Tuesday, June 30, 2009

The Nazis were not in favor of female reproductive rights

The alleged killer of late-term abortion provider Dr. George Tiller, Scott Roeder, believed that for performing such abortions (for the health of the mother) Tiller was "the concentration camp 'Mengele' of our day and needs to be stopped before he and those who protect him bring judgment upon our nation." Bill O'Reilly, who ran a campaign of defamation and character assassination against Tiller for years, said that Tiller was doing "Nazi stuff" at his abortion clinic. Search the "pro-life" websites and you will find this comparison made over and over, that performing abortions is Nazi behavior.

It is true that the Nazis performed forced abortion and sterilizations on groups that they considered to be racially inferior. But what such anti-abortion proponents overlook is: 1) that Dr. Tiller and other abortion providers do not practice forced abortions and 2) the Nazis practice of forced sterilization/abortion stemmed from a larger policy of not respecting the reproductive rights of females. If one is going to make accusations of "Nazi" like behavior, you would have firmer ground to stand on proclaiming the militant anti-abortion stance to be such (also see here.)

This is because while the Nazis were perfectly fine with forcing abortions on those deemed inferior, abortions were criminalized for the "Aryan" race, and legal abortion/reproductive rights were considered to be a nefarious "Jew" plot; voluntary legalized abortion (with apparently some exception for risk to the life of the mother) was outlawed and family planning clinics were closed and access to contraception was severely limited. This is why I mentioned that Ann Coulter's rhetoric about "the governing principle" of liberals being "to always kills human life" and -

No liberal cause is defended with more dishonesty than abortion. No matter what else they pretend to care about from time to time – undermining national security, aiding terrorists, oppressing the middle class, freeing violent criminals – the single most important item on the Democrats' agenda is abortion.
- sounds like Nazi propaganda. If you look through the Nazi propaganda archive you will find multiple articles speaking in such terms against abortion (substituting "Jews" for "liberals".) Michelle Goldberg highlighted one such example, in her book Kingdom Coming, from Hanns Oberlindober.

In an article titled "The 'Decent' Jew" he wrote about how Jews loved killing unborn children for money and malice (recall O'Reilly's repeated assertion that Dr. Tiller would "kill a baby" for any reason for 5,000 dollars)

More than that, your racial comrades intentionally and cold-heartedly preached and encouraged the murder of the unborn children of our people through abortion. The racial hatred Jews had for their Aryan host people extended to the growing life in a mother's womb. Jewish scoundrels made this part of the programs of political parties. How many millions of unborn children and how many hundreds of thousands of mothers fell prey to the greed and racial hatred of Jewish doctors? The Jews kept the number secret by controlling and influencing the official statistics of the German Reich. To my knowledge, no "decent Jew" raised his voice against such organized murder.
And since Coulter likes to do the Jonah Goldberg/Glenn Beck dance of equating Nazism with liberalism,( e.g. also from Godless: "If Hitler hadn’t turned against their beloved Stalin, liberals would have stuck by him, too") maybe I should point out that Michelle Goldberg also notes the parallel in rhetorical style between another passage by Oberlindober and an article at Human Events (which features the syndicated columns of O'Reilly and Coulter). Quoting her

[T]he language that the right uses to describe its enemies echoes all the tropes of classic anti-Semitism. The day after the 2004 election, the right-wing magazine Human Events posted a pseudosatirical piece on its Web site called “Declaration of Expulsion: A Modest Proposal.” In it, the writer suggested excising several of the blue states from the union, saying,

As a class, liberals no longer are merely the vigorous opponents of the Right; they are spiteful enemies of civilization’s core decency and traditions. Defamation, never envisioned by our Founding Fathers as being protected by the First Amendment, flourishes and passes today for acceptable political discourse. Movies, magazines, newspapers, radio/TV programs, plays, concerts, public schools, colleges, and most other public vehicles openly traffic in slander and libel … When they tire of showering conservative victims with ideological mud, liberals promote the only other subjects with which they feel conversationally comfortable: Obscenity and sexual perversion. It’s as if the genes of liberals have rendered them immune to all forms of filth.
Compare that to “The ‘Decent’ Jew,” a 1937 missive by the Nazi Hans Oberlindober. In it, Oberlindober describes the Jewish (and gay) sexual researcher Magnus Hirschfeld as

one of a legion of Jewish corrupters of the youth, sexual criminals, pseudo-scientists, playwrights and novelists, painters and sculptors, theater and cabaret directors, publishers and distributors of pornographic literature. They competed with each other to produce their filth, surpassing each other in obscenity, making easier the work of their racial comrades seeking to dominate an unnerved and powerless people rendered susceptible by such “art.” The absence of moral rules was called freedom, and unrestrained drives were proclaimed to be the right of the young.
If you live in glass houses and what not, you know.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Funny you should talk about living in glasshouses. Nazis dehumanize Jews to point of making them like unwanted tissue or cancer to be removed and abortionists make out unborn babies to be unwanted blob of tissues. And let's recall Hitler did employed Margaret Sanger's eugenics when it comes to undesirables. Hitler may be opposed to abortion when it comes ot the Aryan race as he called it, but he was for it when it came to getting rid of the undesirables.

Undesirables? Before the Jews, he did it to the disabled and weak among us. Not far remove from the abortionist justification that abortion is needed to get rid of those who would be born retarded or with birth defects.

And what you try to spin does not change the fact that abortion was one of the things listed by which the Nazis were accused of crimes against humanity. There is a reason for that: the unborn are humans and to kill them is indeed crimes against humanity.

Hume's Ghost said...

"There is a reason for that"

Yes, there is. Its the central point of my post and the one you've completely waved your hands at. The Nazis were not considered criminals because they granted reproductive rights but because they denied them.

Hume's Ghost said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Hume's Ghost said...

Also, some further points to consider:

You see a moral equivalency between someone freely choosing to have an abortion and forced abortion as part of a campaign of genocide? Turn that idea around in your head for a minute: do you honestly beleive that a woman who has an abortion is doing so because she harbors a Nazi like hate for the embryo/fetus based on her belief that it's inhuman, and that she wishes to eliminate all such life from the face of the earth?

So-called "abortionists" don't believe abortion should be legal for eugenic reasons. The biggest reason they believe it should be legal is because they do not believe the state should have the power/authority to commandeer a woman's body and turn it into an incubator for a developing human life. The Nazis were excersising repressive powers both when they forced abortion and forced pregnancies to term.