“Unborn Lives Matter” sign at January 2017 March for Life. Image by Getty Images

In Slate, Ruth Graham explores the surprisingly extensive history of pro-life rhetoric comparing abortion to the Holocaust. She traces the phenomenon to an analogy made by Pope Pius XII in 1951, a time when the specifics of Nazi ideology were still fresh in people’s minds:

Catholics dominated the pre-Roe anti-abortion movement, and they saw an obvious connection between the budding push for wider access to abortion and recent atrocities in Hitler’s Europe. They feared a slippery slope between abortion and eugenics, euthanasia, infanticide, and genocide — all, they argued, practices rooted in a disregard for the essential value of human life.

Graham goes on to explain how the rhetoric has evolved: “Today, Nazi comparisons remain commonplace within the pro-life movement, but the angle has shifted. Catholic theologians no longer dominate the anti-abortion conversation, and contemporary activists are just as likely to emphasize the sheer numbers of the dead as the moral calculus of the ‘killers.’”

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Graham writes that the aim of the comparison these days often appears to be “riling up true believers and making their enemies angry, rather than persuading with a morally serious argument.” Intent is always tough to gauge, but I think the (newer) rhetoric, inspired, so to speak, by Black Lives Matter, supports Graham’s hypothesis.

However earnestly intended, analogies to racist violence against the very much born are, I believe, best avoided.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy edits the Sisterhood, and can be reached at [email protected]. She is the author of The Perils of “Privilege”, from St. Martin’s Press.

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