A genocide to call our own.

Another day, another suicide bomber. Ten, twenty, thirty killed in this market place, that restaurant, or on yet another bus. It's no longer surprising to hear reports of suicide bombings or military 'reprisal' killing sprees. It's less a matter of 'if' than when, where, and how high the death toll.

I can't even pretend to understand the complexities of Middle East politics or Arab-Jewish relations. What perplexes me is the more general question of why some types of murder make the news and others don't. Ethnic and religious-based massacres are reported regularly (the only notable exception seems to be the persecution of Christians in predominantly Muslim countries); socioeconomic killings are not. There's dead silence about the abortion hotocaust, and the 'dark side' of euthanasia. (We hear very little about the increasingly common involuntary kind, but we're regularly treated to emotional appeals to let terminally ill people 'determine their own destiny.')

Why is our society distressed by news of terrorist acts, but not upset at the notion of millions of unborn babies being sliced up and suctioned from their mothers' wombs? What's worse still, many of these abortions are being performed by self-described Christian and Jewish doctors, with the full assent of the babies' nominally Christian and Jewish parents.

Moreover, North Americans (even 'committed' Christians among them) as well as modern Israelis have wholeheartedly embraced the use of contraception and abortion as population control measures. While this is almost understandable for secular humanists, who see no point in human life before birth or after death, it is incomprehensible (or ought to be) among Christians and Jews. Both groups have known bloody persecution. Both believe not only in the sanctity of human life, but also in an afterlife. They simply ought to know better.

Within the last year, a local priest made this point in his homily. He was commenting on an attack by Islamic extremists upon a Christian church in Asia: "[Muslims] don't have to kill us--we're doing it to ourselves." He went on to say that since Islamic nations are virtually the only ones with healthy birth rates, all they need do to secure global domination is to bide their time. Admittedly, it's not quite that simple, but he was exaggerating to make a point.

North America and Western Europe (both traditionally Christian areas) are contracepting and aborting themselves to a slow demographic death. Statistics reveal the birth rate has fallen below replacement level. I'm willing to bet that the statistics for pro-choice modern Israel are equally grim.

As for terrorism, it puzzles me that we North Americans are shocked and horrified by the terrorists' flagrant disregard for human life. We live in a society that sees nothing wrong with partial birth abortion, harvesting and selling body parts and stem cells from aborted babies, or killing handicapped children with poison gas.

Canada is so very complacent about abortion that it no longer even keeps statistics on it, making it impossible to tally the casualties. How many preborn babies have died in North America over the last thirty years? How many worldwide? The number would make the death toll of Sept.11 (and probably several major wars) look like a drop in the bucket.

Secular humanists can perhaps be excused for being duped into believing that problems like hunger, sub-standard living conditions, disease, war, and terrorism can be solved with unnatural population control measures, or using human beings as lab rats. Their world-view is rather one-dimensional, utilitarian, and based on certain notions of "quality of life." There's only so much to go around, and if everybody doesn't get a share, it means there are too many people, so reducing their numbers becomes the logical solution. If your life is worth less than mine (and it is if I say so), then I can kill you, and then harvest your organs or stem cells to cure my diseases. When professed Christians and Jews buy into these fantasies, however, the result can only be genocide.

Believers claim an understanding (even if only partial and imperfect) of God's revelation about the heart of man, the state of the world, and the meaning of existence. If believers in God won't stand up for the sanctity of human life and the integrity of the human body, who will? Contraception, embryonic stem cell research, abortion, sterilization, euthanasia, "compassionate homicide"--with friends like these, who needs terrorism?

Mariette Ulrich writes from Scott, SK. Her column appears every other month.