When the Supreme Court handed down its Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, the pro-life community in the United States celebrated. After 50 years of working tirelessly and witnessing faithfully for the dignity of all human lives—especially for unborn child and mother—a victory had been won.

While Dobbs was not everything that prolifers could have hoped for, it was a lot. Abortion would no longer be protected by the Constitution; states would now democratically decide their own abortion laws—which meant pro-life advocacy and witness would be concentrated at the state level.

Then came the pushback. Those who call themselves “pro-choice” (or “pro-abortion” or “progressive”) took to the streets, the digital highway, and the airwaves to vent their anger and misgivings about Dobbs, and their unrelenting hostility to the pro-life community. We knew this was coming. But it was worse than we thought it would be.

Then came a big defeat. Kansans voted not to override a state court ruling that had declared abortion protected by the state’s constitution, limiting the extent to which abortion legislation in Kansas would be decided democratically by the people—not judicially by the judges.

Then came a couple of Biden administration legislative victories. So now it appears that this year’s mid-term elections will not see pro-life Republicans shellacking pro-choice Democrats. Congressional and senatorial races across the nation have tightened.

Given these sobering developments, it is not surprising that the pro-life community has a case of the blues. When the blues come, we are wise to remember why we believe what we believe and why we do what we do. When the blues come, we are wise to get down to basics.

Vera Sharav calls us to do exactly that. As a child, Vera Sharav survived imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp. She went on to become the founder and president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, whose “mission is to ensure that the moral right of voluntary medical decision-making is upheld.”

On August 20, 2022, Ms. Sharav delivered a speech in Nuremberg, Germany, to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Nuremberg Code (which was laid out in the verdict of what became known as the Nuremberg “Doctor’s Trial”). A response to the brutalities inflicted on prisoners by Nazi doctors, the Nuremberg Code aimed to protect all people going forward from unethical medical experimentation. Its objective, Sharav said, “is to ensure that medicine never again deviates from the precautionary ethical principle, ‘First, do no harm.’”

In her speech, Ms. Sharav warns of the dangers of national governments being over-involved in medical affairs, using as examples Germany during the Nazi years and the United States during the Covid pandemic years. Here is just some of what she said at Nuremberg:

The Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Treblinka. The Holocaust was preceded by nine years of incremental restrictions on personal freedom, and the suspension of legal rights and civil rights. The stage was set by fear-mongering and hate-mongering propaganda.

A series of humiliating discriminatory government edicts demonized Jews as “spreaders of disease.” We were compared to lice.

The real viral disease that infected Nazi Germany is eugenics—eugenics is the elitist ideology at the root of all genocides. Eugenics is cloaked in a mantle of pseudo-science. It was embraced by the academic and medical establishment as well as the judiciary—in Germany and the United States.

Eugenicists justify social and economic inequality. They legitimize discrimination, apartheid, sterilization, euthanasia and genocide. The Nazis called it “ethnic cleansing”—for the protection of the gene pool.

Medicine was perverted from its healing mission and was weaponized.

First, it was to control reproduction through forced sterilization. Then it was to eliminate those deemed to be “sub-human”—Untermenschen.

• The first victims of medical murder were 1,000 German disabled infants and toddlers. This murderous operation was expanded to an estimated 10,000 children up to age 17.
• The next victims were the mentally ill. Thy were followed by the elderly in nursing homes.

All of these human beings were condemned as “worthless eaters.”

Under Operation T-4, designated hospitals became killing stations where various extermination methods were tested—including Zyclon B, the gas that was used in the death camps. The objective of the Nazi Final Solution was to annihilate the entire 11-million Jewish population of Europe as quickly and efficiently as possible.

The Nazis enacted discriminatory laws. They utilized modern technology, low-cost industrial methods, an efficient transportation system and a highly trained bureaucracy that coordinated the industrial genocidal process.

The objective was high speed, maximum efficiency at the lowest cost. The human casualties of this unprecedented genocide were 6 million Jews and 9 million other people whom the Nazis dehumanized as Untermenschen.

Ms. Sharav goes on to warn of parallels between Germany in the 1930s and America today. For example, she cites “state of emergency” declarations during the pandemic that allowed for overlooking constitutional and civil rights; the imposition of “repressive, discriminatory decrees”; forbidding “hospitals from treating the elderly in nursing homes,” which led to “mass murder”; disallowing “doctors to prescribe life-saving, FDA-approved medicines.”; permitting only “a single, government-dictated narrative”; censoring “opposing views”; maligning “doctors and scientists who challenge the approved narrative.”

Americans must be vigilant about speaking out when moral and legal boundaries that involve life and death are breached or moved. Vera Sharav’s speech* is a very sobering reminder of what happens when the strong turn on the weak. We must always be ready to recommit ourselves to stand up for the weakest among us—starting with unborn child and mother.

This speech chases away the blues.

* “Vera Sharav: ‘Nuremberg Code is Our Defense Against Abusive Experimentation,’” August 22, 2022, Children’s Health Defense website, accessed 8/31/22.