Collett on legalized abortion and the Holocaust

My colleague Teresa Collett writes:

I agree with you that  the Holocaust is not a good analogy for the deaths of millions of unborn children. The final practices of the Nazi regime differ in important ways from the current American practice of permitting abortion through all nine-months of pregnancy. In its final years, the Nazi government killed thousands of its own citizens in furtherance of its goals of racial purity and improvement.  At this point in time, neither state nor federal governments require pregnant women kill their unborn children, regardless of the women's circumstances or the unborn children's condition.  To employ the language of constitutional law, abortions are not state actions, unlike the imprisonment and killing of the Jews by the Nazis.

This is a crucial distinction to citizens, like myself, who believe that each abortion results in the death of a human being.  If the abortions were compelled by law, as they often are in China, we would have to seriously consider, in your words, "overthrowing the government that [forced] this to happen."  Even at this juncture, some have raised the question of whether we are nearing a time when "the Church collectively [must] decide at what point a government becomes sufficiently corrupt that a believer must resist it." http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=3945 

You seem to suggest that those of us who believe that hundreds of children are dying everyday due to legal abortion must abandon all other pursuits to blockade clinics and ferment  revolution if we are morally upright human beings.  I question the moral seriousness of this claim.  Political revolutions are rarely peaceful, more often than not resulting in large numbers of deaths.  Our founding fathers understood this, as evidenced by their statements in the Declaration of Independence.  Abolitionists too recognized that the elimination of great social evils is best achieved by democratic means, and pursued their efforts to abolish slavery in the courts and legislatures for over a century before the issue was resolved through armed conflict.  Do not underestimate the conviction and determination of those of us who continue to hold out hope that we can reverse this grave injustice by legal and political means.

While we agree that women often choose abortion because they are overwhelmed by their personal circumstances, that fact does not make their choice of abortion morally or legally sound.  Many other acts of child abuse and child murder are actions by those who are overwhelmed by personal circumstances and unable to make sound choices.  Yet we do not privilege these acts in the law, making them immune for legal prohibition. 

As to your speculation that everyone shares your belief that "killing a twelve year old is worse than killing a six week old fetus," I must disagree.  The vulnerability of the six-week old child within the womb makes such actions a greater abuse of the powerful over the powerless, than the killing of a twelve-year-old who has some (albeit limited) ability to protect herself. This abuse is aggravated by the fact that, while the murderer of the twelve-year-old may be a perfect stranger, the person directing that the child be killed in an abortion is the mother, the very person intended to nurture and protect the child during those crucial first months of life.  Both killings are deeply wrong, because as you say, "we should protect human life, period." Nonetheless, if we are speaking of which act is of greater moral gravity and thus a more proper subject of legal prohibition, it is the mother killing her defenseless child within the womb.