Word: perl
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...your story about Dr. Gisella Perl, who aborted women prisoners in Nazi camps to save them from the gas chambers [TIME, Sept. 20], you omitted [a point] of great importance. Many of these women became pregnant because they were raped by the prison guards, who then had to conceal their violation of their own "racial purity" laws by killing the defenseless women. It is easy for shocked moralists, safe in this country, to condemn Dr. Perl. One wonders how nobly moral they would be if their own wives & daughters were in a similar situation...
...regards Dr. Perl's [being] "sentimental and well-meaning," and Dr. Deutschman's condemnation of her "wholesale slaughter of infants," I cannot but wonder about Dr. Deutschman's pretentiousness in passing judgment on the doctor's morals . . . Presumably, it would have been a happier choice to put the mothers to death before the children were born, [or] should the camp authorities consent to exceptions ... to raise children with the prospects of starvation, medical experimentation, permanent physical and mental mutilation...
...theological haggling over the virtue or sin of Dr. Perl, no one seems to have noted that the unborn babies were doomed in any event...
...current Partisan Review an article titled "A Parable of Simple Humanity," by Hans Meyerhoff, considers the moral implications of what Dr. Perl did. "Into the struggle she threw her . . . life here and everlasting," he concluded, "[She] risked death and eternal damnation . . . and came to be hailed on behalf of 'simple humanity' at the price of thousands of lives which might have been, but never were and never will be. [She] was right in being what she was by committing this enormous wrong...
...theologians would agree that Dr. Perl's end justified her means. Protestants and Jews have varying views on different kinds of abortion; Roman Catholics say flatly that any abortion is mortal sin. One physician, New York's Dr. David Deutschman, observed: "There is no rational or moral justification for . . . wholesale slaughter of infants . . . whether it be done by the brutal Nazis, or by a sentimental and well-meaning female medical personality...