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  • 2022-05-10 (xsd:date)
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  • Did Hitler Say He'd 'Put an End to the Idea That a Woman's Body Belongs to Her'? (en)
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  • Since at least 2017, memes or tweets have suggested that Adolf Hitler once wrote or stated, I'll put an end to the idea that a woman's body belongs to her ... Nazi ideals demand that the practice of abortion shall be exterminated with a strong hand. Some iterations cite Hitler's 1925 manifesto Mein Kampf as this statement's purported origin. Indeed, Mein Kampf contains a statement similar to the first sentence of the quote, which stems from Hitler's views on state education: This differs from the meme-quote attributed to Hitler. The meme version of the quote appears to be a paraphrase from an essay written by Gloria Steinem in 1983. That essay, Hitler and the Abortion Debate, sought in part to counter right-wing, anti-abortion activists' claims that legalization of abortion would lead to state-controlled eugenics akin to Nazi Germany. In the introduction of that piece, Steinem references the same portion of Mein Kampf: Steinem put Hitler's views on bodily autonomy in the context of the feminist and abortion-rights movement's invocation of female bodily autonomy. Her work likely brought this quote more attention in that context. As a result, the memed version of the quote appears to be a poor paraphrase of Steinem's argument from that 1983 essay. As for the second sentence — Nazi ideals demand that the practice of abortion shall be exterminated with a strong hand — nothing like it appears in Mein Kampf. Hitler and the Nazi Party did have strong views against abortion, but they were motivated by a desire for Aryan women to do their patriotic duty and create German babies for the future of the Third Reich. In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that the folkish state — a Nazi term for an idealized and racially pure greater Germany, must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. In this same passage, Hitler wrote that, It must be considered reprehensible to withhold healthy children from the nation, adding that the state must act as the guardian of a millennial future in the face of which the wishes and the selfishness of the individual must appear as nothing and submit. Hitler also spoke of these issues in a 1934 speech to the National Socialist Women’s League: Indeed, this view was codified in German law by 1943, which stated: These strongly worded anti-abortion laws applied primarily to Aryan women, which makes the assertion that Hitler would have said that that the practice of abortion shall be exterminated dubious. The Nazi regime promoted or encouraged the use of abortion in the territories they occupied if allegedly inferior races were at issue. As Steinem wrote: Because a portion of this quote stems from a specific statement Hitler made in Mein Kampf, but because it is a poor paraphrase and there is no basis in fact for the second sentence, we rank this claim Miscaptioned. (en)
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