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Auschwitz Abortions

I am summarizing the story of Gisella Perl. TRIGGER warning because it is sad, disturbing but it's real. Gisella Perl is was born in Hungary 1907. She was a gifted child and at 16 graduated top of her secondary school being the first woman, and the first Jew to ever do so. Gisella Perl later married a surgeon and was working as a successful gynecologist until the nazis invaded in 1944 She hid her daughter with a non-Jewish family but the rest of her family- parents, husband and son were sent to auschwits as well as herself. Her son was murdered in the gas chambers, her husband beaten to death. Perl was spared only to be forced to become a physician under the notorious Josef Mengele. In addition to Mengeles horrendous experiments on twins, he also experimented on pregnant women. He performed autopsy like "surgeries" on living and awake human beings. When mengele learned that perl had been trained in gynecology he saw an opportunity to obtain information about which inmates arrived pregnant. Because he "would send them to a better camp from mother and child" she knew better than to believe him. But some women heard him say this and went to him themselves confession their pregnancies, they were experimented on and killed. Perl wouldn't tell mengele anything but she knew she couldn't keep it a secret. She couldn't deliver babies in secrecy because everyone in the barracks would be killed as punishment if they heard a baby cry. She couldn't turn pregnant women in either because they would be murdered at the experimental hands of mengele and his doctors. So, even though it went against her own morals she started preforming abortions. She had nothing to sanitize her hands with, no tools, and no pain relief of any kind. "No one will ever know what it meant to be to destroy those babies. But if I hadn't done it, both mother and child would have been cruelly murdered" She tells a story about one woman who arrived nearly full term. She delivered the baby in secrecy and sent her to the infirmary for "pneumonia" because it was one of the few things not punishable by death. Perl had an inner struggle, she tried to keep the baby alive but she knew that if he cried it would alert the guards and get ever single woman in the barracks killed. She decided she could hide him no longer. So she kissed his face and then strangled him. She hid him under a pile of bodies that were waiting to be cremated. Perl thought she was doing the best thing she could do. The most human thing in the face of horrible circumstances. Perl was released from auschwits at the end of the war. Her entire family was dead, she didn't know that the daughter she hid had survived. She tried to commit suicide. After that, perl moved to New York where she was interrogated for suspicion of assisting nazi doctors. The accusations were dropped after the testimonies of women who got out of auschwits with her-because of her. Perl then got her US citizenship and became an infertility specialist in a New York City hospital. She also became friends with Eleanor Roosevelt. Then discovered that her daughter was alive. She then moved to Israel with her daughter and lived there until her death in 1988. After the 3000 abortions she performed in auschwits, Dr Gisella Perl delivered 3000 babies and retired. It's a long read but the more you know.

Originally posted by Glow user Alien in the Pro-Choice group, but I decided that you needed to see this too

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