Canada’s ‘father of abortion’ was a Holocaust survivor. Did trauma make him a killer?

 

It has long haunted me how Henry Morgentaler, sometimes referred to as Canada’s “father of abortion,” survived Nazi concentration camps only to go on to perpetrate similar horrors against the smallest and most vulnerable members of the human family: preborn children.

How did a Jewish Holocaust survivor from Poland—someone who endured the worst of man’s inhumanity to man at the infamous Nazi camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau and later Dachau—go on to dehumanize and destroy tens of thousands of preborn human beings, robbing them of their most fundamental right: the right to life?

Morgentaler’s biographies provide vivid accounts of his survival, though some critics question the credibility of those accounts. Eleanor Wright Pelrine, in her 1975 book Morgentaler: The Doctor Who Couldn’t Turn Away, wrote about how Nazis rounded up the 21-year-old Morgentaler from a Jewish ghetto in August 1944, herding him along with his mother and younger brother, Mumek (Mike), onto an overflowing train bound for the dreaded Auschwitz-Birkenau camp where over a million people were murdered.

It was during the “selection” process after arriving that Morgentaler saw his mother for the last time. He and his brother were selected for work, their mother for the gas chambers. Prisoners had their belongings confiscated, they were stripped naked, shaved from head to foot, and provided striped prison garb along with wooden shoes. A huge chimney nearby spewed forth black, stinking smoke, a brief testimony lingering in the sky to those who were murdered in the gas chambers and were later cremated.

Morgentaler was soon transferred to the Dachau work camp, where—in a deliberate effort to dehumanize prisoners—he was stripped of his name and identified only by a number: 95077. The camp routine consisted of 12 hours of hard labor and 5-6 hours of sleep. Food, consisting of watery soup and bread, was rationed and insufficient. Prisoners died from malnutrition, exhaustion, and exposure. There were constant beatings. Fear was everywhere. One day, Morgentaler, starving and sick, reported to the infirmary. He glanced at his reflection in the mirror. The emaciated figure he saw staring back at him filled him with horror.

“I looked like death incarnated—and I started to cry. I thought it must be the end,” he recounted.  (more...)

Canada’s ‘father of abortion’ was a Holocaust survivor. Did trauma make him a killer?