On November 11th, 1997 Dr. Jack Fainman, a Winnipeg obstetrician who performed abortions was sitting down in his living room watching TV. A sniper’s bullet ripped through the window and entered his shoulder. Dr. Jack Fainman survived, but that was not always how these shootings played out.

It is especially ironic when a professed pro-lifer murders another human being; when a former fetus kills another former fetus in the defense of other fetuses! But as a society we have drunk a deep draught of the-end-justifies-the-means Kool-Aid. Rambo, Clint Eastwood, Dirty Harry, Captain America and any number of our fictionalized heroes have maimed and manslaughtered great numbers en route to a Hollywood happy ending.

The nobility of a cause justifies all. The use of evil means is quickly rationalized with assurances of how villainous our opponents are. We then adopt villainous tactics. How quickly we countenance all manner of evil for the sake of the good: the dropping of atomic bombs of defenseless civilians in Japanese cities, vehicular homicides of cops in the name of BLM, drone executions of foreign enemies living in countries we are not at war with, the use of missiles on densely packed civilian centers in the Gaza Strip, the execution of mentally compromised criminals and euthanasia of the elderly. While shameful activities lists may vary, depending on whether a person is right or left leaning, the results are the same: our gradual acceptance of evil. Even the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Barrack Obama, in six years of drone strikes racked up a body-count greater than 350 years of the Spanish Inquisition.

A recent innovation of the modern courtrooms are victim impact statements. The idea is to humanize the victim for the aggressor. Seeing is believing and seeing can be feeling. Perhaps the aggressor may be taught to feel and have an change of heart. Of course, there are some hardened criminals (and perhaps politicians) for whom such appeals to humanity will carry little currency. However, I hesitate to think that of the mass of humanity. In this comic book I am trying to put a human face on all the characters, both born and unborn, At a certain point in a pregnancy a woman can feel the unborn baby's heartbeat. Oh, that we could stop being a society of strangers and become a society able to feel each other's heartbeat. Then we can take evil out of our Build-A-More-Just-World toolboxes, and make some real progress.