Abortion: The 21st Century Slavery
January 23rd, 2011 § 2 Comments
Few would defend the taking of innocent life. If we defined a fetus as alive the abortion debate would end instantaneously. Accordingly, abortion defenders cannot allow life to be defined so. Why? Because it’s too inconvenient to deal with the moral consequences of that admission.
There is a historical parallel:
In 1787, the States reached a compromise at the Philadelphia Convention to apportion a slave as three-fifths of a man. Accordingly, as a Negro was two-fifths short of a white man, there was no moral compulsion to grant him equal rights.
Jefferson and Washington both spoke against slavery, but neither ceased their personal slave activity while they lived (Jefferson released two, but sold most of them to pay his debts). And Jefferson extended slavery with the Louisiana Purchase. Washington insisted that his slaves be freed upon his death – after he no longer needed them.
The simple truth is that slavery was ingrained in the economic system of the time. It would have been painful and terribly inconvenient to emancipate them. So, those too weak to do the hard and moral thing simply punted through spurious definitions of a Negro life. More than two-hundred years later, they are not forgiven.
The abortion apologists have adopted a similar defense. If a fetus is not a life it is very nearly so. In either definition, it is a life-to-be. Abortion, by either definition, is a life lost. Tortured temporal equivocations about the moment of life will not absolve us of moral abdication in allowing this to continue.
This is not a women’s rights issue, it is not a religious dogma issue, it is a humanities issue. A woman has no more right to dispose of a life, or a life-to-be, in her womb than she does to dispose of that life outside her womb. As Negroes were not the property of slave owners, children are not the property of their mothers.
Estimates of aborted life, or life-to-be, since Roe v. Wade, are prodigious. The widely accepted estimate is more than 50 million. Abortion defenders ask “what burden would have been placed on the children, mothers, and society had those 50 million been born?”. The salient question is “why did we have 50 million unwanted pregnancies?”
The real issue, and the solution, is pre-pregnancy accountability. Except in the very rare cases of rape or incest, or if the mother’s biological life (not her social life) is in danger, abortion should be illegal. It has become retroactive contraception for the supremely irresponsible. That is inhuman.
Will forcing men and women to take responsibility for unwanted pregnancies be painful and terribly inconvenient? Yes, and so be it. Retracting the reproductive get-out-of-jail-free card will dramatically reduce unwanted pregnancy; which should be the focus of our discussion and energy.
Our forefathers abdicated their moral responsibility to end slavery. With the same corrupt arguments, pro-choice defenders abdicate their moral responsibility to end abortion.
As with slavery, history will judge, and judge harshly.
MoralNorth
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