Alabama politicians compare abortions to the Holocaust in proposed legislation
Source: CBS NEWS
BY KATE SMITH
APRIL 23, 2019 / 4:19 PM / CBS NEWS
In legislation proposed earlier this month, Alabama state lawmakers compared abortions in the U.S. to the Holocaust and other modern genocides, prompting Jewish activists and abortion rights groups to rebuke the legislation as "deeply offensive."
Senator Ben Albritton and Representative Terri Collins, both Republicans, filed matching bills in Alabama's state legislature that would ban abortion, making no exceptions for rape or incest. The legislation, dubbed the "Human Life Protection Act," would reclassify abortion as a felony offense, punishable by a minimum of ten years in prison for the physician.
Within the text of each bill, the authors compare abortions to lives lost during the Holocaust, in Joseph Stalin's gulags, during China's "Great Leap Forward," under the Khmer Rouge and during the Rwandan genocide.
Here's the section that appears in both pieces of legislation:
"It is estimated that 6,000,000 Jewish people were murdered in German concentration camps during World War II; 3,000,000 people were executed by Joseph Stalin's regime in Soviet gulags; 2,500,000 people were murdered during the Chinese "Great Leap Forward" in 1958; 1,500,000 to 3,000,000 people were murdered by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia during the 1970s; and approximately 1,000,000 people were murdered during the Rwandan genocide in 1994. All of these are widely acknowledged to have been crimes against humanity. By comparison, more than 50 million babies have been aborted in the United States since the Roe decision in 1973, more than three times the number who were killed in German death camps, Chinese purges, Stalin's gulags, Cambodian killing fields, and the Rwandan genocide combined."
Read more: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/alabama-abortion-bill-alabama-politicians-compare-abortions-to-the-holocaust-in-proposed-abortion-law-2019-04-23/
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