I know what you are thinking, and yes, it is an outrageous title. Moreover, no, I am not advocating for violence of any sort towards anybody. I am merely using this title to grab your attention, make a point, and get you to think.

Last Tuesday morning, toxic bombs filled with Sarin gas were dropped from war planes over the Idlib Province in northern Syria, killing at least 70 innocent civilians, including ten children. Pictures and videos quickly went viral, allowing for the whole world to see what was being done by the Syrian government and the ruthless president, Bashar al-Assad. People across the globe became furious. The attack is reportedly the deadliest chemical attack in Syria since the August 2013 attack in Damascus killing more than 1,400 civilians.

In response to the attacks, President Trump said, “Today’s chemical attack in Syria against innocent people, including women and children, is reprehensible and cannot be ignored by the civilized world.”

Moreover, ignore it he did not. Sixty-three hours later, President Trump gave the order to launch 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at Al Shayrat airfield in western Syria. This was where the chemical weapons attack had originated.

As you can imagine, the chemical attack by Syria on its own citizens and the attack from the US have both drawn quite a bit of criticism around the world. Almost everybody agrees that the Syrian government was wrong in attacking innocent civilians with toxic chemicals. However, there are also many people who think Trump was wrong in firing those missiles at the Syrian airfield. Ironically enough, many of the same people who have been attacking Trump, demanding that he do something to help the Syrians, are now the ones criticizing him for attacking Syrian military installations.

A recent CNN interview with Kassem Eid, who survived a 2013 chemical gas attack in Syria helps to shed some light on the impact Trump is having on those civilians suffering from the attack.

Now, back to the shocking title.

As it should be, people in the US are outraged at the fact that Syria is using chemical weapons to kill innocent civilians. The hypocrisy is found in the fact that many of those individuals appalled with Syria have actually been supporting the chemical killing of innocent human beings in the US for at least a decade.

Just three days after being sworn into office, US President Bill Clinton signed an executive order directing the Department of Health and Human Services and the Food and Drug Administration to take steps to promote the testing, licensing, and manufacturing a chemical drug called RU-486, also known as Mifepristone. The drug became legal in the US in 2000.

This chemical drug, typically used with Misoprostol, is used to bring about abortion. It has a 95% effective rate within the first 50 days of a pregnancy. It is usually used within the first five to seven weeks of pregnancy. However, it has also been known to be used in the second trimester as well.

This chemical pill is not safe or easy as its supporters claim. For the pregnant mother, it can cause heavy bleeding, nausea, vomiting, and painful uterine contractions. TIME Magazine calls this multi-step and multi-pill process “painful, messy, and protracted.” I know people who have taken this and ended up in the hospital. Pharmacy experts project that about 14 million chemical abortions occur in the United States each year. That equals 14 million innocent human beings legally killed in the US every year by toxic chemicals. To put that into perspective, that is more than twice the number of innocent human beings killed by the Nazis killed during the Holocaust.

Speaking of Nazis and the Holocaust, while doing research on this chemical drug, I found an interesting connection.

RU-486 was developed by the French company, Roussel Uclaf, which was a subsidiary of Hoechst AG, a multi-national corporation. Hoechst was one of the companies that came together to make IG Farben, the German chemical and pharmaceutical conglomerate. IG Farben was the company that supplied the Zyklon-B gas to the Nazis who used it in their concentration camps to kill Jewish people by the millions. IG Farben was also the company that designed the Nazi gas chambers. Several of their people were even tried at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity including genocide and slavery. Additionally, in 1938, IG Farben discovered Sarin, the chemical gas used in the recent attacks in Syria. In other words, the RU-486 chemical abortion pill was produced by the same company that produced the gas and gas chambers used to kill millions of innocent Jews in the Holocaust.

All this to say, many of the people who are appalled by the chemical attacks in Syria also fight for unrestricted abortions (including chemical abortions) to be legal all nine months of pregnancy, up until the day of the birth. Ironic, is it not? Abortion, both chemical and surgical, has killed over 60 million innocent human beings in the US since 1973. If we are appalled by Syria using chemicals to kill 70 innocent human beings, we should be even more appalled by the 60 million innocents killed in the US through chemical and surgical abortion. The only difference is that in Syria, the government itself is ordering the killing of innocents with chemicals, and in the US, the government has simply made it legal for others to kill innocents with chemicals. If what Syria did to its own people justifies the US bombing, how much more does the US deserve punishment for the atrocities that it has allowed within our own country?

Originally published in The American Daily Magazine in April of 2017.