Antiabortion analogy is flawed but popular

Is legalized abortion akin to the Nazi Holocaust? The analogy is a
standard talking point among abortion opponents, and a new half-hour
video by a prominent Christian apologist has gone viral by making the
comparison more explicit and graphic than any antiabortion sound bite on
the evening news.

But the success of the video and the popularity
of the argument raise the broader question of whether comparing
legalized abortion to the Holocaust—or to slavery, another widespread
analogy—is logical and legitimate, even if it is effective.

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The new Internet movie is called 180,
a title meant to signal that viewers will do a U-turn from their
previous support for abortion rights. In many respects, it's a standard
piece of propaganda in the culture wars.

The video was produced by
Ray Com­fort, a controversial evangelical Chris­tian from New Zealand
who an­nounces at the start of the video that he is Jewish, though in
fact his father was a gentile and he was raised without religious
instruction. Comfort became a born-again Christian in his early
twenties.

For the first half of 180, Comfort interweaves
chilling clips of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi death camps with
street-level interviews of young people who display fairly predictable
ignorance about the Holocaust (and much else). He then pivots to make a
connection between what he's told them about the attempted genocide of
the Jews and modern-day legalized abortion.

Scales fall from eyes
and minds are miraculously changed, at least in Comfort's careful, if
self-serving, editing. "What's a pretty good documentary could have been
even stronger without the fools early on," as Christianity Today's Mark Moring put it.

But middling reviews and even blistering criticism are hardly going to sink 180.
The Holocaust analogy is so powerful that opponents of abortion don't
need to examine it very closely, while supporters of abortion rights
simply dismiss it out of hand without really refuting it.

So what
is wrong with the comparison? The most obvious and common objection is
that it deeply offends Jewish sensibilities, even more so when abortion
foes use the power of raw numbers to argue that abortion is actually
worse than the Holocaust.

"Nearly 60 million Americans have been
slaughtered by abortion, and that's ten times the amount of Jews who
died under the Nazis," argued Comfort in responding to critics like
Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, who said those who compare the Holocaust
to abortion "prove that they do not know what the Holocaust was."

For
a number of antiabortion critics, the problems go beyond respecting the
memory of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Instead, they say the
analogy has holes that undermine the credibility of campaigns against
abortion and can ultimately harm the movement's ability to make its case
to the wider culture.

One major flaw in the Holocaust logic, they
note, is that the U.S. government is not mandating that women have
abortions—unlike the Third Reich, which ordered the extermination of
Jews and other classes of people. "At this point in time, neither state
nor federal governments require pregnant women to kill their unborn
children, regardless of the women's circumstances or the unborn
children's condition," Teresa Collett, an antiabortion advocate who
teaches at the University of St. Thomas School of Law, has written in
critiquing the Holocaust comparison.

"To employ the language of
constitutional law, abortions are not state actions, unlike the
imprisonment and killing of the Jews by the Nazis," Collett wrote in an
exchange on the topic at Mirror of Justice, a popular blog on Catholic
legal theory.

Another problem is that even if one considers
abortion to be murder, it does not automatically make women who have
abortions murderers. "The mothers who choose abortion often feel as
though they have no other choice, and admittedly, the choices they face
often are not easy ones," Robert Vischer, another law professor at St.
Thomas, argued in the Mirror of Justice debate.

"I do not think
that choosing to kill their unborn children is the answer, but choosing
that answer does not make them the moral equivalents of the Nazis, and
neither does our government's willingness to permit them that choice."

In a widely cited 2008 essay in Com­monweal magazine,
a liberal Cath­olic periodical, Cathleen Kaveny, who teaches law and
theology at the University of Notre Dame, noted several other problems
with the analogy.

One is that the Nazis would have jailed or even
killed anyone who helped Jews escape persecution. "In contrast, the
pro-life movement in the United States has a strong political voice,"
Kaveny wrote. "Ongoing efforts to convince women to carry their
pregnancies to term, and to give those women assistance in doing so, are
entirely legal and legitimate, and often effective. Crisis pregnancy
centers are not analogous to the 'secret annex' in The Diary of Anne Frank."

A
final problem that both Kaveny and Collett highlighted is that
comparing legalized abortion to the Holocaust implies that the U.S.
government de­serves the same fate as Nazi Germany—namely, to be
overthrown. And that's a logical conclusion few if any antiabortion
activists are going to make.

Still, a number of antiabortion
activists who agree that the Holocaust comparison is flawed say critics
need to come up with a better substitute, and so far they haven't. That
means that the  comparison isn't likely to go away anytime soon.

Though
the argument can wind up turning off as many people as it convinces,
its emotional appeal is amplified by its apparent simplicity—and by the
frustration that many abortion opponents feel over their inability to
end what they see as a monstrous injustice. There's an old saying that
"every analogy limps," meaning that no comparison is perfect. But that
doesn't mean that an analogy can't run away with an argument.  —RNS