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Slavery versus abortion

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For people who care about these things, there’s been a bit of a dialogue in the blogosphere over the comparison between slavery and abortion of late. It all started with this initial comparison piece here, and resulted in a rebuttal here, which caught my eye for this statement:

First of all, to be brutally candid, it [the comparison between slavery and abortion] trivializes abortion. Evil as slavery was in practice (especially in its American variety, which broke up marriages, sold off children, and discouraged religious preaching to blacks), it was never remotely as evil as abortion. It amounts, in essence, to the theft of labor—and theft isn’t quite as evil as killing. Of course, one could rightly see it as “defrauding the laborer of his just wages,” and thus a sin that cries out to heaven for vengeance, which would put it in the same category as voluntary murder.

Finally, I choose today to comment on the rebuttal to the rebuttal–which caught my eye for this sentiment which remains encouraging to me, as it should to all who strive for each life to be recognized as worthy:

But the pro-lifer/abolitionist analogy is just that: an analogy that is imperfect and inevitably breaks down somewhere. To my mind, it works best as a cause for encouragement among pro-lifers: If abolitionists could succeed against a moral evil with such deep roots in law, custom, and culture as slavery, they should have some hope of overturning the abortion regime of the past 36 years.

Off to rent Amazing Grace, again.

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Brigitte says: Forgive me for barging into a delicate debate with clumsy clodhoppers, but it seems to me the important connection between slavery and abortion is that both deny the full humanity of human beings. It’s the same connection I see with the Holocaust and any genocide you care to mention. When a society accepts that some of its members aren’t fully human, all sorts of evil things happen – including that it makes it possible for otherwise normal and decent people to do bad things and get away with them, at least in the strict legal sense.

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Tanya has to agree with Brigitte: It is a denial of the human rights of a human being. That is the parallel. Watching the Prince of Egypt with my daughter yesterday, I couldn’t help but again be reminded that the root cause of atrocities against humanity is always someone, somewhere, believing his rights supersede anyone else’s.

The wrong side of history

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If fighting abortion is not a social justice issue, then what possibly could be? The victims have no voice. The perpetrators have entrenched interests, deny others information and make money by it. Perpetuating abortion results in harmful physical and mental effects that are concealed from the vast majority. (Through a combination of sheer disinterest, deliberate coverups and a lack of freedom of speech.) Overturning it would result in greater freedom and the defence of the ultimate of all rights, the right without which all others are void.

Where we accept abortion we are apathetic, dispassionate and relentlessly cruel.

Being pro-choice means standing on the wrong side of history: A side that says it is just fine to use people, to have sex and leave, to deny a natural and normal result (pregnancy) of a natural and normal action (sex). To live in an empty shell, devoid of all logic and reason, where charity, love and compassion themselves become nothing more than choices.

This culture will be embarrassed in not too long for offering the barbarity of abortion. We will wonder how we excused it, ignored it, concealed it, sanitized it, normalized it. 

If fighting abortion does not constitute social justice, then I don’t know what does.

Here ends the rant. Read about this “new trend,” here.

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Andrea adds, yes, to her own post: This from William Wilberforce’s great grandson:

There are great similarities between the status of the foetus and the status of African slaves two centuries ago. Slaves were considered a commodity to do with whatever the vested interests of the day decided. Today, in our desire to play God in our embryology experimentation, with all its’ unfulfilled promises of miracle cures, and our decision to abort unwanted children, we are no better that those slave traders who put their interests and world view higher than they placed the sanctity and value of human life.

More than leprechauns and shamrocks

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It’s St. Patrick’s Day. And while there’s nothing wrong with wearing green and having a pint of Guinness, we have a tendency these days to dumb down and secularize our festival days. But St. Patrick has a great story, a story that must include God otherwise it’s no story at all… He was himself first a slave, and would then help eradicate slavery in Ireland long before other nations… He’s the early William Wilberforce, in a way. From How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe, by Thomas Cahill:

The life of a shepherd-slave could not have been a happy one.  Ripped out of civilization, Patricius had for his only protector a man who did not hold his own life highly, let alone anyone else’s. We know that he did have two constant companions, hunger and nakedness…He began to pray… he didn’t really believe in God…. But now, there was no one to turn to but the God of his parents…Patricius endured six years of this woeful isolation, and by the end of it he had grown from a careless boy to something he would surely never otherwise have become – a holy man, indeed a visionary for whom there was no longer any separation between this world and the next.  On his last night as Miliucc’s slave, he received in his sleep his first otherworldly experience.  A mysterious voice said to him:  “Your hungers are rewarded:  you are going home. 

Patricius sat up, startled.  The voice continued:  “Look, your ship is ready”. 

As he tramped towards his destiny, his faith that he was under God’s protection must have grown and grown, for it was virtually impossible that a fugitive slave could get so far without being intercepted.  “I came in God’s strength… and had nothing to fear” is Patricius’s simple summation.

Try though he might, he cannot put the Irish out of his mind.  The visions increase, and Christ begins to speak within him: “He who gave his life for you, he it is who speaks within you.” Patricius, the escaped slave, is about to be drafted once more – as Saint Patrick, apostle to the Irish nation.

Cultural change is what counts

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Mark Steyn reviews Amazing Grace (the book, not the movie, although he discusses both), about William Wilberforce, the British parliamentarian who essentially laid the framework for ending slavery. (After a sudden and dramatic religious conversion, but of course we must all keep religion out of politics these days, right?) The quote all of us who hope for a more humane future should remember:

[T]he life of William Wilberforce and the bicentennial of his extraordinary achievement remind us that great men don’t shirk things because the focus-group numbers look unpromising.

But the theme of the book is that Wilberforce accomplished more than a change to British laws, he transformed the culture of the western world to the point that, albeit it after several painful convulsions, no civilized person found the idea of slave-owning acceptable, or even palatable. The parallel between slavery and abortion isn’t perfect, although heaven knows it’s been belaboured enough already. But it does illustrate how changing minds is more important than changing laws. In Saudi Arabia, for instance, slavery is nominally illegal but in practice common. In Canada, the US and western Europe, though, I would venture to say that even if there were no laws against slavery, common decency would prevent it from occurring; we are hardly, after all, nations of people who quietly wish we could own slaves and chafe at the laws that forbid us from doing so.

Would that we see the day when it isn’t a law against abortion that stops people from seeking one, but a deep-seated repugnance, and a profound recognition of the barbarism of the practice. Who, I wonder, will be the William Wilberforce of the pro-life movement?

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Andrea asks: Anyone got the focus group numbers for the pro-life cause in Canada?

The ultimate goal

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Tanya, a contributor to our Comments page wrote in response to my post on criminalization. Her comment:

“Even though the criminalization of abortion is not, for you, an immediate goal, the question begs to be asked; is it not reasonable to have its criminalization as an eventual goal?

Let’s parallel this human rights issue (abortion) with another one from another era, when William Wilburforce first introduced a bill to criminalize the slave trade. He was ridiculed and success seemed far off. He was always up-front with his ultimate goal. Through creative and gradual measures, by more means than simply introducing his annual bill, his goal was eventually realized.

I understand that there is much to accomplish in the mentality and practices of Canadians before a legal ban on abortion would even be beneficial. However, I would hope that every person who speaks out for the right for the unborn would have as an ultimate goal that these tiny humans’ rights be held up as equal to our own.

The point is well taken. Arguing against criminalization from a fetal rights’ perspective offers no wiggle-room and I can be accused of taking the easy way out by avoiding the question altogether. Either the fetus is a human being and deserves the same protection from harm as other human beings, or fetuses are not human and have no claim to a protected right to life and integrity. The third option, well described on our Comments page by Dave, involves getting into philosophical contortions to justify killing some human non-persons in a discourse reminiscent of 19th century slavery rhetoric. Our dismal historic track record in deciding who – or what – is human suggests that we should stop the circus act and recognize that determining humanity based on human-made criteria has embarrassed more than one civilization. Will our treatment of the unborn shame us in a few generations? I have no doubt about it, particularly in light the demographic decline of Western civilizations.

I do think criminalization is the ultimate goal. But I also think that it will happen naturally as mentalities change to recognize the humanity of the fetus. Our role as pro-lifers is not, in my view, to push for criminalization but to change mentalities. If mentalities change, criminalization will naturally follow. The same cannot be said about the reverse.

Gaaaack! Huckabee calls abortion slavery!!!

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Well, that’s what the headline writer probably wants you to think. Here’s what the candidate said:

Leaving it up to individual states to outlaw abortion within their own borders is not enough, he said.

“That’s again the logic of the Civil War — that slavery could be okay in Georgia but not okay in Massachusetts. Obviously we’d today say, ‘Well, that’s nonsense. Slavery is wrong, period. It can’t be right somewhere and wrong somewhere else.’ Same with abortion,” Huckabee said.

So it’s not the kind of rhetoric one would want to use if one were trying to reach out to middle-of-the-road voters, or to those who haven’t really given the subject of abortion much thought. (These people exist, you know.) But it’s ideologically coherent; if one believes abortion is wrong, period, then one believes it ought to be outlawed everywhere, period.

I’m not wild about Huckabee myself. And, as I said elsewhere, I don’t believe legislation is the answer to the problem of casual abortion – at least, it’s not the only answer. But you sure can’t accuse Huckabee of wobbling. And that I like.

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Andrea adds: The media put headlines on stories, and then other media incredulously pick up on them. That is a terrible, biased, convoluted headline–and all the candidates should be allowed to have their citations stand in full so that voters can read them and choose.

On a different note: The abortion-slavery comparison gets at another mantra we repeat often, that abortion is strictly a private issue. Was not slavery a private issue too? As in, you can have slaves, or not have them, and that’s your choice? Shouldn’t bother you if I purchase a couple at the market this weekend.  My life is busy these days. Heck, I could use one to help moderate comments on this site. Trust me, if I had slaves, I’d treat them well–which should make all of you feel better about the fact that I have them. Right?

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