Numerous Project 2025 groups have claimed over the years that abortion is comparable to or even worse than the Holocaust. Those partners have called abortion the “American Holocaust”; said that “someday, abortion will be viewed historically as a modern-day Holocaust, maybe even worse”; and claimed that “America’s holocaust against the unborn makes Hitler’s holocaust pale in comparison.” 

Project 2025 is an extreme right-wing initiative headed by The Heritage Foundation that’s been crafting policy proposals and recruiting personnel for the next conservative administration. The project’s proposals include extreme rollbacks to reproductive rights, including access to surrogacy, IVF, mifepristone, and contraception. 

The initiative is closely tied to former President Donald Trump and running mate JD Vance, who wrote the foreword for Project 2025 architect Kevin Roberts’ book. 

The project has over 100 partner groups, including organizations that have continued to signal that they want to criminalize abortion. Media Matters recently documented that numerous Project 2025 groups have also pushed the false claim that abortions are never medically necessary. 

Numerous Project 2025 partner groups have spent years claiming that abortion is comparable to or even worse than the Holocaust. Here is a look at those claims, which were made both before and after the formation of Project 2025. 

Heritage Foundation president and Project 2025 leader Kevin Roberts compared abortion providers to concentration camps and Adolf Hitler in a January 2024 speech:

The American Conservative published a May 5, 2022, piece by Jason Morgan which called abortion “the American holocaust.” Morgan added: “Unlike the Nazis’ Holocaust, no one from the outside has come to stop our holocaust in red, white, and blue.”

American Family Association has frequently compared abortion to the Holocaust. For instance: 

• AFA’s Rebecca Davis wrote a 2015 piece with the headline “Just Like Hitler...the American Holocaust” and wrote: “Americans have killed more than five times the number of people that Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime killed.” 

• AFA’s Abraham Hamilton said during a 2018 Values Voter Summit speech: “I believe the legal sanctioning of the utter destruction of a child in his mother’s womb is genocide. I believe that. I believe that a Holocaust is happening right here, on our watch.” 

• AFA’s Walker Wildmon wrote in 2019: “Someday, abortion will be viewed historically as a modern-day Holocaust, maybe even worse.” 

• AFA’s Joseph Parker used 2022’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day to claim that “another holocaust is taking place in our world. This holocaust is called legalized abortion. It began in 1973, in the landmark Supreme Court case, Roe v. Wade.” Parker added: “The death toll at this moment is dramatically higher than the Jewish holocaust. … Some might consider it offensive to compare America to Hitler’s Germany. But when you look at the numbers, America’s holocaust against the unborn makes Hitler’s holocaust pale in comparison.” 

California Family Council wrote in a January 2019 statement after Planned Parenthood posted a statement online about International Holocaust Remembrance Day: “More than 60 million babies have been killed from abortion since Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood is responsible for more than 8 million of deaths. Planned Parenthood has now killed roughly 2 million more people than were killed in the Holocaust. And while certainly not lessening the atrocities of the Holocaust, Planned Parenthood has absolutely no place to be talking about the ‘tremendous, immeasurable human cost of bigotry’ when it is responsible for murdering 332,757 babies just last year alone.” 

The organization also wrote in 2020: “During the Holocaust an estimated five to six million Jews alone were murdered. However, abortions have ended more than 61,628,584 innocent human lives since the Roe v. Wade decisions was handed down by the Supreme Court in 1973.” 

Concerned Women for America President Penny Nance wrote a 2013 opinion piece portraying abortion as worse than the Holocaust, writing: “Abortion is the seminal human rights issue of our time. For our grandparent’s generation, the Holocaust was the most heart-breaking atrocity against mankind. As many as 1.5 million Jewish children were killed as a result of the Nazis’ horrific genocide scheme. What’s shameful is that America surpassed this number of little lives lost to a cruel genocide long ago.” 

Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Andrew T. Walker wrote a November 2023 piece stating: “Ethics requires consistency in application. Would we treat a Christian’s vote for a pro-slavery candidate as a matter of prudence? Would we discipline a church member who acknowledged voting for a neo-Nazi? We need to ask ourselves why it is that we can draw lines at the trafficking of human beings or the slaughter of the born but not at the lethal targeting of the unborn. What moral principle differentiates the moral evil of slavery and the Holocaust from abortion?” 

Family Research Council published a January 2018 document credited to FRC’s Kenyn Cureton in which he said : “Do you know how an abortion is performed? It is ironic that the media will never allow you to see one. They will show us some of the 6 million victims of the Nazi Holocaust, they will show us abuses in war torn countries around the world, but none of the 60 million victims of the American Holocaust.” 

Another document credited to Cureton also claimed in April 2019: “It took a World War, but the Nazi Holocaust of 6 million Jews was stopped in Europe. I believe that after 60 million pre-born babies have died in the American Holocaust, that abortion and infanticide can be stopped if God’s people will rise up, stand up, and speak up. That moment has come and the time is now!” 

Students for Life of America’s “personhood” page contains the following text: “As pro-lifers, we believe that a human being obtains personhood, inherently, at the moment of creation (fertilization/conception). We know there are dangers when the state decides if a group of human beings are persons or not. Think back to slavery and the Holocaust – both of these cases displayed an instance in which the state determined the ‘level’ of personhood afforded to certain groups of human beings.”