A high school in Canada is making headlines after a student shared a recording from a class during which an anti-abortion video was shown. The video compared abortion to the Holocaust.
École Secondaire Notre Dame High School is a Catholic high school located in Red Deer, Alberta. In March, a presentation was shown in a mandatory religion class by the group Red Deer and Area Pro Life that referenced Adolf Hitler’s genocide of the disabled and other “unwanted” persons in parallel to terminating a pregnancy, Canada’s Global News reported.
“In 1939, Hitler had authorized a scheme by which severely disabled children could be murdered. Then once the war began, this killing was extended to disabled adults as well (and then to all ‘unwanted’ persons),” says the narrator in the video, which was produced by Abort73, an anti-abortion Christian non-profit “working to protect women and children from the violence of abortion through education and peer-to-peer engagement,” per its Facebook page.
The video then transitions to Nazi propaganda footage which describes the rationalization for killing of the disabled. “Can we burden future generations with such an inheritance?,” the propaganda asks. This subtitle is then presented with an annotation: “Sound familiar?!”
A student recorded the video on their phone and sent it to Accessing Information, Not Myths (AIM), an Alberta group that addresses sexual health and gaps in education curriculum, according to BuzzFeed. Cristina Stasia, who founded AIM, told BuzzFeed that schools often bring in third-party, anti-abortion groups for presentations with “problematic and inaccurate” information such as this.
AIM got in touch with Alberta Minister of Education, David Eggen, and the school district was made aware of the video. Eggen is working on finding out how this happened.
“They let this thing slip through. It’s not good for kids to be presented inaccurate information. It’s outrageous to the general public that someone would make a connection between abortion and the Holocaust,” Eggen told Global News. “It doesn’t belong there and if it’s being used anywhere else here across the province, I want to hear about it immediately,”
The school division then banned that particular video, according to CTV, but the Red Deer and Area Pro Life group is still allowed to present in schools.
Stasia remains frustrated.
“In Catholic school systems, discussions of abortions and reproductive rights are important, but giving students misinformation, giving them medically inaccurate information, scientifically inaccurate information, myths, shaming sexual assault survivors ― that’s not part of having an honest conversation,” she told CTV.
The Huffington Post has reached out to École Secondaire Notre Dame High School for comment.
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