Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Coulson Center, I'm Thaddeus Williams. The leading cause of death in 2025 was not heart disease or cancer. In fact, it's something entirely preventable. According to the World Health Organization, 73 million humans died at the hands of a greedy abortion industry worldwide.
That's the equivalent of twelve Nazi holocausts in a single year, more than two victims per second. That's about ten million more casualties than cardiovascular disease, cancer, COVID-19, wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and indeed every other cause of human death combined in twenty twenty five. An argument you've probably heard before is often used to justify this mass genocide. The pre-born are merely a clump of cells and therefore don't have the same right to life. This rhetoric has a long history.
In Germany in the nineteen thirties, Hitler and the Third Reich Popularized Libens un Vertus Liben, Lives Unworthy of Life. To justify their mass extermination of Jews, dissenting Christians, and anyone else they deemed unworthy. This distinction between lives worth living and lives not worth living is always made, of course, by those who place their own lives in the worth living category. The Tutsis in Rwanda were called Inyanzi or cockroaches. KKK literature reduced blacks in the US to quote guerrillas.
The two million victims of the Khumer Rouge were deemed microbes who must be swept aside and smashed. White supremacists at the Unite the Right rally spoke of, quote, anti-white vermin. It's not a jump, then, to call the seventy three million victims of abortion mere clumps of cells, instead of fellow humans to be dignified and protected as lives worth living. It's a dark page torn from the same dehumanizing playbook. The dehumanizing clump of cells argument, our generation's version of Libens und Vertus Lieben, Has helped justify the elimination of nearly 100% of pre-born humans with Down syndrome in Iceland.
with up to 90% of those precious image bearers aborted in the US. Over one hundred sixty million tiny female image bearers in Asia. With sex selective abortion rampant in the US, along with the termination of one-third of black image bearers in America since Roe v. Wade. Do we take Jesus seriously when he commanded, not suggested, that we care for the least of these?
The clump of cells rhetoric only works if we practice one of four forms of deadly discrimination. First, sizism, which says I have more of a right to life than a pre born because I'm bigger. But as leading ethicists point out, The underlying science is clear. At fertilization, a sperm, a male sex cell, unites with an oocyte, a female sex cell. Each of them ceases to be and a new entity is generated.
This is why it is correct to say that the developing human embryo is not a potential human being, whatever that might mean, but a human being with potential. The second form of discrimination is spacism. I have more right to live than a pre-born human until they are outside the mother's womb.
However, the only difference between a baby five seconds prior to and a second after birth is space, the location, which is an arbitrary foundation for personhood. Third is what we could call self sufficiencyism. which says a human has no right to live if he or she cannot yet survive independent of the mother's body. Yet a premature baby viable in Los Angeles hospitals? may not be viable in the Amazon rainforest.
given the availability of life-sustaining technologies. The level of technological sophistication in a given society seems an indefensible criteria for when human rights apply. And as a Christian perspective, considering a life worthy of life only when it can self-sustain is exactly backwards. The more dependent, the more vulnerable, the more helpless a human being, the more we should do to protect it. Fourth is sophisticationism.
A human's rights only kick in when the brain becomes sophisticated enough to experience conscious states like pain. But this confuses harm with the capacity to feel harm. If I'm under heavy sedation, I'm still harmed if someone cuts my arm off, regardless of whether I'm consciously aware of that harm. And so are millions of tiny humans who have their lives snuffed out at the hands of abortionists, millions of which, we must acknowledge, can feel pain.
Society would hopefully zealously oppose, saying some lives aren't worth living because of their skin tone, social status, or sex. Differences in size, space, self sufficiency, and sophistication should never override a human's right to exist. Christians must stand against the dark and deadly logic of Libens un Vertus Liben, especially right now. where the commitment to the unborn is being tested by political loyalties. Our commitment must be unwavering, uncompromised, and kept a priority.
The fundamental truth is that all life is worth living, and that's the bedrock of any healthy and flourishing civilization. For the full expose of the 12 Holocausts of 2025, please follow the Shed and Beam podcast on YouTube. For the Colson Center, I'm Thaddeus Williams.
