By Professor Donald R. Byrne
While I was a student at Holy Redeemer High School in Southwest Detroit, conducted by the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary from Monroe Michigan, I became familiar with the march of the French in the expulsion of the Acadians (1755-1763) from Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island as well a portion of Maine, in the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem, Evangeline, A Tale of Acadia. The British, having conquered the French in North America, wanted to remove those who had migrated from France, to a distant land we now call Louisiana.
During classes on religion at St. Gabriel Grade School, also in Southwest Detroit, but conducted by the Adrian Dominican Sisters as well as repeated in my high school classes, I became familiar with the forced marches of the Israelites first into Egyptian captivity and later into the Babylonian captivities.
From various sources I was made aware of other notorious marches, including the Bataan Death March of allied prisoners in World War II. In my grade school days I became a friend of Larry Ohanian who was of Armenian extraction. His recent ancestors had been victims of the Ottoman Turks who massacred many of the able-bodied and force-marched the rest out of their native lands to the Syrian Desert (Armenian Genocide) and in the process nearly 2 million Armenians perished.
There have been many other such marches. The Americans marched the Native Americans, of whom I am related, from areas in the Deep South such as Florida and Georgia to Oklahoma, the Trail of Tears. In more recent times, the Nazi’s forced millions to railroad cars and at the end of their journey forced them into concentration camps. Jews, Gypsies, political troublemakers, the physically and mentally handicapped, and many others were amongst their numbers.
In these various marches, many died along the way and many more were to die in the areas to which they were relocated including what we now call concentration camps.
Mankind’s inhumanity to fellow human beings seems endless.
There have been other such mass atrocities not involving marches such as Pol Pot murdering up to more than a third of all Cambodians, and Joseph Stalin starving to death up to an estimated third of all the Ukrainians because they did not agree with collectivized farming among other charges.
We are now in the midst of another march, done independently and mostly the result of a free will choice that collectively swamps in number, all of these other marches combined. On a smaller scale, this atrocity has been occurring throughout time. More recently, however, its practice has become very widespread, legalized, and in some nations like mainland China, it has become a mandatory national policy. The number of victims is in the hundreds of millions. Nearly all of them result in the deaths of the innocent victims involved.
To criticize the ongoing practice of slaughtering millions of babies in the mothers’ wombs, often means you will be labeled as a person spouting political incorrectness or a hate monger attacking women. Unlike the mass marches of the past that I’ve mentioned, these murders occur one at a time.
Of course, I am speaking of the individual free will marches, often under duress, of a pregnant woman marching to abortion mills often encouraged by such groups as Planned Parenthood. Many millions more of newly conceived babies live only a few hours or days as they succumb from the mother’s ingesting of aborticides, given the misleading name of ‘birth control’ pills, making the mother’s womb a virtual pre-birth tomb.
Science now knows that these aborted babies were human beings developing in their mother’s womb just as do babies who leave the womb alive to continue their physical and mental development for a number of years before they reach adulthood.
The efforts of women like Dr. Monica Miller on the Theology faculty at Madonna University, have given us evidence of these atrocities. She has risked incarceration by the law, as evil as such laws are, by searching the dumpsters outside of the abortion mills. Her heroic efforts and those of others have given us a pictorial record of these atrocities. She, as have others, helped retrieve some of these corpses of dead babies and given them more decent Christian burials, but most of the aborted are either incinerated as medical waste or are deposited at a local landfill at the end of a ride there by a garbage truck.
My God, what has happened to our society? Do they think that no harmful effects will come from these barbaric practices?
Just you wait and see!
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Professor Donald R. Byrne authored this essay on January 1, 2013 that was published on Catholic Journal. He was a retired Professor of Economics at the University of Detroit Mercy and held a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Notre Dame. A devout Catholic and family man, Dr. Byrne passed into eternity on May 7, 2018. May God rest his soul.
