Nazism and Abortion
By Don Feder, All About Issues, March-April, 1992
Don Feder, syndicated columnist with the Boston HeraldHere is a place where angels fear to tread. Note the resemblance of abortion to Nazi genocide, and you’ll likely be accused of one or more of the following: insensitivity, devaluing the Holocaust, hysteria, smear tactics.
And yet, and yet, the parallels between Nazism and destruction of the preborn, in both theory and practice, are too stark to ignore. With the idea that human beings in a certain stage of development or condition can be classified as non-persons and disposed of at the whim of others, as well as with growing acceptance of the quality-of life dogma (that some lives are so devoid of value that ending them is a blessing), we are perambulating a path traversed by the German people half a century ago.
Make the obvious comparison, and abortion advocates will dredge up that old Hider quote about abortion being "exterminated with a strong hand."
Certainly, the Nazis opposed some abortions, but not (absurd notion) because they believed in the sanctity of human life.
A consummate pragmatist, Hider judged any action by its impact on his ultimate goal: the advancement of the thousand-year reich. Since they wanted more "pure-blood" Germans for expansion to the East, the Nazis were opposed to Aryan abortions. As they viewed the inhabitants of those lands as untermenschen (subhuman), they were enthusiastic about abortions for Jews, Poles and Slavs.
In August of l942 Martin Bormann wrote to Nazi propagandist Alfred Rosenberg, concerning the fate of subject peoples: "The Slavs are to work for us. In so far as we do not need them, they may die. Slav fertility is undesirable. They may possess contraceptives or abort, the more the better...." The fuhrer himself was in complete accord: "In view of the large families of the native population, it could only suit us if girls and women there had as many abortions as possible."
The Nazis did everything conceivable to facilitate the process, from liberalizing abortion in Poland, to forcing abortions for slave laborers. Among other atrocities, the War Crimes Tribunal indicted ten Nazi leaders for "encouraging and compelling abortions," which were correctly judged to be a "crime against humanity." At his 1961 trial in Israel, Adolf Eichmann was charged with, "directing that pregnancies (be) interrupted among Jewish women" in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, with the "intent to destroy the (Jewish) people."
The death camps were the culmination of Nazi dehumanization and slaughter of whole categories of people. Along with involuntary sterilization, coerced abortions were originally performed on Germans with physical and mental defects thought to be hereditary. As early as 1934, the Hamburg Eugenics Court declared a "racial emergency" as its rational for launching the eugenic abortion program.
About the same time, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger was pushing birth control and abortion as racial purification measures. "More children for the fit, fewer for the unfit" (the latter encompassing all Americans not of Nordic descent) and "Birth control to breed a race of thoroughbreds" were among her favourite slogans. The April 1933 issue of Sanger’s Birth Control Review, devoted exclusively to eugenics, included an article by Dr. Ernst Rudin, a leader of Hitler’s forced sterilisation/euthanasia program.
Germans (insane, incurably ill, handicapped) were put to death under the Third Reich’s euthanasia program. Killing their own people, Nazi doctors acquired the mortal skills later employed in the Final Solution. The defense of the medical murders at Nuremberg echoes in the current euthanasia debate. Lethal shots were "an injection of mercy to relieve (patients) of their incurable and painful suffering," the defendants argued.
With the outset of the war, the Nazis were no longer content simply to stop "useless eaters" form procreating. Beginning in 1939, an estimated 275,000.
If all of this weren’t enough, the rhetorical process by which the preborn are dehumanized is eerily reminiscent of tat nightmare era. "The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but not human," Hitler declared in a 1923 speech. The Jew is biologically "sub-human," a 1942 publication of the Race and Settlement Main Office advised. In Mein Kampf, the architect of genocide called Jews "a parasite in the body of other peoples."
Before viability, fetuses are "subhuman and relatively close to a piece of tissue," says Columbia University sociologist Dr. Amitai Etzioni. The preborn child is a "parasitic growth" on a woman’s body, argues feminist theorist Gloria Steinem.
In his book, The American Holocaust, William Brennan notes the similarities between the Nazi death camps and abortion clinics, including streamlined procedures for the disposal of unwanted life, practitioners of death who pride themselves on professionalism, experimentation on victims, and the assurance that the killing is legally sanctioned.
It’s all too easy to dismiss the Nazis as madmen. Fanatics they were, but fanatics with a vision: that not all life should be preserved, that certain creatures only appeared to be people but in fact were less than human and thus could and should be sacrificed for a higher humanity. If abortion advocates arc uncomfortable with the analogy, that is nothing next to the discomfort of those who are so dehumanized.