Anti-Choice Group Pushes To Screen Movie Comparing Abortion To The Holocaust In High Schools

By Marie Diamond/Think Progress

As ThinkProgress has reported, anti-abortion activists are increasingly taking their crusade to high schools and middle schools, frightening students with disturbing graphic images as they make their way to class.

Now, the creators of a movie that compares abortion to the Holocaust are taking this tactic a step further and arelobbying to screen their film in high schools. The group’spress release touts the film’s ability to change minds, and makes no distinction between the actual Holocaust and modern abortion. In fact, the creator promotes the film as the solution to a lack of education about the Holocaust in American schools:

A free DVD of the award-winning viral movie “180″ may be coming to a high school near you. The creator of www.180movie.com, Ray Comfort, said “180 received over a million views in 22 days, because it’s ‘shocking.’ [...]

Late last month, between 180,000 and 200,000 copies of the 33-minute DVD were given out at 100 of America’s top universities, and now the Jewish author and TV co-host is turning his attention to high schools. “No doubt some will say that Holocaust education isn’t appropriate for high school kids. However, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum says that the appropriate age is ’11 years of age and older.’ [...]

Comfort added, “It’s evident that many of the States aren’t bothering to teach kids about one of the darkest periods of human history. I am concerned that we may become like the U.K. where some schools dropped teaching about the Holocaust for fear of offending Moslems, some of whom deny that the Holocaust even happened…This is more than a travesty, so we are giving hundreds of thousands of kids a free documentary.

The movie has gone viral in the anti-abortion community, with its website registering nearly 1.5 million views so far. Comfort’s mission is to essentially replace teaching about the horrors of the Holocaust of the 1940s with propaganda about abortion. He also misleadingly suggests that the Holocaust Museum endorses his video as a proper educational tool about the wholesale slaughter of Jews, gays, and other minorities that is appropriate for young children.

It’s disturbing to think that thousands of students’ first exposure to a world-changing historical atrocity would be colored by such an inaccurate and insulting argument. To equate women’s personal choices about their reproductive health to the Nazis’ systematic, coordinated operation to exterminate Europe’s Jewish population is to reduce its unique importance and confuse students.