Slavery and Abortion

The pro-life movement likes to think of themselves as modern day abolitionists. They equate abortion with slavery and put "choice" in those terms. I will leave it to the reader to Google choice and slavery to verify this.

Some of these individuals are no doubt sincere, however in many ways they are just plain wrong. Slavery poisoned the entire social structure of the South in ways that are still apparent today in certain backwaters (like the Florida panhandle and rural Georgia). Violence against those who would denounce slavery in the South was common, much the same way the descendents of slaveholders bomb abortion clinics and target providers.

Many in the pro-life movement think of slavery as an issue that was settled in 1865, which it was not. It took the passage of the 13th and 14th Amendments and the pressence of federal troops to keep it at bay - and it was not kept away for long. Southern justice kept African-American slavery alive in the form of convict labor alive until the dawn of the Second World War. It has since resurfaced with the rise of private prisons, convict labor and the War on Drugs. In some pockets of the South, peonage also still exists.

Guess which political party is the loudest champion of underfunding the wage and hour division and the War on Drugs, which is also used to disenfrachise African American voters?

Their reading of history is wrong as well. Abolition went hand in hand with the struggle for emancipation for women, including their rights to vote, own property, obtain a divorce and use birth control. Indeed, given the majority of their positions, the original abolitionists would disown the pro-life movement. I doubt that Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony would not be highly offended by any association between their movement and the National Right to Life agenda.