Why Abortion Is Not The Holocaust

180 is the latest propaganda tool of the prolife movement. It’s 33 minutes of flawed film-making aimed at turning prochoicers into prolifers. The trailer promised to show us how Ray Comfort, a Jewish prolife and 10 Commandments zealot, convinced people to become prolife in a matter of moments.

We don’t know how many people told Ray to get lost or argued against him in a sane manner when he poked microphones and cameras at them. I hope plenty of smart, sane people ended up on the cutting room floor otherwise 180’s biggest achievement is to expose the sorry state of American education. Ray starts by asking people who Adolf Hitler was — there are blank stares, someone thought he was an actor, someone knew he had a moustache, plenty thought he was a communist.

He then tells people about the Holocaust and asks them if they knew what Hitler would go on to do, had a clear shot at Adolf Hitler in 1939 or Adolf Hitler’s mother when she was pregnant with him, would they pull the trigger? Everyone says yes. Ray doesn’t seem shocked by this or, in his capacity as a prolifer and fan of the “Thou Shalt Not Kill” commandment, point out that they have just condoned murder. That’s the first logic failure of the movie.

Then there’s a ridiculous hypothetical whereby Ray asks what you’d do if a German soldier in WWII held a machine gun to your head while you were at the wheel of a bulldozer and says you have to bulldoze a pit of Jews or you will be shot. Regardless of the fact that if you fired a machine gun in the cabin of a bulldozer, the gunman would probably die too — logic doesn’t play a big part in this movie — plenty of people are honest enough to say they would drive the bulldozer over the Jews to save their own life. Ray then asks if they’d shoot the Jews with the machine gun if the German soldier asked. More people seemed squeamish about doing that.

Logic takes yet another holiday when Ray says surely machine-gunning is more merciful than bulldozing. He then has a brief aside were he asks people if they’d stop him from blowing up a building if they were unsure if people were inside or not. I think this meant to be a parallel to a pregnant woman’s womb — except that if a woman is pregnant, she knows there’s a fetus in there. Following on from this non-sequitur, Ray’s kicker is that the Nazi Holocaust is no different to babies dying in abortion, therefore if you are prochoice, you are just like Adolf Hitler.

Except that when a woman chooses abortion, there are so many other possible issues at play — physical health, mental health, financial circumstances, rape, incest, abusive relationships and so on — making it far more complex than Hitler’s wholesale killing of as many Jews as possible simply because he doesn’t like Jews.

Prochoice is not about wholesale killing of anyone nor is about trying to make as many women as possible have an abortion. It is about pregnant women having choices which include, but are not limited to, abortion. True prochoice also supports clear honest sex education and access to birth control, awareness of the pros and cons of all forms of birth control, sexual health awareness, support for women who choose to carry the pregnancy to term and making the process of adoption as non-bureaucratic and compassionate as possible.

I can’t see a day when prochoice and prolife will agree on when life begins or whether or not abortion is murder. Indeed, there are disagreements within prolife and prochoice camps. Camille Paglia supports abortion and goes as far as to say it is the taking of a life but she still supports the procedure, which some prochoicers find hard to stomach. Meanwhile, prolifers are divided on issues such as capital punishment and birth control.

In any case, 180 doesn’t really add anything new to the debate and as a bonus, manages to be offensive to prochoice Jews, Christians and indeed anyone of any creed who is appalled by Adolf HItler. And like so many of these films, there is no escaping the religious dogma. Not content to leave it at guilt-tripping previously prochoice people into becoming prolife because of a terrible Hitler analogy, he then asks everyone whether they’ll be going to heaven and hell and exposes them all as evil 10 Commandments-violators who should repent at once. Apparently, we should be prolife because of the afterlife.

In short, this movie won’t do a damn thing to prevent any unplanned pregnancies. Ray Comfort isn’t afraid to show pictures of dead Jews at concentration camps. But he is afraid to talk about what can be done to stop these abortions he hates so much.

Georgia Lewis is a journalist who lives in London. Contact her here.