‘Abortion over birth defects like Nazi eugenics’
VATICAN CITY: Pope Francis denounced abortion on Saturday as the “white glove” equivalent of the Nazi-era eugenics program and urged families to accept the children that God gives them.
Francis spoke off-the-cuff to a meeting of an Italian family association, ditching his prepared remarks to speak from the heart about families and the trials they undergo.
He lamented how some couples choose not to have any children, while others resort to prenatal testing to see if their baby has any malformations or genetic problems.
“The first proposal in such a case is, ‘Do we get rid of it?’” Francis said. “The murder of children. To have an easy life, they get rid of an innocent.”
Francis recalled that as a child he was horrified to hear stories from his teacher about children “thrown from the mountain” if they were born with malformations. “Today we do the same thing,” he said. “Last century, the whole world was scandalised by what the Nazis did to purify the race. Today, we do the same thing but with white gloves,” Francis said.
The pope urged families to accept children “as God gives them to us.”
Under Nazi eugenics programmes, hundreds of thousands of people were forcibly sterilised and tens of thousands killed in an attempt to “clean” the chain of heredity of those with physical or cognitive disabilities.