A young woman whose two siblings both have physical disabilities, one of whom would have been institutionalized a generation or two ago, is now a nurse. This is common. Research has shown that in families without other demographic challenges, children with a disabled sibling often have enhanced psychosocial and emotional development.^[ix]

But because of abortion, the number of children with congenital disabilities has reduced dramatically. And American society, as a whole, has become much less compassionate. This is not a coincidence; most of today’s young adults were not raised with the natural education in compassion that grew from knowing and working with children who were like them, but different.

Gen Z, today’s young adults, are passionate about volunteering. But they are not particularly interested in volunteering to help community members. “Gen Z is passionate about making the world a better place,” according to a survey by Door of Clubs, a job recruiting services organization. “From the environment to equality, Gen Z is passionate about making the world a better place.”[x]

But what makes the world better? The leftists and progressives who make up the majority of outspoken university administrators and faculty have a laundry list of ideas based on DEI, (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion). This philosophy says that the world is divided int oppressors and oppressed; espouses the concept that a child can be born into the wrong body; and so forth, most of which would have been laughed at when I was young. And they have indoctrinated the young. I saw this at the Becker College Library, and we have seen this in massive demonstrations dominated by young adults in support of George Floyd, Black Lives Matter, and the LGBTQI+ movement.

What Does This Have to Do With Pro-Hamas Demonstrations?

As I said in my post, Freedom, Not Always the Way It Looks, “Today’s Free Palestine rallies remind me of those days [60’s/70s]: a lot of ignorant college students who want to make a mark on the world join to make themselves feel important. They have absolutely no concept of what they are screaming, or what the ramifications might be. And like the other ‘freedom movements,’ they are without limits.”[xi]

Photo by Nikolas Gannon at Unsplash.com

At the massive pro-Hamas demonstrations, chants of “Kill the Jews” are prominent. To my thinking, this abhorrent, but not not weird, sick, or crazy. Gen Z students and young adults grew up in an environment where civilized values and even life were cheapened. They were raised listening to cultural heros and TV stars who preached that abortion is necessary and maybe even a sacrament, who supported rioters and looters who burned down poor neighborhoods, and who idolized druggies who, in the throes of overdose-caused psychosis, resisted arrest moments before the drugs killed them, as happened with George Floyd. These were all causes that thinking people avoided, but the young, who were indoctrinated rather than educated, embraced.

My students at Becker College wrote term papers on how physician-assisted suicide enhances death and why abortion is preferable to adoption, topics that were recommended in journals aimed at their professors. They knew that fetuses with disabilities were routinely aborted, both to protect society at large from the high cost of medical care and to protect families from the expense and heartache of a disabled family member. And they were taught the specious argument that no life is better than a difficult one.

All combined, these concepts taught them that society has a right and a responsibility to rid the world of the undesirable. Who was considered undesirable in these previous movements? White men, filthy capitalists (including small business owners in minority neighborhoods), conservative Christians, police, and straight people.

But when the agenda turned to Israel, the stakes changed from disruption (the tactic used until now) to worse—because now it involves the Jews, the least-understood and most-maligned group in history, a tiny fraction of the world’s population living in a tiny slice of rocky land.

Never having learned compassion, growing up well-educated about the so-called benefits of removing undesirable babies, sick, and old people from life, and not having been taught about a loving God who created all life for a purpose, the death-chanting young adults are products of their age.

For the salvation of western civilization, they need to be stopped. The demonstrations must be stopped, and the foreign nationals who appear to be prevalent in the organization of the riots need to be deported. (Simultaneously, the teachers and mentors who despise Israel for ideological, not factual, reasons, need to be removed from positions of influence, but that’s another article.)

As part of turning the citizenry around, the United States and Europe need to understand a difference that Israelis understand: the difference between murder and killing. This difference, which is unclear in English, is very clear in Hebrew, the language of my guide for morality. Killing is in self-defense, defense of others, or accidental (manslaughter); murder is deliberately taking life for a selfish reason.

If change is to occur, western society needs to reinstate the belief that all life is valuable and all murder is wrong.

I do not see this happening.  

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[i] This scenario was not as bizarre then as it seems now. A few years later, when I was a caseworker for the Idaho Dept. of Health and Welfare, I had several young clients whose parents had not explained sex to them. When they had become pregnant, their parents’ initial reaction was to kick them out of the home. Some later relented, others did not.

[ii] Zylstra,L., Indi Gregory’s Deaths Reminds Us to Defend Parental Rights over Government Power. LifeNews.com, Nov. 17, 2023, https://www.lifenews.com/2023/11/17/indi-gregorys-deaths-reminds-us-to-defend-parental-rights-over-government-power/ , accessed Jan. 28, 2024

[iii] If you took reports of Hamas terrorists on October 7 cutting a pregnant woman open, removing the fetus, and then hacking it to pieces as a lie, think about this: hasn’t the legality of the D&E procedure normalized hacking a fetus into pieces? 

[iv] Valverde, M., Fact-checking Pence’s claim on Democrats and abortion ‘up to the moment of birth’, PolitiFact, October 9, 2020, https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/oct/09/mike-pence/fact-checking-pences-claim-democrats-and-abortion-/ Accessed Jan. 28, 2024.

[v] Grewal, K., A brief history of euthanasia in the United States and relevant ethical concerns. Grounds, the Virginia Journal of Bioethics, Jan. 19, 2019, https://www.vabioethics.com/content/2019/1/19/a-brief-history-of-euthanasia-in-the-united-states-and-relevant-ethical-concerns , accessed Jan. 28, 2024.

[vi] Lupton, A., Funeral homes pivot to offer rooms for medically assisted deaths. CBC News, Oct. 26, 2021,  https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/funeral-homes-pivot-to-offer-rooms-for-medically-assisted-deaths-1.6224353 , accessed Jan. 28, 2024.

[vii] Malone, K., Medically assisted deaths could save millions in health care spending: report. CBC News, Jan. 23, 2017, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/medically-assisted-death-could-save-millions-1.3947481 , accessed Jan. 28, 2024.

[viii] Seppala, E., Compassion: our first instinct. Psychology Today US, June 3, 2013, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/feeling-it/201306/compassion-our-first-instinct , accessed Jan. 28, 2024.

[ix] Macks, R. J., Reeve, R. E., The Adjustment of Non-Disabled Siblings of Children with Autism, Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, October 27, 2006, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-006-0249-0, accessed Jan. 25, 2024.

[x] Urses, S., Gen Z expects you to embrace volunteerism. TLNT, Sept. 13, 2019, https://www.tlnt.com/articles/gen-z-expects-you-to-embrace-volunteerism , accessed Jan. 28, 2024.

[xi] Geshelin, H.B., Freedom: Not always the way it looks, TanteHannaWrites.com, Dec. 26, 2023, https://tantehannawrites.com/p/freedom-not-always-the-way-it-looks , accessed Jan. 28, 2024.