MP dubs abortion ‘modern-day holocaust’ during Shoah commemoration

As the world remembers the over 6 million victims of the Nazi holocaust 72 years since the end of the Second World War, Nationalist MP Tonio Fenech turned his attention to what he said was “an equally horrific atrocity” – abortion.

Fenech was addressing Parliament on Monday as the House commemorated Holocaust Remembrance Day, celebrated on 27 January.

“As happened in the Second World War, people today too are trying to justify this modern-day holocaust that has seen more than 60 million abortions being carried out since 1973 in the United States alone,” he said, referring to the year in which the US Supreme Court decided in Roe v. Wade that a state cannot hinder the path of a woman seeking an abortion.

“People try to argue that they are not killing babies or that they have the right to choose, but what if people started believing they had to right to abort babies they knew would be born disabled, or to allow abortion in a bid to control the planet’s over-population.”

Fenech said anyone visiting Auschwitz and the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem could learn to what extent mankind would go in its search for power, but also in its bid for survival.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, the US abortion rate in 2014 was 14.6 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15–44 – the lowest rate ever observed since 1973, the year abortion became legal, when the rate was 16.3.

Education Minister Evarist Bartolo said the day dedicated to the remembrance of the Holocaust victims should not end up being simply a day on the calendar, without any thought spared to the suffering endured by millions of human beings.

He noted that the Nazi regime, under the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler during the Second World War, embarked on the systematic killing of all those the Third Reich felt were inferior human beings, including six million Jews or people of Jewish heritage and another five million people killed because of their sexual orientation, religious beliefs or ethnic heritage.

Bartolo called on all MPs to consider how they would have reacted if they had lived through such atrocities as those carried out by the Nazis. “People should also consider how many lives could have been saved if, for example, the Allies had bombed the rail tracks used by the Germans to deliver people to their concentration camps,” he said.

The Holocaust, known as the Shoah in Hebrew for “the catastrophe” killed two-thirds of European Jews, apart from the 5 million non-Jewish victims, which included ethnic Poles and other Slavs, Soviet citizens and Soviet POWs, Romanis, communists, homosexuals, Freemasons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and the mentally and physically disabled.

A network of about 42,500 facilities in Germany and German-occupied territories was used to concentrate victims for slave labour, mass murder, and other human rights abuse. Over 200,000 people are estimated to have been Holocaust perpetrators.