Project 2025 architect Kevin Roberts compared abortion access to slave auctions, lynchings, and the Holocaust

Special Programs Abortion Rights & Reproductive Health

Written by Eric Hananoki

Published

Heritage Foundation president and Project 2025 architect Kevin Roberts told a conservative audience earlier this year that access to abortion was a comparable evil to slavery, lynchings, concentration camps, and Adolf Hitler. 

Roberts is closely tied to the Trump-Vance campaign. Roberts and former President Donald Trump flew on a private plane together in 2022 and then Trump praised him during a Heritage speech, stating: “He’s going to be so incredible.” Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-OH), wrote the foreword for Roberts' now-delayed book.  

Project 2025 is the Trump-connected extremist plan to guide staffing and policy priorities for the next Republican administration. It includes proposals that would heavily diminish reproductive rights. 

Roberts gave a January 20 speech to the National Pro-Life Summit, which was hosted by Project 2025 advisory board member Students for Life of America. During the speech, he said that there is an “evil that underlies mankind’s greatest horrors,” and then compared abortion access to slavery, lynchings, concentration camps, and Adolf Hitler, among others. 

From a January 20, 2024, speech by Kevin Roberts

KEVIN ROBERTS: Pride depends on degrading others. Unlike the agnostic who’s clouded by doubt, or the atheist blinded by hatred, the devil himself knows firsthand he cannot deny or replace God. Old Screwtape, as you know, learned long ago that the surest path to corrupting the souls of the strong is denying the humanity of the weak.

This, rather than the comparable body counts, is the evil that underlies mankind’s greatest horrors. Every slave auction, every lynching, every concentration camp, every abortion mill, every pogrom, every terrorist bombing from the Middle East to Kermit Gosnell, from Herod to Hitler to Hamas, has been justified on the same inhuman pretense that the victims aren’t really people. That human dignity is not universal, not inherent to our nature, but contingent on the convenience to the powerful.

And the butcher’s bill of history is chillingly clear. Once a society deems certain individuals not fully human, it soon treats them as if they weren’t human at all. And it never stops with one group.

Consider the telling example of the pigs on George Orwell’s Animal Farm, who declared some animals are more equal than others. Is it any surprise that the same party of death celebrating violence in the womb also justifies, and even cheers, the surgical mutilation of children, the euthanizing of the depressed, the persecution of parents and churchgoers, even a genocidal war to exterminate the Jewish people?

Make no mistake: This idea of human inequality — that some people count and some people don’t — doesn’t come from the media or the government or the elite or the left or even Planned Parenthood. It comes straight from hell.

Media Matters has recently documented several other examples of people comparing abortion access to slavery.