Abortion and Slavery?

I heard Alan Keyes speak about abortion in terms of slavery:

“…when I hear folks stand before Republican gatherings and tell us that, well, we should just take the abortion issue out of our politics and forget about it by being silent on it–it’s just a “private issue”–that’s to me like saying what they said in the 19th century.

“Do you realize there were people in the 19th century who thought slavery was a private issue? They did. An issue of private property, they said.

“….I often tell people that what this whole debate boils down to is whether some of us get to decide whether others of us are human, whether we get to draw the line and on one side of the line will be the human beings and on the other side of the line will be the non-humans, and we get to determine that.

“Don’t you realize that that opens the door to every form of tyranny? Because all I have to do if I want to snuff out your life or trample on your rights is decide that you’re not human. And, of course, you’ll look at me and say, “But you can’t do that.” And I’ll say, “Well, I remember a time in this history, the last time the American people decided they were going to draw the line, my folks ended up on the wrong side of it.””

So since an unborn child is considered non-human and just private property of the mother, that mother can do whatever she wants to it – just like a slave owner used to do with his non-human, private property slaves. I thought that was a very interesting point of view that I hadn’t thought of before and it makes a lot of sense to me.

I disagree with abortion (with so many parents willing to adopt) and I also disagree with the current “line” that has been drawn between who is human and who is non-human when it comes to abortion, just like I disagree with the “line” that was drawn previously while slavery was still in effect in this country. We woke up to the wrongness of slavery and I hope we wake up to that same fact with abortion some day.

Except in the case of rape, both a woman and a man make a choice to engage in risky behavior. If the couple becomes pregnant as a result of their choice, they can get rid of the consequences of their choice by having an abortion. It’s not about rights, it’s about avoiding the consequences of your own choices. The only way this man and woman can rid themselves of most of the consequences of their choices is to “draw a line in the sand” and say, “we are on the human side of this line, and the baby we just created is on the non-human side of that line, so we can deny that baby its right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – at the same time, we can get rid of the consequences of the decision that we both made of our own free will.”

It’s also not about women’s rights.  The unborn child inside the mother has different DNA than the mother which makes it not a part of her that she owns (like a slave) and if the unborn child were not protected by the embryonic sac, the mother’s immune system would attack and destroy the foreign body.  Just because it’s inside of her doesn’t make it a part of her that she owns and can kill at will.

My point is that in the name of dodging the consequences of our own choices, we shouldn’t draw that line and end life, we could avoid much of our consequences by giving those babies to someone who can give them the mom and dad who love them that every baby deserves.