Pope Compares Holocaust to Abortion

In the Pope John Paul II's new book "Memory and Identity", he compares the holocaust to abortion. Paul Spiegel, the president for the German Central Council for Jews was quick to insist

"The Catholic Church does not understand or does not want to understand that there is an enormous difference between mass genocide and what women do with their bodies."

Of course there will be many people who will be quite upset in the comparison of abortion to the holocaust. I can understand this being a very sensitive subject, but lets see if there is any comparison:

The holocaust was justified claiming that Jews were Untermenschen, i.e. 'underlings' or 'subhumans', who were biologically inferior to 'Aryans'. Nazi's rationalized it as a form of eugenics. Abortion is often justified by claiming that the unborn children are not 'fully developed' or 'fully human' and are not a life. The Nazi's saw this as a form of eugenics.

Nazi death camps were called 'relocation centers' and Jews were described as a 'parasitic race'. Abortion clinics are more commonly referred to as 'reproductive health centers' and Planned Parenthood often describes an unborn baby as more of a 'parasite' or 'disease' trapped in a woman's body.

Estimates of the number of humans killed in the holocaust between 1941 and 1945 range between 5-10 million which averaged 1-2 million per year. Estimates of the number of babies killed by abortion is about 42.5 million between 1973 and today (31 years), which averaged about 1.3 million per year.

I would say there are a few similarities.

Guess who said the following:

"Today eugenics is the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political, and social problems . I wish to take advantage of the present opportunity to point out that the unbalance between the birth rate of the 'unfit' and the 'fit', admittedly the greatest present menace to the human race, can never be rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition between the two classes. In this matter, the example of the inferior classes, the fertility of the feeble-minded, the mentally defective, the poverty-stricken classes, should not be held up for emulation to the mentally and physically fit though less fertile parents of the educated and well-to-do classes."

It is none other than Margaret Sanger, the highly praised founder of Planned Parenthood. (Margaret Sanger. "The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda." Birth Control Review, Volume V, Number 10 (October 1921), page 5) Believe it or not she had an entire journal dedicated to eugenics.