Comparing abortion to the Holocaust is perverse, says ADL

A group that fights anti-Semitism has denounced a film popular among anti-abortion activists linking abortion to the Holocaust. The Anti-Defamation League calls the film “cynical” and “perverse.”


In a press release, the League calls the film “one of the most offensive and outrageous abuses of the memory of the Holocaust we have seen in years.”

The 30-minute film, which is referred to as the “180 movie,” has garnered almost 1.5 million views on YouTube and has been heavily circulated among anti-abortion activists. The creator of the film, Ray Comfort, recently announced he was sending the movie to high schools in the hopes that the movie is shown to students.

Personhood USA emailed 600,000 voters in Mississippi a link to the controversial film just a day before Mississippians would vote on the failed Personhood amendment.

According to the Anti-Defamation League’s press release:

“The film is a perverse attempt to make a case against abortion in America through the cynical abuse of the memory of those killed in the Holocaust,” said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director and a Holocaust survivor. “Not only does the film try to assert a moral equivalency between the Holocaust and abortion, but it also brings Jews and Jewish history into the discussion and then calls on its viewers to repent and accept Jesus as their savior. It is, quite frankly, one of the most offensive and outrageous abuses of the memory of the Holocaust we have seen in years.”

The film “180″ is part of an initiative led by “Living Waters,” which has spearheaded “Project Heart Changer,” which aims to change peoples’ minds about abortion and get them to accept Jesus as their savior.

In the film, Comfort manipulates the young people interviewed to view the killing of innocent Jews during the Holocaust to be the same as the killing of fetuses. First, he asks the young people whether they would agree to bulldoze innocent Jews into a mass grave and bury them alive it would save their own lives. Then he asks questions about abortion. He tells the young people who answered ‘no’ to the first question that they have just said that they would not kill innocent Jews, but they think it is okay to kill innocent babies.

“We’re talking about a Holocaust in America, in our country, that’s sanctioned by the government,” Comfort says. He goes on to claim that American people allowing abortions is doing exactly what the Germans did, that Hitler had the sanction of the German people to kill Jews.

In a statement responding to the League’s press release, Comfort said:

No one but a Holocaust survivor can really understand the horror of what the Jews suffered. But the analogy stands. Hitler justified their murder by saying that Jews weren’t human. Abortion advocates do the same by calling a baby a “fetus” (as do ADL in their press release). Yet at 6 weeks 6 days a baby has a heartbeat, eyes, a mouth and hands. We show actual footage of this in our movie. Science now tells us that at the moment of conception there is DNA, determining the eye-color, hair-color and the height and personality of the person. Destroy that, and you destroy the person.