Dr Kania's Introduction: The first part of this article is dedicated to civilians of all nations and races who have fallen victim to man's inhumanity to man during war. That the account of the Bombing of Dresden has been chosen is that this piece is also dedicated to the sufferings which my father, (at the close of World War II a teenage refugee), and his younger sister endured, seeking out a safe-haven city, and reaching Dresden to find a place to rest and sleep on the evening of the 12th of February, 1945. Both my father and aunt survived the bombing that was to take place the next evening. Their recollections have formed a good part of the introductory vignette, and have created in my mind an indelible insight into how not only a man's enemy, but also his children can bleed and die, and how our hearts should never be so hardened to that fact, no matter how just our cause may be. The second part of this article is dedicated to those who are unable to tell their story of suffering – children denied even the right to open their eyes so as to look upon the world.

The bombing of Dresden…

The merry-go-round was in full motion, and though it was late at night, the children, wide-eyed, were relishing the Circus Sarassani and the performing ponies. Soon clowns appeared riding donkeys – and the laughter of thousands of tiny voices wafted across Dresden Neustadt (New Town). Innumerable crowds of refugees, women and children had poured into the Saxon capital spurred on by the belief that the Allies would spare this city if the 'sister' university cities of Oxford and Cambridge remained untouched. So strong was this belief, that indeed many German soldiers had sent their families to the ancient cultural city; the unwritten 'law' regarding Dresden seemingly well-known to friend and foe alike.

The bombing of Dresden

Before

After

It was February 13th, 1945, Shrove Tuesday, and the war was coming swiftly to a close. The Soviet Army was pushing further West, Patton and his Third Army were speeding East. On that evening, at the same time thousands of children were being entertained en masse in Dresden, Allied bombers were following the course of the River Elbe in search of the jewel of the Saxon Crown. Many disbelieving Allied airmen, whose consciences were to be later haunted, had been given reports earlier that day, that they were on a mission to attack a Gestapo Headquarters, a vital ammunitions work, and a large poison gas plant. History would later reveal that the existence of such targets was spurious. A memo issued by the RAF to pilots stated: "Dresden, the seventh largest city in Germany and not much smaller than Manchester is also the largest unbombed builtup area the enemy has got. In the midst of winter with refugees pouring westward and troops to be rested, roofs are at a premium, not only to give shelter to workers, refugees, and troops alike, but to house the administrative services displaced from other areas. At one time well known for its china, Dresden has developed into an industrial city of first-class importance ... The intentions of the attack are to hit the enemy where he will feel it most, behind an already partially collapsed front ... and incidentally to show the Russians when they arrive what Bomber Command can do." (Halsey Ross, 2003, p. 180)

Almost on cue, as the performance of the donkey-riding clowns came to a close, an air-raid sound could faintly be heard amid the laughter of the children, and then as if bewitched by yet another spectacular performance, the children, trustingly and innocently, looked up to the heavens watching dazzling flares. The voice over the loudspeakers began to announce the Full Alarm, but even still, as the crowds of mothers and their children headed home, laughter could be heard – the unthinkable could never happen. Oxford and Cambridge, easy targets at one time for the Luftwaffe had not been touched – as such, nor would Dresden be bombed.

On Ash Wednesday morning, 1945, the sun did not shine over the city of Dresden, it could not pierce through the three miles of dark smoke which hung over the burning city. Those children who survived, could be seen wandering the fields on the city's outskirts, frightened, exhausted and dazed. Amid the ruins of Dresden, vultures from the famed Zoo, picked at the remains, while hungry lions feasted. The River Elbe which had been on fire during the night, was steaming, and across the city a median estimate of 35,000 people, many of them children, lay dead or dying, tiny twisted corpses – charred, small faces, frozen faces, caught gasping for a moment of air and now fixed for an eternity in this grimace – tossed high upon heaps of forsaken humanity. Even in the reconstructed city of Dresden the echoes of the teaching of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (par. 2314) may be heard, even now so many years afterward: "Every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and man, which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation. A danger of modern warfare is that it provides the opportunity to those who possess modern scientific weapons especially atomic, biological, or chemical weapons – to commit such crimes."

A greater carnage goes on each year today…

Graphic as these images of the past are, according to the Guttmacher Institute in 2003, it was estimated that some 42 million children are murdered annually in the world, not at the hand of some super-power in search of a speedier military victory, but during times of peace, at the legal behest of the child's surest ally – their mother. In a world of increasing 'creature comforts' and technological advances, these children perish each day not only under the pall of regimes that we in the West dismiss readily as totalitarian and culturally and morally inept and bereft, but also with the overarching consent of our 'civilized' governments. Individuals who dress in pin-striped suits and designer pencil skirts, who attend office cocktail parties on busy city streets, who read Kafka, Dostoevsky, Proust, Camus and Dickens, in between such pursuits, are also quite capable of ending unborn human life; as capable, perhaps even more so, than the simple beggars who punctuate the streets and gutters of the Third World. In purely statistical terms, every six years, the total number of women who procure abortions exceeds the total fatalities of all armed conflicts in the 20th Century. (cf. Leitenberg, 2006, p. 14 – records 237.5 million deaths as a direct result of all the wars combined)

"In purely statistical terms, every six years, the total number of women who procure abortions exceeds the total fatalities of all armed conflicts in the 20th Century."

Abortion may be termed the only true crime against humanity, for in the deliberate seeking of death for the unborn child, those who carry out the abortion strike at the very fabric of human existence, the tap-root by which the human family regenerates itself. The child within, has perpetrated no crime, it has caused no offence, other than the fact that it has life, and for this, it must die — it must receive a capital sentence. It has been thus judged by its parents.

Metropolitan Andrii Sheptyts'kyi (1865-1944) in instructing his Greek Catholic faithful about abortion noted that abortion was a form of cancer which tears away at the total cultural and moral tapestry of a people or a nation. In Sheptyts'kyi's words, abortion is "a plague that avenged itself on an entire people and was far worse than enslavement by an enemy. Children were a nation's guarantee of the future, its potential leaders, scholars, artists and writers, and the loss to society of every individual life was incalculable, for no one could ever know the potential contribution to the common good that was thereby erased". (Krawchuk, 1997, 148)

The Ancient Greeks over two thousand years ago knew well that abortion was an ontological crime, tearing at what makes a man a man, and a woman a woman – and thus stated that no medical practitioner should be party to such an act that seeks to wipe humanity from the earth's face. As such, the father of medicine, Hippocrates, wrote in The Oath, "and in like manner I will not give to a woman a pessary to produce abortion". (Hippocrates, 1952, p. xiii)

From the dawn of the Church, the Apostles of Christ in their teaching known as, Didache (c 140AD), also exhorted their communities: "You shall not procure abortion, nor destroy a new-born child". (Jurgens, 1970, Vol. I, p. 2) The very message of Christ, is one of life to the fullest and at the same time the protection of the innocent, especially of children; hence we are told by the Evangelist Mark: "Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs". (Mark 10: 14, The New Jerusalem Bible) The Gospel of Matthew also has Christ tell his audience, "Anyone who welcomes one little child like this in my name welcomes me. But anyone who is the downfall of one of these little ones who have faith in me would be better drowned in the depths of the sea with a great millstone round his neck". (Matthew 18: 5-6, The New Jerusalem Bible) As such, no Christian can claim for themselves abortion as their right and Christ as their God, for Christ is a God of life and love, and not the Prophet of death.

Those who support abortion today, do so in terms of scientific euphemisms to reduce the impact of the reality of killing a child. Whereas the barbarian 'kills', we 'eliminate', whereas the barbarian 'aborts', we 'terminate', whereas the barbarian 'tears apart', we 'dispense tablets'. It seems in contemporary society, au fait or avant-garde to side with that theory that dares enact the unthinkable. Empowered by governments, the abortionist speaks authoritatively about when human life begins, they speak of stages of development, and draw arbitrary lines in the ground, as to when it is morally permissible to abort or not, when in fact the act of killing is not really the act of killing. Discussions take place as to when a fetus becomes human, as if anything that was conceived by a man or woman could be anything less than a human life. Similar discussions take place as to the extent of pain that the unborn can actually feel; in such ways making the operation 'nicer' for all concerned.

Like those who planned Dresden, the task of the abortionist is to deal with illusions, so that a strike can be made – a fatal strike in 'good conscience'. Like the architects of Dresden, the task of the abortionist is the purveying of death. The saintliest person alive can in fact kill a child, if what they believe they are doing is no more than shooting empty cardboard boxes – not realizing that within each box, is chained and gagged a child. If a tree that falls in a forest does not make a noise for want of any living being hearing its fall – then did the child really die, for want of anyone actually seeing its death?

In the case of abortion, men and women become convinced by those who wear white coats and carry degrees in Medicine issued from eminent places of higher learning, that all that they carry within them is a sub-human form, and that the killing of this enemy within is a march toward the liberty of gender, as if the most feminine act can be razed in the cause of feminism. That the life of both mother and child become so intertwined surely indicates that abortion is as much an act against feminism as it is an act of genocide of a species.

Others will say that the abortion is carried out, in the best interest of the child aborted, and of course, in the mother's best interest as well. Still others will tell you, as if the male is no part of the species whatsoever, that men have no right to speak about matters pertaining to women and children. If this is truly the case, then what right do any of us have to speak out over any issue that we are not directly involved in by virtue of our gender, our race, our religion, or our nationality? Using such 'logic': by not being German, we should not condemn the Holocaust; by not being Muslim, we should not condemn the terrorist bombings, by not being male, we should not condemn domestic violence, by not believing in God, we should not be empowered to condemn instances of child abuse within the Church. Each and every one of us not only should but must speak out on matters relating to injustice, and social issues in which the life and death of the innocent is the subject for debate, are the most critical of issues.

We are rightly shocked when we read articles such as those written by Laura Donnelly and Melissa Kite in the The Daily Telegraph (18 May 2008 LINK), that there are thousands of women in Britain who have had four abortions by the time they have reached the age of 30, and that it is now not unknown for some women within this same age group to have had up to six abortions in the United Kingdom. Moreover a 1998 study, titled, Reasons why Women Have Induced Abortions: Evidence from 27 Countries concluded that in the vast majority of cases the reasons why abortions, take place, are:

1. a desire to use abortion as a contraceptive tool;
2. abortion as a means by which to prevent an interruption to studies or career;
3. abortion used so as to maintain financial security and wealth;
4. and finally, the woman perceiving herself to be not mature enough to have a child. (Bankole, Singh, Haas, 1998, International Family Planning Perspectives, Vol. 24, No. 3, September edition)

With regard the highly emotive arguments most commonly purveyed in university and classroom debates as to victims of incest and rape – a 2005 study in the United States highlighted that of the total number of abortions in that nation: 1% were performed because the woman was raped, and 0.5% because the woman was a victim of incest. (Finer, Lawrence B., Frohwirth, Lori F., Dauphinee, Lindsay A., Singh, Shusheela, & Moore, Ann M. (2005), Reasons US Women have abortions: quantitative and qualitative perspectives)

A series of further questions cry out to be answered, by those who have not been offered a breath of the world so as to cry out:

First, if the destruction of Dresden was, and can be rationalized as being the sacrifice of an enemy's children in order to punish their father; then in the case of an individual procuring an abortion, for whose 'sins' or for whose 'circumstances' has the life of the child been sacrificed; whose enemy have we in fact become? Second, if we all agree that the child who is aborted is innocent of any crime – why then when calls are made to outlaw abortion, do so many, otherwise compassionate, well-educated, and intelligent individuals, strive to promulgate 'pro-choice'? Is it because these people believe that there is no turning back on a path they have already taken, and convinced others to take? Third, if we legislate for our nation to be given the 'right' to kill children, what moral or political authority can we then appeal too so as to persuade our citizens that we indeed have the right to defend their inalienable rights – for if the weakest among us are lambs to the slaughter, are we not, but a sanitized, and of course democratic version of Social Darwinism, the strong lording it over the weak? Fourth, how should a child whose parents have agreed to an abortion for one of its unborn siblings, look at its parents? For it is one thing to thank your parents for giving you life, but a totally different scenario to comprehend, that a person like yourself, was killed for no real reason, beyond that they once existed as you yourself exist.

The Church is adamant that God is indeed merciful, that no person duped by the culture of death should be lost — that even if a person has conducted or procured an abortion, that they can come to a metanoia and a new life; for this reason, compassion is required in the hearts of all who approach this sad part of human history, compassion not only for the unborn child, but for those who do not fully know what they do; who need to be educated not in any hysterical fashion, but by the quiet dissemination, revelation and examination of Truth.

Editor's response:
The editor of Catholica, Brian Coyne, has written a separate response to this commentary which can be found in the Catholic forum at: www.catholica.com.au/forum/forum_entry.php?id=13386.

©2008 Dr Andrew Thomas Kania

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