Reproduction then and now: Learning from the past

Abstract

Doctors during the National Socialist regime violated their professional ethics and disregarded basic human rights, especially in reproductive medicine in general and abortion in particular. Using reproductive medicine during the Third Reich as a case study, I show how the history of the medical crimes has influenced and affected reproductive policies and research in modern Israel and in Germany. New genetic technologies, such as preimplantation diagnosis and embryonic stem cell research, aim to improve human well-being, but this area of human subjects research also poses many fundamental ethical and moral dilemmas that medical professionals must acknowledge and address. The social, cultural, and political conditions of medicine under National Socialism are not exactly analogous to those of contemporary medicine. Nonetheless, studying the Nazi perversions of medical care can facilitate and inform the current discourse on bioethical issues, especially the devastating consequences of physicians abandoning their ethical and professional precepts in the name of science.