Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Newly elected GOP House Speaker once likened abortion to the Holocaust

Mike Johnson wrote in 2005 that the legalization of abortion was ‘no different’ than Hitler’s killing of Jews

Newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson once compared abortion to the Holocaust and wrote that the judicial philosophy underlying the Supreme Court case that legalized abortion nationally, Roe v. Wade, was “no different” than Hitler’s atrocities, CBS News reported on Thursday.

In an op-ed published in the Shreveport Times in 2005, unearthed by the watchdog group Documented, Johnson objected to a Florida county court’s ruling in a right-to-die case, and tied it to the legalization of abortion. “It is a holocaust that has been repeated every day for 32 years, since 1973’s Roe v. Wade.”

“The prevailing judicial philosophy is no different than Hitler’s,” he wrote.

Johnson wrote the piece after the death of Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman in a vegetative state whose family fought over whether her feeding tube should be removed. Their division led to a court battle and a public, national debate.

A four-term Republican congressman from Louisiana, Johnson, 51, was elected speaker Tuesday following weeks of chaos after the ouster of Kevin McCarthy earlier this month. A spokesperson for Johnson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

At the time his op-ed was published, Johnson was a lawyer for the Alliance Defense Fund, a conservative Christian advocacy group that opposes abortion and is now called the Alliance Defending Freedom.

Abe Foxman, the former head of the Anti-Defamation League and a Holocaust survivor, said he hopes Johnson as speaker “will refrain from promoting his extremist personal views.” Foxman suggested that Johnson visit the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum “to understand the difference between the Holocaust and abortion.”

Republicans have in the past faced backlash for drawing Holocaust analogies when discussing abortion. Darren Bailey, the Republican nominee in last year’s election for Illinois governor, came under fire for remarks he made in a video posted to Facebook in 2017 in which he said that the Holocaust “doesn’t even compare” to abortion on the scale of human atrocities. Pennsylvania State Sen. Doug Mastriano, who lost his bid for Pennsylvania governor last year, referred to abortion as a “barbaric holocaust.” 

And Georgia Republican Jason Shepherd, a member of the Republican state committee, likened major corporations that cover abortions in their health insurance plans to Nazis.

Halie Soifer, chief executive of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, called Johnson’s comments in the unearthed op-ed “on brand for the GOP” and said that it’s “not surprising” that he has “extremist views” that are “misaligned with Jewish American values.”

This post was updated.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.