"Crime Against Humanity" Argument
It is sometimes suggested that it’s inconsistent for someone to get “all worked up” about abortion without getting just as upset about some other societal problem like corporate corruption, for example. This comparison is odd because, at minimum, we are talking about two different scales of “wrong.” While corporate cronyism and corruption are bad, and we should vigorously enforce laws and policies that encourage free trade and otherwise ethical business practices, we are probably not talking about a “Crime Against Humanity” anywhere comparable to that of abortion. But, then the objection arises: isn’t “Crime Against Humanity” too strong a phrase? Doesn’t that exaggerate things a bit? No. That phrase is disturbingly literal.
Definition: “Crime against Humanity”
The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), article 7, defines “Crimes Against Humanity” as such: “Crimes against humanity” include any of the following acts committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack:
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murder;
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extermination;
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enslavement;
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deportation or forcible transfer of population;
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imprisonment;
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torture;
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rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, or any sexual violence of comparable gravity;
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persecution against an identifiable group on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious or gender grounds;
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enforced disappearance of persons;
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the crime of apartheid;
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other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering or serious bodily or mental injury.”
Source: International Criminal Court, The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC: The Hague, Netherlands, 2021), Part 2, Art. 7, pages 3-4, accessed 11 March 2025 at:
https://www.icc-cpi.int/sites/default/files/2024-05/Rome-Statute-eng.pdf
Abortion Policy Compared
“‘Crimes against humanity’ include any of the following acts committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack:”
a. Abortion is widespread, legal in all 50 states,
b. It’s directed against human occupants of the U.S. who have been legally denied almost all civil and human rights.
c. Yet it’s perpetrated in full knowledge of the U.S. populace, even with passionate defense by otherwise compassionate citizens.
“Murder”
a. While “murder” can be defined as “illegal killing of a human being,” the term “murder,” is here used in the definition of “crimes against humanity.” That indicates it’s the moral sense of the word “murder.” Legality doesn’t guarantee morality, indeed, the category of “crimes against humanity” was introduced, in part, to prosecute large scale injustices regardless of whether they were legal, commanded, or common at the time (see, the Nuremberg Trials, 1945-1946). In this way, this sense of “murder” refers to “unethical killing of a human being.”
b. By this definition, abortion easily qualifies as unethical killing – given that it’s the deliberate killing of an innocent non-threatening human being, within a societal policy that allows for race-based, sex-selective, and ability-based abortion, often including dismemberment, crushing, scalding, and torturous death for the child-in-utero (especially in 20+ week abortions) at rates that are disproportionately killing black and minority children-in-utero.
c. The humanitarian burden of proof favors life, so that unless a particular case of human killing is overwhelmingly justified (beyond a reasonable doubt) then that killing is deemed unjustified. It is a dangerous precedent to shift the burden of proof onto the protectors of life.
d. The Roe v. Wade decision erred seriously in this regard. Their notion of “potential human” was and is scientifically inaccurate since it was known from before then and ever since that biologically distinct human life begins at conception. It is not a “potential human” but a human with potential.
“Extermination”
This term is fitting since there have been about 66,000,000 children in utero killed already (as of 2025), just in the United States, and just since 1973, and that estimate only including documented and measurable abortions, not illegal, back-alley, and un-reported at-home abortions (source: http://www.numberofabortions.com/).
“Enslavement”
a. This aspect does not directly relate to abortion, but it does indirectly relate. Abortion policy allows for a functional separation between sex and its natural consequence of pregnancy.
b. When it comes to sex trafficking, pregnancy is a liability; it’s bad for business. Abortion is one more option available to sex traffickers to keep business thriving.
c. In January 2011, Live Action Films conducted a sting operation revealing that some Planned Parenthood clinics aided and abetted clients who presented themselves as a Pimp and his 14 year old prostitute (source:
https://www.liveaction.org/what-we-do/investigations/child-sex-trafficking-cover-up/)
d. We should not assume that the actions of the few clinic workers reflect the culture and beliefs of Planned Parenthood broadly. Hopefully, those were just isolated incidents. But neither can we safely assume that this case was the only example in the 50+ years of abortion-choice policy in the U.S.
e. If people who are presenting themselves as obvious sex traffickers can find illegal support from Planned Parenthood, then we have to conclude that covert sex traffickers have slipped through as well before, especially in settings where parental consent is not required, and profit incentives plus confidentiality are high enough values that they can conflict with other concerns about health and well-being.
“Deportation or forcible transfer of population”
a. Children-in-utero are right where they are supposed to be for their given stage of development. Abortion, however, literally evacuates them from this biological home.
b. Unlike adult deportations/exiles, however, this evacuation means almost certain death. Indeed it is the normal expectation that the evacuation of a pre-viable fetal human being-in parts or in whole–will kill him or her.
“Imprisonment”
a. This facet doesn’t directly apply to abortion policy.
b. Abortion policy does, however, radically restrict the rights and interests of fathers since they are not allowed any legal say in the fate of their unborn children. It would be an overstatement, however, to call this restricted right “imprisonment”
“Torture”
a. Abortion practices include chemical burning, suffocation, dismemberment, crushing, etc. It is no exaggeration to say that as soon as the child-in-utero has developed enough to feel pain, abortion invariably tortures it to death.
b. Prior to the child’s ability to feel pain, abortion invariably harms it – as death is inherently harmful to the child’s life – even if the “harm” does not include felt pain.
“Rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, or any sexual violence of comparable gravity”
a. Abortion choice policy is compatible with sex slavery, as mentioned above, although neither directly causes each other.
b. Rape cases are a common justification for abortion–since the pregnant rape victim did not have a choice to get pregnant.
c. Abortion-choice policy, however, also accommodates rapists, incest, molestation, and any other sexual abuse where the abuser is harder to catch and prosecute because the victim’s body bears no public witness to the crime and the foremost evidence of the crime is destroyed (the child).
d. While rape pregnancies are ethically difficult for pro-choice and pro-life positions, abortion has the unintended side effect of accommodating rapists, molesters, and perpetrators of incest. If the DNA evidence is disposed of, it becomes harder to convict the criminal.
e. Simply put, abortion is a rapist’s best friend.
“Persecution against an identifiable group on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious or gender grounds”
a. Current abortion policy accommodates sexist, racist, or otherwise ethnocentric discrimination. A woman can abort her child because she doesn’t want a (1) girl baby, (2) a black/hispanic/asian/etc/ baby, (3) non-american/etc. baby, (5) physically or mentally disabled child, etc.
b. A woman can even abort her baby because she doesn’t want parental ties to a father with a different religion/political stance.
c. Abortion policy broadly affirms most any discrimination to the point of killing the oppressed party.
“Enforced disappearance of persons”
a. Obviously, abortion kills a child-in-utero but besides the killing, there is the added effect of making him or her disappear.
b. Often abortion is an effort to forget a mistake, to hide the past, to destroy any evidence of a relationship. The fetal human being is treated as an inconvenient object, not as a human subject.
c. While many women after abortions wish they could forget their aborted child, sometimes the disappearance leaves a painful memory behind. The disappearing act only works sometimes. Often the post-abortion mother is haunted by the felt sense of murder, even if she thinks her behavior was justified.
“The crime of apartheid”
a. Abortion is clearly not a civilly enforced segregation. It does however, have a disproportionate effect on black communities.
b. In that regard, pro-choice democrats, black caucuses, and any Eugenicists have a shared interest in keeping abortion inexpensive and widely accessible for disenfranchised black people. The effect has not just been a proportionate use of abortion services but rather a disproportionate incidence of abortion among black women, i.e., 3-4x’s higher rate than their white counterparts (source:
https://www.guttmacher.org/gpr/2008/08/abortion-and-women-color-bigger-picture)
c. This fact has not gone unnoticed among black prolife organizations like Maafa 21 (http://www.maafa21.com/) and Black Genocide (http://www.blackgenocide.org/). According to these organizations, abortion-choice policy has advanced cultural racism at an alarming and destructive rate. Jim Crow laws, for example, mostly oppressed black people. Those laws were less often used to killed black people outright. But abortion has killed millions of black human beings.
d. Slavery, of course, is a radically different kind of social problem. Abortion can’t compare to slavery in terms of forced-labor, kidnapping, trans-Atlantic human commerce, years-long dehumanizing subjugation of it’s primary victims. Nevertheless, it’s worth considering the raw numbers of slaves traded in the U.S., and the plausible death-tolls that it likely caused. That’s because slavery is a “baseline” for large-scale societal injustice, which virtually no one in the Western humanitarian tradition would consider to be defensible social good. Slavery needed abolishing, and that’s widely admitted.
e. Compared to slavery in the United States (305,000 slaves) and North America (12.5million slaves), Abortion in the U.S. alone is over 66 million. That’s about 2000% and 500% higher respectively than the transatlantic slave trade. And only a portion of slaves died from slavery, meanwhile almost all abortion cases kill the victim (source:
http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/estimates.faces).
f. The abortion death-toll has far surpassed that of institutionalized slavery in the U.S.
“Other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering or serious bodily or mental injury.”
a. Given that the child in utero is literally a member of the homo sapiens species it is literally a human being and violent, torturous, or other mutilating acts against him or her is literally inhumane.
b. Abortion openly harms all aborted children. And from around the 8-20th week onward, when they are known to be able to feel pain, abortion injures, hurts, and tortures children in utero causing their physical suffering.
Objection: “Abortion is legal, so whatever it does to humanity it is not a ‘crime.’”
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But this objection misses the point. The chief reason for international laws regarding human rights is that different states and nations may have radically inhumane and even tortuous laws that violate people’s human rights. The grounding for human rights is not legal convention but human nature. Crimes against humanity violate human rights, no matter whether they are legal or not.
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Abortion is currently legal in much of the western world but chattel slavery was legal for ages in most of the world, forced marriage of adolescent girls is legal in many areas, homosexuality is grounds for death in some countries, and apartheid was legal for many years in South Africa.
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The category of “crimes against humanity” is expressly established for the sake of human rights violations, not just civil or criminal offenses relative to a country.
Conclusion
What can we conclude, then, about abortion? Abortion is clearly a crime against humanity on many levels, and for those aspects of the phrase to which it does not directly align, such as sex slavery and racism, it indirectly aligns with or broadly accommodates those abuses.
Returning to the comparison, at the beginning, whatever wrongs we might find in corporate cronyism or white collar crimes, we are probably not dealing with a crime against humanity anywhere comparable to that of abortion.
It is hard, if not impossible, to find any event natural or man made, in human history that has killed more human beings than abortion (source:
https://intelligentchristianfaith.com/2015/06/24/abortion-is-the-worst-thing-ever-literally/)
