Religion: Not So Simple

Dr. Gisella Perl is a pleasant, well-dressed Rumanian doctor who does not look her 43 years.* Nor does her face betray her fearful experiences. Before the Allies liberated her from a Nazi concentration camp in 1945, her parents, husband and son had been killed by the Germans. And—according to some theologians—Dr. Perl has killed about 3,000 people herself. They were of undetermined sex: unborn children.

Dr. Perl was an abortionist. But she plied her terrible trade out of mercy. She has explained: "It was the policy of the Nazis to immediately put to death all Jewish, Polish, Russian and French women who were pregnant, in the gas chambers, and in the crematorium. I aborted them to save their lives." Last winter Congress passed a special bill granting Dr. Perl permanent residence in the U.S., on the urging of Representative Sol Bloom, who praised her "simple humanity" in saving "the lives of more than 3,000 women."

In the 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."

Not all 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."