Why Abortion is the New Slavery

There is a pervasive myth that undergirds the practice of abortion, the foundation on which it rests and without which it couldn't continue to exist as a widely accepted activity. That myth is that unborn children are not human beings.

The same kind of myth undergirded the practice of slavery in America: that blacks and those of Afrcian descent were not human beings. Without belief in that myth, the institution of slavery crumbled, because there's no way to deny the evil involved in stealing the freedom of another human being or treating a human being as property instead of as a person.

Abortion is vulnerable to the same demise. Hence the massive pushback from the Left against the videos of Planned Parenthood workers mutilating and dissecting the bodies of dead babies in order to harvest their body parts for money.

Jayme Metzgar over at The Federalist has made a compelling case for drawing a straight line between the evil of abortion and the evil of slavery.

The Planned Parenthood videos—and the surrounding debate over the use of fetal tissue—have revealed just how closely abortion parallels the last great moral evil enshrined in American law: slavery. And like that immoral institution, very few of us have clean hands. It’s easy to demonize those directly involved in the practice, but if we refuse to acknowledge the reality of what these videos show us about ourselves, we have no right to condemn our 19th century forebears.

Metzger identifies three ways in which our attitudes and behavior towards abortion are almost exactly like our attitudes and behavior towards slavery.

1. Abortion deepens our hypocrisy about the humanity of the unborn.
Abortion requires us to pretend that an unborn child is just a collection of tissue -- unless the mother wants to keep her baby. In that case, we're allowed to believe that the unborn child is a precious little person growing inside of her. This parallels the nonsensical slave state/free state treatment of blacks under slavery, in which the same black man who was non-human property in Alabama magically became a human being with rights in Vermont.

2. It reveals the inherent violence and cruelty of abortion.
Most people don't think too deeply about abortion because they understand, even if only on an unconscious level, that it's the ending of a unique human life. It makes them uncomfortable, so they don't think about it too much. Pro-choice folks used to acknowledge that in slogans like "Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare," or by calling abortion "a necessary evil." That's how slavery was discussed and treated in America through the 1830s or so. But beginning in the 1840s, pro-slavery folks pushed back and insisted that slavery was a positive, not a negative, practice. They unashamedly promoted it, and insisted that anyone who disagreed with them was a zealot who hated property rights. That's where most pro-choicers are today: pushing back against reluctant defenses of abortion, proclaiming that abortion is a good thing that shouldn't ever be restricted. Today their slogan is "Abortion on demand, and without apology!"

3. It ingrains a need for abortion in our way of life.
American life in the late 1850s depended a great deal on slavery. Southern society completely depended on it, but most northern states depended on it more than they wanted to admit. Southern cotton kept the mills in New England running. Foreign markets for Southern cotton and tobacco created an appetite for American goods that kept helped keep northern merchants in business and built the portfolios of the northern banks that lent to them. This vision of economic sectors completely dependent on a horribly inhuman practice is what Metzgar sees potentially developing in the R&D departments of biotech firms and giant academic research centers that use dead babies' organs and body parts for research. The biotech industry has a huge appetite for fetal organs and tissue -- for legitimate, highly valuable research. Just like northern mill owners had a huge appetite for southern cotton that created legitimate, highly valuable jobs raised millions of immigrants out of poverty. That need blinded people to the clear necessity to end the awful practice used to meet it. So it may be here.

It's an excellent article and I didn't convey half of it. You should read the whole thing.