Tag Archives: Nazis

Parallels between abortion and the Holocaust, Part 2

Note: To get the context of this post it is necessary to read through the Introduction in Part 1 of this series. The basis for these two posts is the book Rachel Weeping: The Case Against Abortion, by James T. Burtchaell.

3. Discharge of responsibility and brutality from average people
According to Burtchaell,

A third theme that rises repeatedly from the Holocaust record is the denial of responsibility…The first way of putting it is for each person to account for his killing work by pointing out that he acted under law, having submitted his judgment to those empowered to make decisions of state. (pg. 157)

Or, as it has come to be known, “I was just following orders.”

As one defense attorney explained at Nuremberg:

If the experiment is ordered by the state, this moral responsibility of experimenter towards the experimental subject relates to the way in which the experiment is performed, not to the experiment itself. (pgs. 157, 158)

Even the commandant of Auschwitz who oversaw the most efficient extermination method of the Holocaust and one of history’s most gruesome, shrugged it off on Himmler:

I did not reflect on it at the time: I had been given an order, and I had to carry it out. Whether this mass extermination of the Jews was necessary of not was something on which I could not allow myself to form an opinion, for I lacked the necessary breadth of view. (pg. 158)

More recently at least one supporter of abortion has moved beyond being concerned about the responsibility for the act. She forthrightly states: “Here’s the complicated reality in which we live: All life is not equal.” Emphasis mine. Sounds like “Life unworthy of life” to me.

Though some promoters of abortion rights now accept moral responsibility, this is not universally acknowledged nor was it always the case. The former president of the National Abortion Rights Action League, Dr. Bernard Nathanson, wrote in 1974:

Certainly the medical profession itself cannot shoulder the burden of this matter. The phrase, ‘between a woman and her physician’ is an empty one since the physician is only the instrument of her decision, and has not special knowledge of the moral dilemma or the ethical agony involved in the decision. (pg. 211)

The doctor does not shoulder the burden? Is he or she not the one who inserts the vacuum, dismembers the child and evacuates the womb? Nathanson eventually did shoulder the blame and left the abortion industry.

Medical doctors were not the only ones who disavowed responsibility. Psychiatrists did as well.

Kenneth R. Niswander, professor and chairman of Obstetrics and Gynecology at ht eUniversity of California, Davis, insisted that there were virtually no psychiatric grounds for abortion…’If society wants abortion to be easier, it should have the courage to campaign for it honestly and not exploit the psychiatrist who, I contend, has no factual basis for being associated with the problem.’ (pgs. 213, 214)

Shifting of blame is not the only issue. How far can it be removed when so many people have become links in the chain of death?

Daniel Goldhagen’s 1997 international bestseller Hitler’s Willing Executioners (though perhaps too broad in assessing motivation) showed overwhelming evidence that the extermination of European Jews involved the energies and enthusiasm of tens of thousands of ordinary Germans. Noted scholar Hannah Arendt concluded “heinous evil generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths. Instead, these were the actions ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal.” She coined the now famous phrase: “the banality of evil.”

How evil can banality become? From Rachel Weeping:

There was Ilse Koch who had lampshades made of prisoner’s tattooed skin and Irma Grese of Auschwitz and Belsen, who was said to have bound together the legs of prisoners in labor so that mother and child would perish together….And there was Dr. Sigmund Rascher [who] was also detailed to Dachau, where he conducted aviator clothing tests by freezing prisoners to death, and trials of parachute function by suffocating others in high-altitude chambers, and experiments on blood coagulants by shooting prisoners and noting how long it required for them to bleed to death.” (pgs. 165, 166)

The perversity of the demonic Third Reich is an interwoven tale of family men who were doting parents, lovers of their wives, and kind to children. These, who were the very devil of Hell to six-million Jews and as many as 7 million others, could be angels when dealing with their own.

Perhaps one reason (besides overuse) comparisons to the Nazis tend to be rejected is the ash of the crematory covers so much of our memory. We tend to forget these “willing executioners,” to use Goldhagen’s term, could be our neighbors and co-workers. Indeed, in Nazi Germany neighbors and co-workers were exactly that.

But, if there is a better word to describe the diabolical efficiency of the mass slaughter of babies than “brutality” I would lean toward “savagery.” More than 55M children killed in the U.S. alone in the last 40 years while we simultaneously herald and ignore the documentary assertion that “life” is an “inalienable right”?

It is well known that a certain number of attempted abortions result in live births each year. The Alan Guttmacher Institute, no friend to the pro-life movement, estimates the number around 400. This is not a new phenomenon; it has been happening since Roe.

As Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York moved into high-volume abortion work (“pregnancy interruption service”), the director of nurses reported: ‘Most nurses find the destruction of life the very antithesis of what they believe…Nurses in delivery rooms had been accustomed to every conceivable effort to save babies, even those of one to three pounds, and they found that sometimes they were ‘salting out’ bigger babies than those they had worked to save. (pg. 215)

In case you do not recognized it, “salting out” is a euphemism for “kill.”

4. Once killing was initiated, killed continued indiscriminately
Burtchaell notes the expanding circle of victims the Reich was willing to include.

The killers do not, in fact, appear to have been discriminating. What characterized them is not so much a defensive readiness to destroy all major enemies of the state as it is a tempered willingness, once they had blood on their hands, to eliminate any person or group that constituted even a relatively mild frustration. (pg. 172)

What kind of progression do we see? “Mercy death” for chronic mental and medical patients, those with encephalitis, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, epileptics, polio, senility and more. What was initially wrought to those hospitalized was later expanded. In northwestern Poland the SS sent out mobile units for X-ray procedures. Anyone with TB was cured at an extermination center. Early Jewish victims, even before the Final Solution had been formulated, included the crippled, chronic bed-wetters or some with “badly modeled ears” (pgs. 172, 173).

The inability of some to see the parallels between this and gendercide or abortion of Down’s Syndrome babies is beyond comprehension. (Gendercide has come to refer to the killing of children of a certain gender, usually female. In one a championship demonstration of mental gymnastics, a significant portion of abortion-rights proponents defend the right to exterminate a child because said child is female. Such a right is the very definition of abortion on demand. Any reason is sufficient. The killing is indiscriminate.)

It has only been two years since Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s abortion clinic was called a “baby charnel house”. He was charged with murder. His wife and seven others have pled guilty and Gosnell’s trial is set to begin this year. The Boston Globe reports:

“[Gosnell] regularly and illegally delivered live, viable, babies in the third trimester of pregnancy — and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors. The medical practice by which he carried out this business was a filthy fraud in which he overdosed his patients with dangerous drugs, spread venereal disease among them with infected instruments, perforated their wombs and bowels — and, on at least two occasions, caused their deaths. Over the years, many people came to know that something was going on here. But no one put a stop to it.’’

The report goes on to describe a squalid operation in which hygiene was ignored, equipment was broken, and late-term abortions were routine. Pregnant women were treated with callous disdain, often left for hours, semi-conscious and in pain, on dirty recliners covered with bloodstained blankets. Untrained employees administered powerful drugs to induce labor, and heavy sedatives to keep women from screaming.

Time and again, the grand jury says, late-term babies were delivered alive — fully intact and breathing — and then killed. Gosnell “called it ‘ensuring fetal demise.’ The way he ensured fetal demise was by sticking scissors into the back of the baby’s neck and cutting the spinal cord. He called that ’snipping.’ Over the years, there were hundreds of ‘snippings.’’’

5. Found the violence an occasion to acquire wealth
Skin for lamps, exploitation by non-German companies like IBM, Ford and Standard Oil, and large profits for German companies including IG Farben (maker of the poisonous Zyklon B gas used at Auschwitz and parent company of Bayer), Porsche/Volkswagon, and Hugo Boss, the Holocaust boosted many a financial bottom line. Riches made via the commission of genocide; blood money.

baby foot in mom's belly

Baby on board! [Image credit]

Planned Parenthood has made millions from the abortion services it provides. Riches at the expense of children’s lives. Riches made via the commission of genocide; blood money.

Abortion providers made enormous sums of money immediately following Roe. Often far more than doctors who practiced medicine the way it was intended…you know, to save lives rather than take them. Abortion, which, only years before, was reprehensible, came to the fore. The mythical “coat hanger in the back-alley” transformed into a highly lucrative cog in the wheel of capitalism.

Even in the early 70s the amount of money made from the abortion industry was staggering. Nathanson reported doctors in his clinic could clear more than $1,000 in each eight hour shift. Some worked double shifts as a result. In 1974 one Chicago doctor–by himself–billed Medicaid $792,266 for abortions for his welfare customers. One job recruitment effort promised $80,000 per year for 10 hours of work per week, while a single woman made up to $5,000 per week running a “counseling” facility. She was paid commissions from abortionists. (pg. 227)

Abort73 figures annual revenue from aborting babies at upward of $831 million. The Planned Parenthood Federation of American, the nation’s largest abortion provider made more than $148.6m from abortion in 2010. After an all time high of around 334,000 abortions performed in 2011-2012, the total number of abortions committed by PPFA affiliates in the past three years reached nearly 1M.

It thus remains that honest, thoughtful people can disagree on the subject of abortion. But defenders of abortion-on-demand should admit that they share vivid, historical parallels with one of the most ruthless and efficient killing organizations in history. The parallels are real and demonstrable.

The comparison I have put forth is not emotionalism, nor a thoughtless invoking of Godwin. It is studied, factual evaluation. If the pro-choice camp insists on defending abortion, members should also be honest enough to acknowledge their philosophical kinships where ever the bloodlines lead.

Parallels between abortion and the Holocaust, Part 1

In the early days of the Internet, before what we now know as social media, people exchanged ideas in forums and Usenet groups. After observing many such discussions an attorney named Mike Godwin postulated an argument that has become one of my favorite things to spring from the entire online enterprise. He said, “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” In other words, the longer an online discussion goes–regardless of topic or scope–someone at some point will bring up a comparison to Hitler or the Nazis.

This statement is now known as Godwin’s Law, sometimes called Godwin’s Law of Nazi Analogies.

The problem Godwin highlights is most comparisons are glib involving neither a valid historical nor philosophical basis. Godwin himself says he wants people “to think a bit harder about the Holocaust.” If you have spent any time at all online you know Godwin’s Law to be true. At times I’ve seen a non-participant jump into a rapidly fraying thread with the single word “Hitler” or “Nazis.” By skipping ahead to the inevitable they demonstrate the degeneration taking place in the discussion.

But, what happens when a comparison to the Third Reich is warranted? Should it be ignored? Because the comparison has been worn out are there never appropriate parallels? So recklessly and mindlessly has Hitler been invoked to use the comparison almost automatically invalidates one’s argument. It is seen as an admission of a weak, unsupportable point of view. This knee-jerk reaction speaks both to the shallow analysis of the over-user and the intellectual laziness of the person who would dismiss the argument out of hand.

The very nature of the Holocaust demands earnestness of thought. Our concept of genocide, indeed the coining of the term, has arisen as a result of Hitler’s Final Solution. Raphael Lemkin, in his work Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944), coined the term by combining Greek genos (γένος; race, people) and Latin cīdere (to kill). Though other genocides have taken place in the last 100 years (i.e., Armenians, the Rwandan Genocide, and Srebrenica Genocide), “Holocaust” is generally reserved for the attempted total extinguishing of European Jewry by Hitler’s Third Reich.

One area of clear parallels with the Third Reich is the abortion-on-demand mindset in America. Children have been linguistically reengineered in ways that would make Orwell seem positively straightforward. Since January 1972 some 50 million lives have been artificially and often violently ended before birth in the United States. Comparison to the Nazis are real, valid and ongoing. These articles are only intended to start your own thinking process, not to raise every conceivable point. However, on this 4oth anniversary of Roe v Wade these ideas are worth our consideration.

Introduction

More than three decades ago Notre Dame professor James T. Burtchaell published a series of essays on abortion. Compiled into the book, Rachel Weeping: The Case Against Abortion, it remains a blistering assault on national pro-abortion policy. No less than the Los Angeles Times called it “a searing, impeccable documentation,” while the Library Journal said it offered “extensive information and profound reflection.” “Unassailable” and “unequaled” could easily be added.

Each is worth reading (the book itself should be added to every personal library), but the two historical essays comparing abortion to American slavery and the Holocaust should not be missed. I cannot emphasize strongly enough the power in these writings. Today we will look at abortion and the Holocaust.

Burtchaell is careful to distinguish arguments and process used by the Nazis from the Nazis themselves. In other words, he does not equate pro-abortion advocations to the Nazis in a direct parallel. He does, however, draw clear comparisons to the arguments and mindsets used in both cases to introduce scenarios beforehand thought improbable, impossible or unthinkable.

Ponder the Germanic scenario. There must be an answer as to why millions and millions of human beings died without hearing or trials. There were no hearing or trials because no victims were accused of any crime; they simply were not wanted. Burtchaell asks and answers.

Who did this to them? The SS, the Gestapo, the German Wehrmacht, military and civilian medical and hospital personnel, conscripts from subject countries like Lithuania and the Ukraine, the police of Germany and its tributaries, the governments of cooperative regimes, and the German government in its many ministries: military, Reichsbank, Propaganda, Interior, Transport, Economy, Food and Agriculture, Finance, Labor, Security, Foreign Affairs, and Justice. Many tens of thousands of people–mostly but not exclusively Germans–merged their wits and their efforts that many millions of their fellow humans–not as soldiers nor as criminals–might be destroyed. (pgs. 144, 145)

In Burtchaell’s mind there were “seven factors in the Holocaust which may help us to understand it as an archetype of massacre that is acknowledged only after the fact.” [Emphasis mine.] We will look at five of these in brief–two today and three in the next post.

1. Depersonalization of the victims.
Germany did not simply awaken one day to find its citizenry acquiescent to a genocidal culture. Many years of treating certain groups as sub-human or not human prepared the normal German to view Slavs, Jews and others as life not worthy of life.

When Dr. Eugen Haagen, professor of hygiene at Strassburg University, was receiving prison inmates in batches of two hundred to be injected with typhus, a question was raised whether some of the experimental subjects might be Alsatians. Haagen’s assistant explained reassuringly that “the experiments would not be conducted with prisoner but only with Poles” as “Poles really are not human beings.” Slavs, in the National Socialist racial scale, were classed as subhumans, Untermenschen, only one grade above Jews. (p. 145) Emphasis in original.

Also,

Himmler once cautioned his SS generals not to tolerate the stealing of property which had belonged to dead Jews. “Just because we exterminated a dead bacterium,” he said, “we do not want, in the end, to be infected by that bacterium and die of it.” (p. 147)

There are endless examples of dogmatic racial superiority and eugenics in Nazi Germany and well before. It was all over medical texts, psychiatry and psychology teachings, propaganda, and even math books.

Below is a list of words and phrases used in the “transformation of nomenclature for the unborn.”

The unborn has been designated as “protoplasmic rubbish,” “a gobbet of meat protruding from a human womb” (Philip Wylie); “a child-to-be” (Glanville Williams); “the fetal-placental unit” (A. I. Csapo); “gametic materials,” “fallopian and uterine cell matter” (Joseph Fletcher); “a part of the mother” (Oliver Wendell Holmes); or “a part of the mother’s body” (Thomas Szasz); “unwanted fetal tissue” (Ellen Frankfort); “the products of pregnancy” or “the product of conception” (HEW); “sub-human non-personhood” (F. Raymond Marks); “child Who-Might-Have-Been” (James Kidd); “so much garbage” (Peter Stanley)…”a collection of cells” (Malcolm Potts)…”potential life” (Mr. Justice Blackmun)…and “a non-viable fetus ex-utero” by the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. (p. 196, 197)

nazi propaganda sign

Two people read Nazi propaganda. The left column reads, “The Jews are our misfortune.” [Image credit]


2. Euphemistic language to cover torment
Speaking of language and the end result, Burtchaell notes, “The most common outcome was death, but, to avoid all open mention of death and its violent forms, official documents developed an elaborate, almost elegant, euphemy” (p. 152). Think Orwellian and you will get the idea.

I’ll forego the German and list only some English translations:

evacuation, resettlement, clean-up, labor in the East, cleansing, disinfection, special treatment, return undesirable, departed, special actions, forwarded for special measures, inoculated off, separately quartered, transit camp, bath houses, clean-up of the Jewish question. (pg. 152, 153)

And most well known of all the “final solution to the Jewish question.”

This pastel colored language of the grave–this whitewashing of tombs–did not appear only in words and phrases. It was found in the corridors of official life.

There was the 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Posterity (which affected prevention through sterilization or death); the Reich Committee for Children (which destroyed them); the Reich Committee for Research on Hereditary Diseases and Constitutional Susceptibility to Severe Diseases (which identified those to be eliminated); the Non-Profit Patient Transport Corporation (which conveyed them to the clinics where they would die); the Charitable Foundation for Institutional Care (which paid for it); and there was “euthanasia” and “mercy death” (which was what it was all about). (p. 153)

The Nazis, of course, addressed all issues of potential dilution to the master race including the crippled, retarded and infirm. “These victims were characterized as ‘useless eaters’ and ‘socially unfit.’ Their treatment, as one book described it, posed ‘The Problem of Abbreviation for Worthless Lives'” (pg. 154). Death as abbreviation; how lovely.

The same euphemistic obfuscation was present in the move toward legalized abortion and continues to this day.

“termination of potential life,” “termination of pregnancy,” “therapeutic abortion,” “treatment,” “life-rationing,” “post-conception planning,” “menstrual extraction,” “insure non-pregnancy,” “non-meaningful life,” “unwanted child” (pgs. 202, 204, 205)

Since publication of Rachel Weeping we can add others: “women’s health and reproductive freedom,” “private family matters,” “ensuring fetal demise,” “women’s rights,” and perhaps the most Orwellian of all: “choice.”

And where, exactly, might one go for “post-conception planning”? At the time of Burtchaell’s writing he knew of at least these:

In Pittsburgh there is Women’s Health Services, where the services have little or nothing to do with women’s health. In Florida there is the Orlando Birthing Center, which will handle second-trimester abortions but no births. In Leiden one finds the Center for Human Reproduction, which is concerned to arrest reproduction, as also the Water Tower Reproductive Center in Chicago. In Missouri, Parents Aid aids women to avoid being parents, while in Chicago “Family Guidance” guides people to prevent families. Pre-Term and Pre-Birth in Chicago preclude full-term births. (p. 204)

Be reminded: he is not saying these people are Nazis. He is saying the same “language as smoke screen to the truth” was used in both instances. Any convincing disproval is unlikely.

Next up: 3. Disavowed malicious intent, 4. Once initiated, killed indiscriminately, and 5. Found it an occasion to acquire wealth.