Abortion and Nazism

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Abortion

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In the back alley
Linking Abortion and Nazism is a common anti-abortion pro-life slogan to compare the relation of ideas on what constitutes a human life found in abortion supporters beliefs and those of the Nazis. One reason the Nazis had no problem murdering million in cold blood was because they had lowered their expectations on what was considered a human life, therefore removing any moral objection to their killings. In summary, pro-lifers consider third party individuals who define living in order to signify that abortion is not murder, as followers of this Nazi montage.

Contents

[edit] Arguments for the link

[edit] Rush Limbaugh

The conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh coined the term "feminazi," defining it this way:

[A feminazi is] a feminist to whom the most important thing in life is ensuring that as many abortions as possible occur ... There are fewer than twenty-five known feminazis in the United States.[1]

That Mr. Limbaugh is missing the entire point of radical feminism can probably be agreed upon even by anti-feminists. Whether the comparison of abortion with the actions of the Nazis holds water is a separate question.

[edit] Refutations

Before accepting the parallel between abortion and the Holocaust, one should keep these points in mind:

  1. The Nazis were opposed to abortion. Weimar-era Germany was, for its time, fairly liberal on the abortion question.[2] In 1939, the Nazis brought in laws that did away with this permissiveness, flatly forbidding except for eugenic purposes and by Jews.[3]
  2. The Holocaust was a genocide. In these days, the Holocaust is less objected to for its large body count than for the fact that it was a genocide, or, as the United Nations says, an explicit attempt to destroy a nation, ethnicity, or race, or practitioners of a religion. Not only do fetuses do not form any such group, but they are not even being targeted on the basis of being fetuses.

[edit] Footnotes

Abortion articles on RationalWiki
Abortion - Fetus/Fœtus - Gonzales v. Carhart - Nuremberg Files - Pro-life - Pro-choice - Essay:Rhetorical analysis of abortion essays - Roe v. Wade - Schlafly, breast cancer and abortion - The Silent Scream - Barnett Slepian - Essay:Where do you fall in the abortion debate?
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