Slaves and abortion -- the same argument was used to justify both!?

Question

The same argument that was used to justify slavery is now used to justify abortion -- slaves weren't technically humans, so slavery was ok. Today some proponents of abortion assert that abortion is ok because fetuses aren't technically human. Perhaps 100 years from now, we'll see the evil in abortion that we now recognize in slavery. Your thoughts?

Answer 1

I'm sympathetic with your underlying point. And I believe there ARE parallels between slavery and abortion as well as the arguments used to justify them.

But I don't think you're quite right about what those arguments for slavery WERE. If you read through the great defenders of slavery (as opposed to those, including slave owners, who, esp. in the early days, regarded it as an EVIL that they hoped they would gradually overcome), they do NOT question whether the slaves were human beings.

They argue, for example:
1) these people are not as advanced and not able (at least not yet) to care for themselves, so are better off as slaves
2) slavery is the result of God's judgment on Ham (quite mistaken, since the text refers not to Ham, but to Canaan), so God is overseeing it and will bring it to an end in his time
3) slaves actually had it pretty good... much better, in fact, than the 'free labor' in Northern factories

Also note - the notion that the Constitution's "3/5 compromise" was based on the South seeing slaves as only 3/5 human is nonsense. In fact, the debate was about counting for taxation and esp. for REPRESENTATION. The South actually wanted the slaves FULLY counted (to gain more representatives!), whereas the North did not want this (and why count them if they were not going to be represented anyway?)

Actually, a better comparison might be made on the arguments from RIGHTS. Abortion is justified on the basis of "abortion RIGHTS", with which others must not interfere... even if those who support the rights may say that they are 'personally opposed' or that abortion is a bad thing, and to be discouraged. The maintenance of slavery (and its extension into the territories) was justified on the basis of the slave owners' "property rights", with which others had no business interfering. On the contrary, they should help them exercise their rights by following the Fugitive Slave Law. (The "states' rights" argument is related to all this -- since the premier right they were arguing for WAS that of holding slaves.)

Answer 2

Not only that, but both the Dred Scot decision in 1857 and the Roe v. Wade decision purported to be based on the exact same constitutional principle: due process. In the Dred Scot ruling, Chief Justice Taney said that if the federal government prohibits slavery in federally-controlled territory, then it violates the slave-owner's right to due process guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment. Then about 115 years later, Justice Blackmun claimed that when a state government prohibits abortion, it violates the pregnant woman's right to due process guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. Hence, both a slave-owner and a pregnant woman have the "right" to do something which government is trying to prohibit. Both of the assertions are lies, because the due process clause is, to quote Robert Bork, "simply a requirement that the substance of any law be applied to a person through fair procedures by any tribunal hearing a case. The clause says nothing whatsoever about what the substance of the law must be." From the Dred Scot opinion: "The rights of property are united with the rights of person, and placed on the same ground by the fifth amendment to the Constitution, which provides that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, and property, without due process of law. And an act of Congress which deprives a citizen of the United States of his liberty or property, merely because he came himself or brought his property into a particular Territory of the United States, and who had committed no offence against the laws, could hardly be dignified with the name of due process of law." From the Roe v. Wade opinion: "This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment's concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment's reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy."

Answer 3

You are absolutely right. They did use the Bible to help support slavery thought while as pro choice people usually don't. Most pro choice people say what about the mother's rights? But the constitution says that one man's freedoms end where another begin. You can't compromise the baby's freedoms to please that of the mother's. If the mother didn't want to be pregnant, she should have prevented the pregnancy in the first place. That is the problem with preventative options. They don't work. Not as well as abstinence does.

Answer 4

First, I think that there are important differences between an unborn foetus and a human regardles of race and these should be obvious to anyone
Second, you see only part of the argument for abortion. There is also a mother involved. The issue is about the mother being free to control her own body.

Answer 5

Yeah, probably. And maybe in 100 years pederasty will be considered the norm because children will be considered to operate on the same mental wavelengths as adults. All that really matters, though, is the here and now, and what you do with it

Answer 6

There is one MAJOR difference.
The Bible was the evidence used to show that slaves werent people.

Answer 7

Thoughts on what, ignorance of those who do not accept scientific fact regarding fetus's? The two have absolutely nothing in common whatsoever, this question makes no sense.