What do serial killers, slave-owners, eugenicists, and abortionists have in common? According to Michael Hitchborn of American Life League, all these groups can only carry out crimes against human beings by first de-personalizing or trivializing the humanity of their victims.
In a new ALL report released on YouTube, Hitchborn makes his case beginning with the famous 1991 film "Silence of the Lambs," where a crazed transsexual killer pursued by an FBI agent (Jodie Foster) continually refers to his latest female victim as "it."
In doing so, says Hitchborn, the killer "depersonalizes his victim, reducing her to the status of an object or animal."
"The thing is, if his victim isn't a person, then in his own mind, there is nothing wrong with what he is about to do," continued Hitchborn.
The pro-life leader explained that a similar process of depersonalization and dehumanization is evident in the way that abortion advocates speak of a child developing in its mother's womb as a "fetus", "fertilized egg", or a "clump of cells."
"The use of terms like these is the first step in reducing humans to the status of non-persons," he added, saying history was replete with such examples.
Hitchborn referred to a clause within the U.S. Constitution prior to the enacting of the 13th amendment, where slaves were counted as three-fifths of a person. The agreement he said was a compromise with a culture that "viewed human slaves as property." Proponents of slavery would claim that slaves were not people, and eugenicists of the 19th and 20th century would do the same thing, referring to those with disabilities or of certain ethnicities as "undesirables."
Taken to its logical conclusion, these ideas led to the forming of the Nazi racial purity movement, which defined certain people as "subhuman" in popular propaganda.
"The excuses, and they are excuses, for denying the humanity or personhood of individual human beings is done for one reason and one reason only: it is the only way to create a class of humans without any rights."
Hitchborn said that Planned Parenthood, just like slave-owners, has to offer similar arguments dehumanizing or depersonalizing the unborn in order to justify their actions, with a motive for profit at the end of the line. Hitchborn told LifeSiteNews.com that "Planned Parenthood's sole agenda is to gain money through the murder of children."
Hitchborn pointed to a Planned Parenthood White Paper written in 1985 and republished in 2002 in response to the pro-life film "Silent Scream." The paper argues that a "fetus" of 12 weeks gestation "cannot be compared in any way to a fully formed functioning person" – arguing that the unborn child's dependency on his mother for survival, its undeveloped organs, and lack of conscious thought, means he does not merit the status of person.
"It is instead an in utero fetus with the potential of becoming a child."
Planned Parenthood said they were responding to Silent Scream, because they feared it could jeopardize the "constitutional right to abortion" as well as "the lives and careers of abortion providers."
"It really is a simple concept," Hitchborn told LSN. "The only people making the argument that a human is not a person are those who want to create a class of subhumans that have no rights."
Hitchborn praised the personhood initiative in Colorado, which is a ballot initiative to amend the State Constitution to recognize the personhood rights of all humans, from their biological beginning to their natural death. The amendment states: "the term 'person' shall apply to every human being from the beginning of the biological development of that human being."
"The personhood initiative out in Colorado ties in perfectly with what [pro-life groups] are doing, because they are working on establishing an amendment that would recognize there is no do distinction between that which is a person and that which is a human," said Hitchborn.
"They are establishing that we are all human, and that we are persons: that we all have a beginning and that beginning takes place in the womb, and not outside the womb, or some random spot on the spectrum by people who have an agenda to fulfill.
"There is no distinction between a person and a human, and the only people that make that distinction are those that have an agenda."
Contact: Peter J. Smith
Source: LifeSiteNews.comDate Published: August 20, 2010
