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TechnoratiThe following is an edited transcript of a message preached by R. Albert Mohler, Jr. for "Sanctity of Human Life Sunday" on January 18, 2009. Today's installment is the fourth in the six-part series.
In the world in which abortion would make sense, we would have to talk about life as being potentially worthy, having potential dignity. We would talk about life as perhaps being worthwhile and worthy of protection. Immediately, you can see where that slippery slope leads as you then have to decide which life is worthy of life and which life is not worthy of life.
In the 20th century we can look at the long parade of horrible terrors, and one of the easiest to identify is the medical ethics of Germany before and during the Third Reich. There, the Germans actually had a medical philosophy - Lebensunwerten Lebens - "life unworthy of life," that formed the foundation for their murderous atrocities. The Germans actually came up with a gradation of life, from life that was definitely worthy of life to life that was definitely unworthy of life. And the life that was worthy of life was Aryan life. It was the life of those who were considered to be physically and genetically superior, who could contribute to the welfare and the defense and the policies of the Third Reich. And the life unworthy of life: Gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally retarded, the physically disabled, Jews.
We look back at the Third Reich and the German medical ethics that produced that and we ask how could it be that agents of medicine and doctors who trained with the kind of even secular moral ethic of the Hippocratic Oath - how is that doctors could turn into the agents of death rather than the agents of life? It is because they buy into a worldview in which there is a gradation from life that is worthy of life to life that is unworthy of life. Well, if you can do that in terms of Jews and in terms of gypsies and do that in terms of others, then you can certainly do it in terms of human life that is in various stages of development.
In the United States, we would be horrified to think that we would be the kind of people who would produce concentration camps, extinguishing people who we render to be "life unworthy of life." Well, we have not extinguished people on the basis of ethnicity and race, but we have done this very thing on the basis of stage of development. We have decided as a people - by the action of the Supreme Court and by the inaction of our political process - we have decided that we can allow unborn human life to be declared potentially "life unworthy of life."
You know, at the end of World War II, one of the most incredible things that took place was at the concentration camps. As the allies penetrated into the core of Germany and German-held territory, they pressed further and further into the heart of the Third Reich, one mile at a time, and they eventually came to these camps of death. The interesting though, is that these camps were not alone. All around these camps were villages and German towns and communities under German control in Poland and elsewhere, and the people of these communities worked in these concentration camps - their job was a job of industrialized homicide.
At the end of the war, General Eisenhower ruled that these people who had worked in the camps and lived around them would have to walk through them. There are some incredible pictures and incredible footage of these German citizens - housewives and butchers and bakers and their children - had to walk through these concentration camps to see what they had done. Continue »
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