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Gisella Perl was forced to work as a doctor in Auschwitz concentration camp during the holocaust.
She was ordered to report ever pregnant women do the physician Dr. Josef Mengele, who would then use the women for cruel experiments (e.g. vivisections) before killing them.
She saved hundreds of women by performing abortions on them before their pregnancy was discovered, without having access to basic medical supplies. She became known as the “Angel of Auschwitz”.
After being rescued from Bergen-Belsen concentration camp she tried to commit suicide, but survived, recovered and kept working as a gynecologist, delivering more than 3000 babies.
I want to nail this to the forehead of every anti-abortionist who uses the word “Holocaust” when talking about legal abortions.
Yeah… she became a gynecologist and was extremely pro-life after she got out of the camps.
In an interview with Nadine Brozan for the New York Times in 1982, Dr. Perl recalled her initial experiences with Dr. Mengele’s “cure” for pregnancy in Auschwitz. ”Dr. Mengele told me that it was my duty to report every pregnant woman to him,” Dr. Perl said. ”He said that they would go to another camp for better nutrition, even for milk. So women began to run directly to him, telling him, ‘I am pregnant.’ I learned that they were all taken to the research block to be used as guinea pigs, and then two lives would be thrown into the crematorium. I decided that never again would there be a pregnant woman in Auschwitz.”
Let’s analyze the situation: mother and child alike were both going to be killed anyway if the pregnancy was discovered. Leaving wasn’t an option. Freedom was nonexistent, and the perspectives of all involved were colored by living in hell on earth.
After the war, she dedicated her life to Holocaust remembrance, infertility treatment, and delivering babies – not destroying them. The New York Times quotes her as saying, “No one will ever know what it meant to me to destroy those babies, but if I had not done it, both mother and child would have been cruelly murdered.” Perl never pretended they weren’t babies, that their lives didn’t matter, or that their deaths weren’t cruel.
Holy crap. I literally got a ton of shit a few months ago for saying that maybe, just maybe, Perl’s actions don’t justify abortion as a whole. Well, it goes to show that I should’ve done more research, to find out that Perl herself doesn’t pretend that was she did was right, or that it justifies abortion now.
There was another woman, a midwife, who was devout Catholic and helped to care for pregnant women and hide the babies, and continued her work in midwifery after the war. Last I heard she was in the canonization process in the Catholic Church.
Fucking THANK YOU I’m so tired of pro-choicers using her as a “gotcha”. She had to do a terrible thing in a terrible circumstance. That has literally no relation to first world abortion legislation today.
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