In a September opinion piece for The New York Times, columnist Jamelle Bouie compares certain pro-life laws to pro-slavery laws, likening state protections for preborn persons to state protections of slave labor. And in doing so, Bouie completely misses the mark.
It is abortion itself that should be compared to slavery. Both slavery and abortion are acts that dehumanize very real human beings, inflict violence, and treat innocent and intrinsically valuable humans as disposable property.
Women seeking abortion have chosen to deny the right to life for their preborn children, treating them as property that they can dispose of as they wish. A preborn child who is denied her rights suffers a violent death by starvation, suction, dismemberment, or forced cardiac arrest. Her broken body is then tossed into a dumpster or medical waste bin as if she were garbage. Slave owners greatly mistreated their slaves, whom they likewise considered property.
Cross-border abortions
Bouie argues that pro-slavery states were able to sell the products created by slave laborers to merchants and manufacturers across the country, even in anti-slavery states. He continued, “They could also buy and sell enslaved people, as part of a lucrative internal trade in human beings. Entitled to representation under the supreme charter of the federal union, slave owners could accumulate political power that they could deploy to defend and extend their interests. They could use their considerable influence to shape foreign and domestic policy.”
Though he attempts to use this as evidence against pro-life states, it actually depicts similarities between the slave trade industry and the abortion industry.
Even prior to the fall of Roe v. Wade, the abortion industry and its advocates moved to expand abortion by selling the abortion pill across state lines and international borders. The industry stands to profit financially by selling abortion with little to no overhead or costs associated. If any of the women suffer complications from the abortion pill, they advise those women to visit an emergency room, and some even instruct them to lie to the doctors and tell them that they are miscarrying — leaving emergency room doctors to pick up the pieces of their dangerous business scheme.
Aid Access, Women on Web, and Women on Waves are three examples. Obtaining the abortion pill through Aid Access costs about $150 while a surgical abortion aboard a ship with Women on Waves could cost far more. These businesses exist not to help women, but to profit from the desperation they feel in a vulnerable moment of their lives.
All the while, abortion industry leaders influence both foreign and domestic policies, ensuring abortion-friendly laws on the national and international levels, which allows abortion to thrive as a business even when individual states pass laws to protect preborn humans. Rep. Nancy Pelosi once made promises to former Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards (who also worked closely with former President Barack Obama). Richards said:
I will never forget the meeting with her [Speaker Pelosi], when I was at PP, where she told me in the middle of that fight that she would not pass the ACA [Afffordable Care Act] if it banned insurance coverage for abortion. Though many “progressive” men were willing to throw women under the bus, she was not.
More recently, California Governor Gavin Newsom, a strident proponent of abortion, chose the president of the pro-abortion Democratic strategy group EMILY’s List, Laphonza Butler, to replace Sen. Dianne Feinstein after she passed away at the age of 90. Some objections have ensued, as Butler is currently not a resident of California, but lives in Maryland.
Trafficking
Some states, including Idaho, Texas, Missouri, and Alabama, have either passed laws or are looking to pass laws that would target ‘abortion trafficking’ in which a woman is taken across state lines to have an abortion.
Bouie believes that such states, working to protect preborn babies, are like pro-slavery states that “could shape their communities to their own satisfaction, especially with regard to slavery. They could, without any objection from the federal government, declare all Black people within their borders to be presumptively enslaved.”
Bouie writes, “The upshot of all of this was that, until the Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford settled the matter in favor of slaveholders, the status of an enslaved Black person outside a slave state was uncertain. It was unclear whether property in man extended beyond the borders of states where it was authorized by law.”
With the issue of abortion, this same concern exists for preborn children conceived in pro-life states.
Will their lives be protected if their mother travels to a pro-abortion state? Their home state may see them as human beings worthy of protection from abortion, but a different state may not and may allow them to be killed simply for crossing the state line against their own control. That is what states like Idaho are attempting to prevent — because as of right now, it remains unclear if a preborn child in one state will be afforded his right to life in another state, or if he will become the disposable property of his mother once he crosses into pro-abortion territory.
People are not property
Bouie’s argument is that pro-life states strip all women within their borders of their rights just as pro-slavery states did to Black persons. “They could,” said Bouie, “without any objection from the federal government, declare all Black people within their borders to be presumptively enslaved — and that is, in fact, what they did.”
Pro-abortion states declare that all preborn humans within their borders are not persons worthy of protection from murder, even those who arrive at their borders from states that do protect them. It is pro-abortion states that consider a certain group of human beings to be property. This is even true of some laws protecting most preborn human beings, which often declare that if those humans are conceived in rape or incest or have received a prenatal diagnosis, their right to life can be violated.
In states that allow Medicaid to pay for abortion, the children of the underprivileged are targeted for abortion on the state taxpayer’s dollar. It’s what Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood’s founder, saw as the weeding out of those deemed unfit.
Pro-abortion laws, like pro-slavery laws, aim to ensure that one group of human beings has no rights and another has superior rights.
There is no middle ground
Bouie is right when he says, “It is not tenable to vary the extent of bodily rights from state to state, border to border. It raises legal and political questions that have to be settled in one direction or another.” But he’s wrong to argue in favor of a so-called right to kill preborn human beings, and misses the mark when he compares pro-life laws to pro-slavery laws for this very reason.
No one can own another person’s body as he presumes a woman owns her preborn baby’s body. Pro-slavery laws allowed persons considered more valuable to own, harm, and even destroy persons considered less valuable. And that’s exactly what pro-abortion laws do.
There is no middle ground.
Every preborn child, regardless of race, gender, or health status, must receive the equal protection that is owed to them under the 14th Amendment.
