Controlling the Womb: Lessons from Nazi Germany for a Post-Roe America

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“We allow the massacre of a million and a half babies a year under the guise of women’s reproductive health…It is never right to justify the mass termination of people under the guise of saying that they are unwanted. That’s how we get Auschwitz, that’s how we get the greatest horrors of the twentieth century.”^[1]

These were the words of political activist Charlie Kirk at a Turning Point USA rally in March of 2025, directly comparing abortion to the Holocaust. Charlie Kirk was not the only political advocate drawing such a comparison. House Speaker Mike Johnson in a 2005 op-ed referred to abortion as a holocaust. Johnson wrote, “This disregard for life has been fostered by the courts. During business hours today, 4,500 innocent American children will be killed. It is a holocaust that has been repeated every day for 32 years, since 1973’s Roe v. Wade.”^[2]

Invoking Auschwitz and the Holocaust to argue against abortion is historically illiterate and callously overlooks what actually happened to women under the Nazi Regime. For pregnant Jewish women who made it past selection in the concentration camps, undergoing an abortion was an alternative to the gas chamber. Within that history lies a story that those who invoke Auschwitz to argue against reproductive freedom would rather not confront: that the Nazi regime weaponized reproduction not to protect fetal life but to engineer the ethnonational state it wanted to become.

The ideological architecture built around reproduction in the Third Reich shares a structure with the one being built in the United States today. Both pursue the same two-part strategy: incentivize births among women they consider essential to the nation’s future, and restrict, criminalize, or coerce reproduction among the women they do not. The content of that ideal differs – in Nazi Germany, Aryan and “racially fit” and in the US, white, native-born and Christian – but the mechanism is recognizable.

Nazi Germany’s population policy was a public campaign, backed by the law, and rewarded to encourage a specific kind of birth. In December 1938, the Third Reich established the Cross of the Honour of the German Mother to encourage women of “pure stock” and “good genes” to reproduce. Over three million German women received the cross. Hitler’s signature was on the back. Magda Goebbels, wife of the propaganda minister and mother of six, was the first to receive it. The Reich report on miscarriage in 1941 said women who had a voluntary abortion before marriage “were therefore unhappy for the rest of their lives.”^[3] This state-sanctioned ideology maintained that women were only fulfilled through motherhood, but only a particular woman’s motherhood counted.

This ideology persists in current American rhetoric. In April 2025, just three months into the second Trump administration, the New York Times reported that the White House was assessing ways to persuade women to have more babies. Among the proposals was a “National Medal of Motherhood” for women with six or more children. In 2021, JD Vance lamented that America was being run by “Democrats, oligarchs and childless cat ladies,” arguing that people without children don’t “have a direct stake” in the country. In his first public address as vice president, at the January 2025 March for Life, he was more explicit about who he had in mind: “I want more babies in the United States of America…And I want beautiful young men and women who are eager to welcome them into the world and eager to raise them.”^[4]

The “mother” this rhetoric imagines is not any mother. It is not the immigrant mother, long stigmatized in American political discourse through terms like “anchor babies” or “birth tourism,” which cast those children’s citizenship as a calculated exploit rather than a birthright.^[5] It is not the Black mother, who has spent decades fending off the “welfare queen” stereotype and who remains disproportionately dependent on Medicaid, which funds roughly 65 percent of Black mothers’ births, even as the current administration pursuing pronatalist policy has also pursued deep Medicaid cuts.^[6] The same voices celebrating and encouraging rising birth rates in the abstract have, in other contexts, framed rising birth rates among Black and immigrant communities as a demographic threat, the fear behind the “great replacement” rhetoric that has moved from the margins of the right into its mainstream. This is the ideological architecture at work – an incentive structure that functions by naming, implicitly or explicitly, who it is not for. The growing control and attack on reproductive rights and bodily autonomy by the current administration and Republican politicians are unabashedly forcing a return to what they deem a “great nation”, a time centered around the “ideal” family as outlined by the Heritage Foundation’s Saving America by Saving the Family.^[7]

In Nazi Germany, reproductive policy was never simply about banning abortion; it was about controlling who should reproduce. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Nazi authorities had actually encouraged Jewish women to seek abortions, since terminating those pregnancies aligned with the Nazis’ goals of eradicating the Jewish people. In Auschwitz-Birkenau, visibly pregnant women were sent directly to the gas chambers upon arrival. They could not serve as forced labor, and a Jewish pregnancy was a direct antithesis to the Nazi goal. Jewish prisoner-physician Dr. Gisella Perl performed abortions in the Auschwitz-Birkenau barracks at night, without anesthesia or proper hygiene, to give pregnant women a chance at survival.^[8]

However, as the war continued, a paradox emerged. In the Warsaw and Theresienstadt ghettos, edicts were passed that prohibited prisoners from undergoing abortions. The reasons shifted with Nazi strategic calculations, and just as often, with nothing more coherent than the disposition of whichever Kommandant controlled the ghetto that month. The inconsistency was not a failure of policy. It was the policy. Jewish reproduction was a tool of total control, exercised or withheld at will, answerable to no principle beyond what the state wanted. Whether forced to abort or forbidden from doing so, the decision was made by the state. During the Third Reich, an Aryan woman’s value was tied to being a wife or a mother. If she was Jewish, her value was determined by whether her reproduction served or threatened the state.

The American mechanism of exclusion looks different, and it is important not to conflate that difference. There is no American policy forcing abortion on any group of women. Instead the existing system, in which the ability to have children, on one’s own terms, is being narrowed unevenly. This burden falls hardest on women who are poor, live in states with the most restrictive bans, lack the resources to travel for care, or are already targets of immigration enforcement. In 2020, a nurse at an ICE detention center, alleged that dozens of immigrant women had undergone hysterectomies without informed consent.^[9] When the news broke, it drew immediate comparisons to Nazi sterilizations and is a part of a longer American history of forced sterilization aimed at Black, Latina, and Indigenous women. The recent ramp-up of immigration raids in cities like Boston and Minneapolis saw many pregnant women skipping or avoiding care due to fears of deportation by ICE.^[10]

That erosion of access begins with the criminalization of those who provide care. From 1871 to 1945, Paragraph 218 of the German Penal Code outlawed abortion and restricted access to contraception.^[11] Despite women gaining suffrage under the Weimar Republic the old legal code was never revised. When the Third Reich assumed power in 1933, Paragraph 218 was ready and waiting – not merely a law against abortion, but a tool the regime could now use: tightened, enforced, and turned into an instrument for deciding whose children the state wanted.

That year, the Nazis passed legislation prohibiting abortion facilities and services. Between 1932 and 1938, yearly convictions for abortion increased by 65 percent. From 1935 on, doctors and midwives were obligated to notify the regional State Health Office of every miscarriage to confirm it was natural and not the result of an abortion. In 1937, Nazi police arrested the Jewish physician Dr. Georg Manes in Hamburg on “urgent suspicion of commercial abortion.”^[12] He was convicted, sentenced to three years’ penal servitude, stripped of his medical license, and the state petitioned the University of Würzburg to revoke his doctoral degree. In 1941, the Reich Statistical Office released a report on “Abortion Crime Committed by Medical Professionals in the German Reich in the Years 1937–1939.” In those three years, 882 medical providers were convicted. The report characterized their motives as “mainly selfish,” accusing them of committing “this crime, which poses the greatest threat to the existence of the German National body, purely for financial gain.”

The framing is familiar: providers are characterized not as healthcare workers but as criminals. In January 2025, a Louisiana grand jury indicted Dr. Margaret Carpenter, a New York physician, for prescribing abortion medication via telehealth – the first criminal charges against a doctor for providing abortion pills since Roe was overturned. Recently confirmed Attorney General Todd Blanche has said of abortion pill restrictions, “We don’t have complete victory yet, but we will have victory, and victory will be soon, and it will be permanent.”^[13] Weeks later, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton brought felony charges against Maria Rojas, a Houston midwife who spent years serving low-income, uninsured and primarily Spanish-speaking patients. Rojas was jailed for ten days, held on a $1.4 million bond, and stripped of her license before trial. Paxton called her clinic network a “cabal of abortion-loving radicals.”^[14] Medical professionals in states with abortion bans face criminal prosecution, loss of licensure, and imprisonment.The machinery is the same – identify the provider, prosecute, then dismantle their professional existence – even where the underlying law and its severity are not.

On August 5th, the Senate confirmed Dr. Erica Schwartz as the next director of the CDC. During her confirmation hearing, Senator Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) asked Schwartz about her commitment to collecting detailed data on abortions for the Abortion Reporting System, which currently is voluntary. Schwartz reiterated her commitment to abortion tracking. “Abortion surveillance is absolutely a critical component of what the CDC is currently doing. We need to make sure we’re pulling out true abortions and making sure that we’re really having clear case definitions regarding abortions so the data is actually accurate.”^[15] The Reich’s own surveillance system began that way, a reporting requirement framed as public health necessity, before it became the infrastructure that made prosecution possible.

This is not a claim that history repeats itself on a fixed schedule, or that the United States is destined to follow Nazi Germany’s trajectory to its end. Historical methods cannot predict the future. What they can do is show us what this particular architecture – incentive paired with exclusion, surveillance paired with prosecution – was built to accomplish before. It was the lived infrastructure of the Third Reich, and it is the emerging infrastructure of the present United States. Let us recognize it as a structure rather than a series of unconnected policies, and confront what happens when a state decides that women’s bodies belong to the nation.

Notes

1. Turning Point USA and Charlie Kirk, Instagram Reel, March 24th, 2025 ​​https://www.instagram.com/p/DHmK3YgSsNf/ ↑
2. Scott MacFarlane and Michael Kaplan, “House Speaker Mike Johnson Once Referred to Abortion as a “Holocaust” CBS News. October 26, 2023. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/house-speaker-mike-johnson-abortion-holocaust/ ↑
3. The Federal Archives, Germany. RGB, 1935/I p. 1035 ↑
4. Jonah McKeown, “JD Vance addresses March for Life: We Need a ‘Culture that Celebrates Life at all Stages,” EWTN News. January 24, 2025. Accessed August 25th, 2026. https://www.ewtnnews.com/world/us/jd-vance-addresses-march-for-life-we-need-a-culture-that-celebrates-life-at-all-stages?redirectedfrom=cna ↑
5. To learn more about this discourse check out the following news articles: Press Release, “Rep. Andy Ogles Introduces Anchors Away Act After SCOTUS Ruling on Birthright Citizenship,” June 30, 2026. https://ogles.house.gov/media/press-releases/rep-ogles-introduces-anchors-away-act-after-scotus-ruling-birthright. | Emma Waters, “What is the US reproductive tourism industry really selling,” The Hill. August 25, 2026. Accessed August 25, 2026. https://thehill.com/opinion/international/6046000-restrict-us-reproductive-tourism/ ↑
6. Recent News articles on this topic: Sophie Hurwitz, “Republicans Claim Widespread Food Stamp Fraud. What’s Missing: Hard Evidence,” Mother Jones. May 5, 2026. Accessed August 25, 2026. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/05/republicans-snap-fraud-welfare-queen/ Naomi Bethune, “The ‘Welfare Queen’ is Back, but she Never Quite Left,” The American Prospect. November 14, 2025. Accessed August 25, 2026. https://prospect.org/2025/11/14/snap-welfare-queen/. On the Medicaid Statistics: Judith Solomon, “Closing the Coverage Gap Would Improve Black Maternal Health,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, July 26, 2021. https://www.cbpp.org/research/health/closing-the-coverage-gap-would-improve-black-maternal-health & Latoya Hill, Alisha Rao, Samantha Artiga and Usha Ranji, “Racial Disparities in Maternal and Infant Health: Current Status and Key Issues,” KFF, December 3, 2025. https://www.kff.org/racial-equity-and-health-policy/racial-disparities-in-maternal-and-infant-health-current-status-and-key-issues/ ↑
7. Roger Severino, Jay Richards, Emma Waters, Delano Squires, Rachel Sheffield and Robert Rector, “Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years,” The Heritage Foundation. January 8, 2026. Accessed July 31, 2026. https://www.heritage.org/marriage-and-family/report/saving-america-saving-the-family-foundation-the-next-250-years ↑
8. To learn more about Dr. Gisella Perl, you can read her memoir, I was a Doctor in Auschwitz, published by Lexington Press in 2019. ↑
9. “ICE Whistleblower: Nurse Alleges ‘hysterectomies on immigrant women in US’, BBC. September 15, 2020. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-54160638 ↑
10. Kate Wells, “Some families afraid of ICE are forgoing medical care. These volunteers help them,” NPR Morning Edition, March 2, 2026. https://www.npr.org/2026/03/02/nx-s1-5724246/some-families-afraid-of-ice-are-forgoing-medical-care-these-volunteers-help-them ↑
11. Lüder, Karl. The Penal Code for the German Reich of May 15, 1871, as amended on February 26, 1876: together with the Introductory and Amending Law. Erlangen: Deichert. https://www.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/details/bsb11332537 ↑
12. RG-14.136, 352-3 Medizinalkollegium (Medical Council).Staatsarchiv Hamburg (Germany). United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives, Washington D.C. ↑
13. Alice Miranda Ollstein and Josh Gerstein, “Blanche assures Anti-Abortion Supporters that Dobbs ‘will be permanent in every single state’”, Politico. August 3, 2026. Accessed August 9, 2026. https://www.politico.com/news/2026/08/03/blanche-pledged-abortion-pill-crackdown-private-call-01023304 ↑
14. Press Release, “No Proof that Texas Midwife Violated Abortion Ban, Court Rules,” Center for Reproductive Rights. July 23, 2026. Accessed August 25, 2026. https://reproductiverights.org/news/no-proof-texas-midwife-violated-abortion-ban/ ↑
15. Awra Mahdawi, “Rest Assured the New CDC Director thinks ‘Abortion Surveillance’ is Essential”, The Guardian. August 8, 2026. Accessed August 9th, 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/aug/08/cdc-abortion-surveillance-schwartz-hawley ↑

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Featured image caption: A Nazi party official gives an award bestowed on German mothers. Mother’s Day, 1943. (Courtesy Wikimedia)