The American Jewish Congress strongly rejected today a charge that its support of legalized abortion meant it had adopted “the posture of legal positivism, the very ideology that enabled Hitler to pursue his genocidal policies.”
Naomi Levine, executive director of the AJCongress, said that “any comparison between the right of a woman to have an abortion and the Nazi slaughter of the Jews is an obscene and outrageous slur on the memory of the six million murdered in the Holocaust.”
The charge against the AJCongress was made by Dr. Lowell A. Dunlap, assistant executive director of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights in a study called, “Neo-Nazism in America?” He specifically took issue with arguments presented by Leo Pfeffer, counsel to the AJCongress, in a brief filed by the AJCongress and seven other groups before the Massachusetts Supreme Court seeking reversal of the manslaughter conviction of Dr. Kenneth Edelin, who was charged with causing the death of a fetus.
MANY GROUPS WERE ATTACKED
In a statement issued by Mrs. Levine, she said: “Dr. Dunlap’s irresponsible statement, while singling out the American Jewish Congress is in fact an attack on all the organizations that with us signed the friend-of-the-court brief in the Edelin case–the American Ethical Union, American Humanist Association, Board of Church and Society of the United Methodist Church, National Women’s Conference of the American Ethical Union, Union of American Hebrew Congregations, Unitarian Universalist Association and United Church Board for Homeland Ministries.”
Continuing, Mrs. Levine said: “The kind of mentality represented by Dr. Dunlap underscores the need for a nationwide educational effort to insure that Americans understand how the drive for anti-abortion laws impairs the basic rights of religious freedom, privacy and equality. We respect the religious and conscientious scruples of those who reject the practice of abortion. However, to the extent that these persons would embody those scruples in law binding on all persons, we vigorously oppose them.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
