Socialized to Evil: Nazi Doctors and Abortion Physicians
by Kevin Burke, LSW
Socialized to Evil: Nazi Doctors and Abortion Physicians
“These doctors had not killed anybody until they got to Auschwitz, so they weren’t extraordinary killers to start with. They were ordinary people who in that way were socialized to evil.” – Dr Robert Lifton
Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton interviewed 28 former Nazi doctors and Auschwitz prisoners who worked with the German medical staff. Dr Lifton described how the physicians rationalized their complicity in the death of millions of innocent men, women and children.
– Every prisoner in Auschwitz was marked to die. They had no control over that.
– To experiment on their prisoner/patients was to bring some good out of those who were already sentenced to death.
– To select the old and weak for the gas chambers was actually a form of compassion because it spared them the more painful experience of starvation.
Seventy years after the horrors of Auschwitz, Slate’s Amanda Marcotte defended Planned Parenthood after undercover videos revealed they were trafficking in the sale of aborted baby body parts.
“We…shouldn’t deny women who want to donate fetal or embryonic remains to science any more than we would deny someone who wants to be an organ donor…”
Samantha Allen at the The Daily Beast tells us Planned Parenthood doctors sipping wine over lunch as they discuss their grisly trade in baby body parts is no big deal.
“… the transfer of human fetal tissue is not illegal in the United States. Women undergoing abortions sometimes choose to donate fetal tissue for scientific research and abortion providers do not facilitate these donations without their explicit consent.”
It’s legal, the unborn child’s parents are ok with it, and it’s for a good cause
Disconnection and Denial
Dr Lifton shares how ordinary medical professionals can be formed over time to accommodate to horrific evil and keep their work and home lives in separate distinct spheres:
These doctors…ran the killing process…did selections. So when they were in Auschwitz they had an Auschwitz self…But they would go home to their families…and they would be ordinary fathers and husbands where they would function in a relatively ordinary way… (The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide by Robert Jay Lifton)
Dr Anthony Levatino is an ob-gyn and former abortionist. Dr Levatino shares how he experienced a similar disconnection not only in his personal life, but in his daily practice as he balanced the paradoxical roles as life-affirming and death-inducing physician:
There is no better news for me than to put that scanner on [a mother] at seven and eight weeks and show them a heartbeat and say: Your baby is okay. You do that as an obstetrician all the time.
And then, an hour later, you change your clothes, walk into an operating room and do an abortion.
Yet abortion doctors and their staff can pay a high price over time for functioning in a long term state of moral and spiritual disconnection from the reality that they are destroying innocent preborn babies.
Here are a few testimonies from former abortion business employees:
Dr. Brewer … “when I was doing abortions, my life was in a shambles in terms of drugs, immorality and all the rest.” Abortionists, he said, “have marriages that are on the rocks…”
Dr Joseph Randall: “It wasn’t until I became divorced and began really searching for something more. It was sort of like, here I was a doctor; I was making a lot of money; but what did I have…I really felt that I had it made, but I still had this gnawing sort of emptiness inside.”
Nita Whitten, working as a secretary in a Texas abortion clinic, became depressed and addicted to drugs. “I took drugs to wake up in the morning.” After having an abortion herself, she became severely depressed and at one point planned to commit suicide.
Kathy Sparks, medical assistant at an Illinois clinic, shared that many of her fellow employees abused drugs and some were alcoholics.
Recovery for Abortion Providers
Psychiatrist Dr. Philip G. Ney is the founder of the Society of Centurions, a recovery program for former abortion physicians and employees. Dr Ney has shared that many of these people want to get out of the business but don’t know how to wash the blood off their hands.
“There’s no easy solution,” Dr. Ney says, but help is available.
In this brief audio presentation Dr Ney shares about his work with former abortion business employees.