Expecting to hear leftist viewpoints from Hollywood actors and actresses is like going to a George Strait concert and waiting to hear country music. Conservative viewpoints in Hollywood have gone the way of the dinosaurs – they’re extinct (minus Tim Allen and Jon Voight, of course).

So, it wasn’t surprising to hear Anne Hathaway recently espouse her pro-abortion view on, well, The View. But it was surprising to hear how she described abortion.

Usually, anti-life activists say abortion is something that’s “heartbreaking,” “difficult,” or a “hard decision.”

But not Anne Hathaway. She described abortion as an act of “mercy.”

Speaking about her role in the film “The Devil Wears Prada,” Hathaway said, “In this character I played a young woman who was starting out her career. And when you are a young woman starting out your career, your reproductive destiny matters a great deal.”

“If I were to play that role nowadays, I couldn’t take that for granted. I couldn’t take that freedom for granted, the freedom of choice.”

Hathaway then tried to dismiss the moral judgements that the issue of abortion necessarily implicates.

“This is not a moral conversation about abortion. This is a practical conversation about women’s rights,” Hathaway asserted. She then said the following:

My own personal experience with abortion, and I don’t really talk about this enough, abortion can be another word for mercy.

Later in the interview, Hathaway seemed to make Freudian slip and acknowledge that a preborn baby in the womb is exactly that: a baby.

“Just because you get pregnant doesn’t mean you get to keep that baby,” she said.

Hathaway’s assertion that the killing of a preborn child – potentially because that child has physical deformities or mental disabilities – is “merciful,” is tragically misguided.

Fox News co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy posted a thoughtful reply to Hathaway’s statement on Twitter.

Let’s be clear, it’s never merciful to kill an innocent person because of mental or physical abnormalities.

As the Daily Citizen has previously written, “When the Nazi regime officially began their euthanasia program, the phrase ‘life unworthy of life’ (In German: ‘Lebensunwertes Leben’) was used as a designation for those individuals who were determined not to have the right to live. These individuals, who had serious medical problems or were determined to be of an ‘inferior race,’ were euthanized.

“The Nazi regime used propaganda and public posters to promote their extermination program. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Nazi regime ‘singled out people with intellectual and physical disabilities’ for euthanasia.”

So no, aborting preborn babies because of mental or physical disabilities is not “merciful.” It’s the same “final solution” that the Nazis implemented to rid the world of those in need of “mercy.”

And in America, in the 21st century, that’s a definition of mercy that we should reject.

Photo from Shutterstock.