The British Empire told their soldiers that German soldiers were savages who killed babies for fun. British propaganda posters showed German soldiers with a big evil grin as they murdered infants.

It was just a propaganda lie, designed to make British peasants hate German peasants, even though they shared common ancestors and were brothers. The Windsors, the British royal family, were themselves a German family.

During the first Iraq war, American war propaganda claimed Saddam Hussein killed Kuwaiti babies by ripping them out of incubators. That wasn’t true either. Just another lie to demonize the enemy.

The truth was, Saddam was put in power by America. And under Saddam, the people of Iraq had universal healthcare and women in Iraq had more freedom and equality than anywhere else in the Middle East. While our dear ally Saudi Arabia stoned women to death for driving a car, women in Saddam’s Iraq were doctors and high ranking members of the government.

And today Republicans are being told that Democrats love to kill babies, because they believe in a woman’s right to choose. It’s just the same old baby-killer lie, designed to make you hate “the other tribe.”

Of course you don’t know this, but abortion is legal pretty much everywhere in the world. Except in a small handful of countries. Mostly religious fanatics in the Middle East. Like the Taliban.

Abortion is legal almost everywhere, not because people all over the world love to kill babies for fun, but because a fetus is not a baby.

Sure, at some point a fetus will develop into a baby, just like an egg will become a chicken at some point. But an egg is not a chicken. They’re two different things.

The brain is made up of different parts. One part is called the cerebral cortex. That’s the part of the brain that’s in charge of higher thought. The cerebral cortex is what makes us think and dream and feel. Without it, you can’t think and you can’t feel anything.

Abortion is legal, before that part of the brain develops, because before it develops, a fetus is just a cluster of cells, that has no more brain function than a mole on your back. It’s not a baby. It can’t think and it can’t feel, anymore than a cyst, a mole, or a tumor can think or feel.

“When Does the Fetus’s Brain Begin to Work? Last of all to mature is the cerebral cortex, which is responsible for most of what we think of as mental life–conscious experience, voluntary actions, thinking, remembering, and feeling. It has only begun to function around the time gestation comes to an end. Premature babies show very basic electrical activity in the primary sensory regions of the cerebral cortex–those areas that perceive touch, vision, and hearing–as well as in primary motor regions of the cerebral cortex.” -ZerotoThree.org “When should society confer moral status on an embryo? When should we call an embryo or a fetus one of us? Synapses — the points where two neurons, the basic building blocks of the nervous system, come together to interact — form in large numbers during the seventeenth and following weeks, allowing for communication between individual neurons. Synaptic activity underlies all brain functions. Synaptic growth does not skyrocket until around postconception day 200 (week 28). By the thirty-second week, the fetal brain is in control of breathing and body temperature.” The embryonic stage reveals that the fertilized egg is a clump of cells with no brain; the processes that begin to generate a nervous system do not begin until after the fourteenth day. No sustainable or complex nervous system is in place until approximately six months of gestation.” -New York Times

In modern medicine, the time of death is determined by a lack of brain function. If there is zero brain function, a patient is dead. A fetus with zero brain function is not alive, any more than a mole is alive. And that’s why abortion is legal all over the world, before the cerebral cortex develops.

“The majority of abortions in 2015 took place early in gestation: 91.1% of abortions were performed at ≤13 weeks’ gestation; a smaller number of abortions (7.6%) were performed at 14–20 weeks’ gestation, and even fewer (1.3%) were performed at ≥21 weeks’ gestation.” -CDC

Virtually all abortions are performed before the brain develops, when the fetus is still just a cluster of cells that cannot think or feel. It’s like removing a mole.

That’s the medical reality. Of course that’s not what the Republicans tell you. They want to use abortion as a wedge issue, to turn us against each other, so they tell you all kinds of lies, to demonize Democrats, about crying, fully developed babies being aborted one day before they’re born and ridiculous nonsense like that:

“Trump spreads false narrative about late term abortions at MAGA rally President Trump made a false claim that mothers and doctors have the option to “execute” babies after they are born at a MAGA rally in Wisconsin.” -MSNBC

It’s just another one of his thousands of propaganda lies, designed to manipulate you.

You know who the real killers are?

Republicans.

You think the death penalty is perfectly normal, right?

Well, you’re pretty alone in the world with that thought. The death penalty is considered barbaric by almost all countries on the planet, except for a handful of dictatorships or crazy fundamentalists, like the Taliban.

Republican talking heads on TV always try to scare you about Muslims and their Sharia law. But Sharia law is simply their version of the 10 commandments. If you don’t like the idea of living under Sharia law, trust me, you’re not gonna like living in a fundamentalist Christian country where the laws are based on the bible.

For starters, polygamy is perfectly ok in the bible, just like in the Koran. And the bible says that a girl who is raped can be sold to her rapist for 50 shekels, or about $580:

“If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, he shall pay her father fifty shekels of silver. He must marry the young woman, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives.” -Deuteronomy 22:28

I don’t know about you, but I would absolutely hate to live in a country that is ruled by biblical law. It would be like living under the Taliban.

According to the bible, if a woman had sex before she gets married, she should be stoned to death:

“If, however, the charge is true and no proof of the young woman’s virginity can be found, she shall be brought to the door of her father’s house and there the men of her town shall stone her to death.” -Deuteronomy 22:20

Yeah, that sounds perfectly reasonable.

Have you ever seen one of those news clips, where a woman gets stoned to death in Saudi Arabia? Savage and barbaric, right?

Well, in other countries they have documentaries like that about the death penalty in America. Other countries look at America as barbaric and savage, for murdering prisoners.

But you think it’s totally normal to execute people. Because that’s how it has been your whole life, and you have been brainwashed to see executing people as normal.

And you think this is freedom.

Almost every other country on the planet calls executing prisoners the exact opposite of freedom.

This article is an excerpt from the book Make Racism Wrong Again.