anonymous:
Since you absolutely adore comparing abortion to the Holocaust, let me introduce you to the “Angel of Auschwitz,” Gisella Perl. She was forced to work as a doctor at the concentration camp and her job was to report pregnancies to Dr. Mengele, (who you have referenced before). He would experiment on the women and their unborn children before killing them. Ms. Perl took it upon herself to perform abortions on women before their pregnancies were noticeable in order to save hundreds of lives.
cultureshift:
I am, of course, quite familiar with Dr. Gisella Perl and the incredibly unfortunate and horrific circumstances she found herself in and I therefore require no introduction.
I am also very familiar with the inhuman monster that ‘doctor’ Josef Mengele was. A man so depraved that following his war crimes at Auschwitz, he fled to South America where he continued to commit crimes against humanity as an abortionist. Your attempt to justify the depraved act of killing prenatal children based on the events that unfolded at Auschwitz is, at best, disingenuous. Here is an excerpt from my post outlining my opinion on Dr. Perl’s actions…
Dr. Gisella Perl was a Jewish gynecologist who was forced to work with one of humanity’s most grotesque creations – Josef Mengele, a Nazi SS ‘doctor’ who provided ‘services’ at Auschwitz. Gisella is often held up as a hero by those in favor of human abortion for her work at Auschwitz killing prenatal Jewish children. But was she really a ‘pro-choice’ hero or a victim of her circumstances?
Josef Mengele, known as the Angel of Death, conducted brutal and inhuman medical experiments on the prisoners of Auschwitz, specifically targeting pregnant mothers for vivisection, a fate resulting in the horrific death of both the mother and her child.
Is it fair then to use Gisella as some ‘pro-choice’ hero? The Holocaust was an event unlike any other in our human experience. The events that unfolded at places like Auschwitz cannot be used to determine what is right and what is wrong in our daily lives. What Gisella was forced to do was against her beliefs. What the mothers of the children she killed were forced to do were against their better nature. Gisella did not kill those children, Josef Mengele killed those children. The circumstances presented in a place like Auschwitz malforms our application of basic human values and forces decisions that would never be tolerated outside of that cruel setting. Just as we accept cannibalism in certain extreme situations, we must accept what Gisella had to do in her position.
What you failed to mention in your zeal to hold her up as some ‘pro-choice’ hero is that she was, in fact, pro-life.
In an interview with Nadine Brozan for the New York Times in 1982, Dr. Perl recalled her initial experiences with Dr. Mengele’s “cure” for pregnancy in Auschwitz. ”Dr. Mengele told me that it was my duty to report every pregnant woman to him,” Dr. Perl said. ”He said that they would go to another camp for better nutrition, even for milk. So women began to run directly to him, telling him, ‘I am pregnant.’ I learned that they were all taken to the research block to be used as guinea pigs, and then two lives would be thrown into the crematorium. I decided that never again would there be a pregnant woman in Auschwitz.”
After Dr. Perl’s startling realization of the fates of the pregnant women discovered by Dr. Mengele, she began to perform surgeries that before the war she would have believed herself incapable of – abortions. In spite of her professional and religious beliefs as a doctor and an observant Jew, Dr. Perl began performing abortions on the dirty floors and bunks of the barracks in Auschwitz “using only my dirty hands.” Without any medical instruments or anesthesia, and often in the cramped and filthy bunks within the women’s barracks, Dr. Perl ended the lives of the fetuses in their mothers’ womb (estimated at around 3,000) in the hopes that the mother would survive and later, perhaps, be able to bear children.
In some instances, the pregnancy was too far along to be able to perform an abortion. In these cases Dr. Perl broke the amnionic sac and manually dilated the cervix to induce labor. In these cases, the premature infant (not yet completely developed), died almost instantly. Without the threat of their pregnancy being discovered, women were able to work without interruption, gaining them a temporary reprieve from their death sentences.
Dr. Perl was finally liberated from the horrors of the Nazi death camps and found her way to America. From the time that she arrived in New York after liberation, until she moved to Israel in 1979, Dr. Perl delivered over 3,000 healthy babies. She became an expert in infertility, and helped many women who previously could not get pregnant. Until her death in 1988, Dr. Perl did all she could to bring life into this world. And before she delivered each baby, she would silently pray to herself, “God help me, I should be able to give back life today.”
Note: I have never attempted to compare the suffering experienced by the victims of the Holocaust to the victims of human abortion. I compare the IDEOLOGY that drove the Holocaust to the IDEOLOGY that drives abortion — the idea that some human beings are somehow less than human and therefore unworthy of the rights inherent with ‘personhood’.
A Pro-Choice Hero?
