And they may not have learned this from the Nazis, but the defining feature of the American anti-abortion movement is terrorism. And that movement’s victory in overturning “Roe v. Wade” last week makes it one of the most successful terrorist movements in U.S. history.
Dr. Gisella Perl
30 June 2022 – Over the last 6 years I have been involved in a film project that has been the most challenging of my career: a deep dive into the political uses of genocide and massacre, as seen through the life of Jacques Semelin, one of the world’s leading authorities on the subject. The movie has changed quite a bit to reflect what I have learned from the Ukraine War (most of you are following my team coverage of that war).
This work has involved 200+ hours of interviews, unfettered access to the two Holocaust memorials in Paris, the Holocaust memorial in Washington DC, a trip to the death camp at Auschwitz, and a trip to Yad Vashem.
Plus a collection of 1,000s of stories, most of which are impossible to include in the film but which I share in this series of posts. And it is amazing how current events have a nasty way of bringing these stories up from the past. This one is about Dr. Gisella Perl. But first, some background.
In the winter of 1985, two young men stood trial in Pensacola, Florida. Charged with placing bombs in three abortion clinics, the defendants offered their Christmas morning attack as “a birthday present for Jesus”. Substantial physical evidence, along with the boys’ confessions, left little reasonable doubt about their guilt, so their lawyers employed a novel tactic. Speaking to the jury in final argument, their attorney asserted that there had been no crime at all. The bombings were justified, even heroic:
“Forty years ago, if they [the bombers] had sabotaged concentration camps, they would be heroes. In World War II my father commanded a rifle company that liberated Lansburg, where Hitler wrote Mein Kamph. My father saw pile upon pile, thousands of emaciated bodies. Why did they do it? Because our Supreme Court in its omnipotence says we can [kill] as long as we’re nice about it.”
Perhaps the spectators, judge, and jurors were surprised to hear the Nazi holocaust invoked by a Christian lawyer on behalf of Christian defendants who acted in the name of a predominately Christian movement. But to the defendants and their supporters, there was no surprise at all. By 1985, the holocaust comparison had long been a staple of the pro-life movement – used widely in its literature as both a passing reference and extended analysis. Politicians and pro-life leaders heavily promoted it – from Right to Life founder and president Dr. J.C. Willke to Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and even Ronald Reagan himself – regularly explained their opposition to abortion by invoking the Holocaust.
I am not going to trace the use and evolution of the Holocaust analogy in the pro-life movement. Pro-life activists likened abortion to the Nazi Holocaust from the earliest days of the movement. But I want to make two points. Equating the deaths of millions of fetus to the deaths of millions of Jews developed into two more controversial claims.
The first is that the Holocaust resulted from German society’s adoption of the “new ethic,” a belief that only persons whose lives do not inconvenience others deserve to live. The “new ethic,” according to these theoreticians, was first manifest in the killing of feeble-minded and disabled Aryan Germans, and only later in the genocide of Jews. Later elaborations of this argument asserted that widespread abortion caused the “new ethic” to take hold in Germany. Further, physicians, who promulgated the new ethic, willingly participated in the slaughter of “useless eater.” In this history of the Holocaust, utilitarianism, not long- standing anti-Semitism, caused the Nazi atrocities, and physicians, rather than Hitler or the Gestapo, were the historical villains.
Pro-life architects of the holocaust metaphor employ this version of history to make a second argument: just as abortion led to the Nazi Holocaust, American physicians are currently engaging in the same acts as the Nazi doctors who preceded them. Abortion providers have not stopped with terminating pregnancies; rather, they experiment on the fetuses they abort, kill defective infants, sell fetal body parts, and euthanize the aged. Thus those who perform abortions, as well as those who defend the legality of their actions, are Nazis in our midst. This was not an isolated claim. It has been elaborated many times throughout the anti-abortion movement.
I’m getting sick to death of people comparing the abortion to the Holocaust so I’d like to take the opportunity to talk about Dr. Gisella Perl. She was a Jewish doctor who saved the lives of countless women at Auschwitz by performing abortions so Josef Mengele couldn’t torture them.
NOTE: Josef Mengele, also known as the “Angel of Death”, was a German Schutzstaffel (SS) officer and physician during World War II. He is mainly remembered for his actions at the Auschwitz concentration camp, where he performed deadly experiments on prisoners, as a member of the team of doctors who selected victims to be killed in the gas chambers and as one of the doctors who administered the gas. When my team was at Auschwitz we visited the experimental labs – now sparse due to the removal of most of the equipment and furniture. But we had access to photographs of the lab taken by the Soviet forces who freed Auschwitz in 1945.
Perl was tasked mainly with changing bandages but Mengele had commanded her to let him know of the presence of any pregnant women in the camp, promising they would be sent elsewhere and given better nutrition. But that was a lie. The women were experimented on horrifically. She decided then that there would be no pregnant women in Auschwitz. This was an ongoing challenge as the SS rampant throughout the camps. And despite having no proper medical equipment or anesthesia she used her knowledge as a gynecologist to end the pregnancies as best she could to save the women.
She tried to keep hopes up, telling her patients that they would have other children, other birthdays, and would sing again. She treated the injuries the SS inflicted upon them. She endured the most horrific circumstances and the loss of her entire family – save her daughter before finally being freed.
Afterwards she dealt with the trauma of everything that had happened and everything she had to do. But eventually she became a doctor again, specializing in infertility, and the women who she saved would come find her. To thank her and to help them bring new life into the world. She was in practice for 43 years, delivering approximately 3,000 healthy babies. Every time she entered the delivery room, she recounted in her autobiography, she would pray “God, you owe me a life—a living baby”. She was incredibly brave and her story always makes me numb with how much she did and sacrificed in order to keep other women safe. She passed away on December 16, 1988, at the age of 81.
So to all those who dare to compare abortion to the Holocaust best be aware that you are spitting on this woman’s legacy and the torment she and the women in the camps went through. She was an abortion doctor who was more pro-life than any of you scum.
Her autobiography is “I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz” and is available on most book distribution sites.
And it is also available on the Internet Archive which you can access by clicking here.
POSTSCRIPT
They may not have learned this from the Nazis, but the defining feature of the American anti-abortion movement is terrorism. And that movement’s victory in overturning “Roe v. Wade” last week makes it one of the most successful terrorist movements in U.S. history.
Organized abortion opponents have committed thousands of acts of violence since their movement was born out of efforts to maintain racial segregation. Anti-abortion terrorism sprung up not in the immediate wake of Roe, but in response to the rights women and minority groups gained in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. The more rights women secured, the more violent anti-abortion terrorists grew. The point of organized anti-abortion terror — and the point of much broader organized anti-abortion harassment, including picking clinics and antagonizing women going into them — was to extract a significant cost from every single person who tried to exercise her rights under the law: humiliation at best; one’s life at worst.
Since 1977, abortion opponents have, in the name of “pro-life” ideology and in the furtherance of their political goals, committed 11 murders, 26 attempted murders, 42 bombings, 196 arsons, 105 attempted bombings and arsons, 472 clinic and other invasions, 100 butyric acid attacks, 663 anthrax and other bioterrorism threats, 676 bomb threats, 491 assaults, four kidnappings, and 332 burglaries. These are not lone wolf attacks. Many were carried out by organized groups. Men who murdered abortion providers often relied on networks of fellow “pro-life” activists to hide them from law enforcement.
The anti-abortion movement paid virtually no long-term political price for its terrorist wing. The Supreme Court just rewarded them with a win, overturning Roe … and feigning innocence about what happens next. The court claims it is simply sending this question back to the states, each of which will now have a right to make its own abortion laws.
But it’s worse than that. One primary tactic of anti-abortion terrorism was to target doctors and anyone who helped women get abortions — to put a bounty on their heads. That’s the exact tactic some new anti-abortion laws are emulating. Anti-abortion terrorism wasn’t rejected by mainstream conservatives; it was copied and made law.
It is a long history and I do not wish to turn this post into a book. But those who have studied American history and/or read the books I have recommended through the years know the very definite arc of that history. In brief:
In the 1950s and 1960s, American politics shifted. The Democratic coalition was becoming untenable, and the Republican Party embarked on its Southern Strategy to capture the votes of racist Southern whites increasingly dissatisfied by increasingly liberal Democratic politicians — primarily angry about civil rights, but also about feminism and secularism. When the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, it set off a wave of racist violence. In 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered.
After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed, affirming the rights of all Americans to live free of discrimination on the basis of race, making the right to vote a reality for long-disenfranchised African Americans, and invalidating a variety of laws that disenfranchised Black voters, conservative backlash to the Democratic Party grew stronger, and the Republican Party’s strength in the South surged. By 1968, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was dead, assassinated by a white supremacist.
By 1980, the political realignment — racist and anti-feminist whites aligned with Republicans, Black voters overwhelmingly supporting Democrats — was complete. That year, Ronald Reagan held a campaign event in the same place in Mississippi where James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman for murdered for the crime of registering Black voters. “I still believe the answer to any problem lies with the people. I believe in states’ rights,” Reagan proclaimed at the event. “I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level, and I believe we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the Constitution to that federal establishment.”
He won the election. And Reagan, once a pro-choice governor of California, became a staunch abortion opponent — a move of political convenience in order to secure the support of the religious right, which was fueling an increasingly misogynist and grievance-driven Republican Party.
Fast-forward to the 2010s, and a conservative Supreme Court overturns key provisions of the Voting Rights Act, opening the door for a new era of racist voter suppression — a door Republicans immediately surge through. A single Black president after 200 years of unbroken white male rule is enough for the Supreme Court, and many conservatives, to claim that racism is over — and then institute a series of racist laws intended to block Black voters from casting a ballot.
Just a few years later, the specter of the first female president following the first Black president was enough to hand a vastly unqualified unrepentant racist and misogynist the presidency.
Four years later, a largely white mob stormed the Capitol, deeming an election invalid simply because their guy lost. People died.
A little more than a year after that, an even-more-conservative Supreme Court has stripped away the civil rights of American women, asserting it is a state’s right to decide if women’ bodies are theirs or if refusing to continue a pregnancy is a criminal act.
Just a few days after that, the same Court upheld a badly gerrymandered, intentionally racist electoral map in Louisiana, drawn to disenfranchise Black voters.
And today the Court has stripped the Environmental Protection Agency of the power Congress gave it to respond to the most pressing environmental challenge of our time.
The U.S. Supreme Court has become a legislative body. It will not stop with these cases. Most of the legal authority for the U.S. regulatory state depends on the court’s interpretation of the Constitution’s Commerce Clause. This SCOTUS has decided that the federal government has massively overstepped its constitutional authority.
We will see the SEC effectively neutered. The EPA is not the target. The target is Jarkesy v. SEC now making its way to SCOTUS. In that case the plaintiffs argue that Congress’ delegation of certain regulatory powers to the SEC is unconstitutional. The case was weak but they now have the ammunition they need. If the Court rules in Jarkesy’s favor — and with this new conservative Court, that has to be the likeliest possibility — it could open the door to all kinds of challenges to the SEC and other financial regulation.
The key language in this EPA case concerns the Court’s interpretation of the “highly consequential power beyond what Congress could reasonably be understood to have granted”. It has turned on their head prior precedents. This case is the product of a coordinated, multiyear strategy by Republican attorneys general, conservative legal activists and their funders to use the judicial system to rewrite environmental law, weakening the executive branch’s ability to tackle global warming. Coming up through the federal courts are more climate cases, some featuring novel legal arguments, each carefully selected for its potential to reduce the government’s ability to regulate industries and businesses that produce greenhouse gases.
The EPA case is unusual, but it’s emblematic of the bigger picture. A.G.s are willing to use these unusual strategies more and more. The plaintiffs say they want to hem in what they call the administrative state, the E.P.A. and other federal agencies that set rules and regulations that affect the American economy. That should be the role of Congress, which is more accountable to voters.
But Congress has barely addressed the issue of climate change. Instead, for decades it has delegated authority to the agencies because it lacks the expertise possessed by the specialists who write the complicated rules and regulations, and who can respond quickly to changes in the science, particularly when Capitol Hill is gridlocked.
This history is hard to face, and the truth it tells hard to fathom, because it fundamentally flies in the face of the American narratives we are taught in school: That while there are ebbs and flows, history generally moves toward justice, and that the good guys usually win. In America, it is more complicated. Our most violent, home-grown, terroristic movements have achieved incredible successes. They have managed to assimilate many of their radical views into the conservative mainstream and legislate not just their radical aims, but their strategies: the Klan and the segregationist politicians who did their bidding correctly saw voting as a key inflection point for civil rights; anti-abortion terrorists and, later, the Texas state legislature correctly realized that bounty-hunting for anyone who “aids and abets” abortion was a highly effective terror campaign.
They have played the long game. Sometimes, they have been set back on their heels, but they have never disappeared. Without fail, in the wake of significant progress, they roared back, angrier than ever. Without fail, there were people in elected office, in law enforcement, and on the courts who supported them and tried to implement their agenda. The question wasn’t the existence of that ecosystem; it was how many people who sympathized with the views of racist and misogynist terrorists were in power, how much they sympathized, and how much power they had.
Right now, there are a lot of them. They have a lot of sympathy. Their power is only growing.