Holocaust Panel: Abortion should be Remembered as a Crime against Humanity

Ben Johnson : Dec 12, 2014
LifeSiteNews

"Even if it be assumed that all [Nazi] abortions were voluntary, they still constitute a crime… One of the defendants even admitted it constituted 'a special violation against life.'" -Associate Counsel Harold Neely, Nuremberg Trials

Historians have plumbed nearly every aspect of the Holocaust—but one needs further exploration, according to historians. The Nazis' crime of forced abortion and sterilization should be highlighted, studied, and used to understand modern totalitarian regimes, a panel of Holocaust historians said at a recent forum. (Photo via UnitedWithIsrael.org)

"A lot of women's experiences during the Holocaust had to do with the biology of being a woman—not only vulnerability of sexual violence but menstruation and childbirth and forced abortion and forced sterilization," historian Rochelle Saidel, the director of Remember the Women Institute, said at a panel at the American Jewish Historical Society in October. "All of these things are women's experiences that need to be talked about."

At the Nuremberg trials, the 1948 RuSHA trial indicted 14 Nazis for "encouraging and compelling abortions" for women whose children were not considered "racially valuable"—and a government-enforced policy of "mandatory abortions" is still supported by white supremacists today. (Photo via UnitedWithIsrael.org)

"Even if it be assumed that all [Nazi] abortions were voluntary, they still constitute a crime," Associate Counsel Harold Neely said at the Nuremberg Trials. Prosecutors classified abortion under any circumstances as a "crime against humanity." One of the defendants even admitted it constituted "a special violation against life."

The threat of forced abortion and sterilization was a fact of life for female members of disfavored groups living under Nazi occupation.
Yet Dr. Ahraron Peretz, a doctor in the Kovno ghetto established for Jews from Kaunas in Lithuania, remembered that some Jewish women continued their pregnancies in secret despite the threat of execution. "By an order of July 1942 pregnancy in the Kaunas ghetto was punishable with death to the father, mother, and the infant," he said. Yet the echoes of forced abortion continue to ring into the present, members of the October panel noted.