Abortion trends were compared to the Holocaust at an event hosted by Columbia Right to Life on Monday night.
Stephanie Gray, cofounder and executive director of the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform, made this analogy in Altschul Auditorium as the guest speaker for the talk titled “‘Echoes of the Holocaust’: Reflection on Abortion within Contemporary Society.” She began with a brief overview of the history of abortion and continued forward in time to the present status of the issue in health care, religion, and culture.
“What these injustices in history teach us is that wherever human life is valued not for being human but for that human being’s function or appearances-in those situations, the vulnerable and weak will be attacked and harmed by the powerful and influential,” said Gray, who has traveled around North America and the United Kingdom giving anti-abortion lectures and arguing against pro-choice legislation.
To support her belief that embryos are human beings and that preventing their development is murder, Gray showed an animation of embryonic development followed by a more graphic film displaying an abortion operation. The first explained the physiological makeup of a six-week old fetus. The second showed real fetuses after they were aborted and removed in clinics.
Her detailed, step-by-step narrative—beginning with abortion and arriving at the Holocaust—carried with it several themes. These included dehumanizing rhetoric, judging the value of life based on form or function rather than on existence, the involvement of physicians, the systematic nature of killings, and massive loss of life, according to Gray.
“Some people say the Holocaust shouldn’t be compared, but if we don’t remember the philosophy it will be impossible to stop it from happening again in the future and rearing its ugly head,” Gray said in preemptive defense of her analogy.
Gray covered a range of abortion-related issues within her Holocaust analogy, including stem cell research, which Gray compared to the genetic experiments performed by Nazi doctors on prisoners in concentration camps. Gray maintained that while stem cell research has many potential benefits, it is unethical to kill an embryo and harvest its stem cells, just as it is unethical to kill a person and take that person’s heart to save another life.
Gray also criticized abortion clinics.
“The systematic nature of killings was seen in Auschwitz then and in abortion now. It is legal … and medical professionals do the killing. Centers are set up for express purpose of terminating lives where women come and their children are dismembered,” Gray said.
She also discussed race, deformity, and gender-based abortion targeting, presenting these as examples of how legal and accessible abortion will harmfully alter the composition of populations and attempt to eliminate certain genotypes.
Ultimately, though, Gray stressed that she is against abortion, not against the women getting abortions, saying that, “In condemning the action of abortion, I am not condemning the actors. The reality is we all, including myself, bear responsibility. Even though we don’t commit it, we permit it.”
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