Slavery and Abortion: Moral Relatives

I totally agree with you on this. And for those people that say it’s a womans’ right to choose then I think that right should extend to the mother and grandmother. If you are 25 and want to have an abortion than your mom should get to pick if she wants an abortion. Yeah that means if the 25 year old is going to kill her baby the grandma can elect to have the 25 year old aborted as well. Yeah that might sound perposterous but really it’s not much worse then aborting a baby in the first place.

Thanks for your comment, David.

Oh, I am totally glad I found this post here, because I’ve just been writing about this elsewhere.

Abortion is not slavery. Prohibition of abortion is.

Since we know how to perform abortions, we can choose whether to perform them or not: there is choice. It follows that prohibition of abortion equals forcing a woman to carry a child against her free will. That is the very definition of sexual slavery.

Refute.

Mike,

My point is that slavery existed because black people were considered less than human. Abortion exists because fetuses are considered less than human.

Back in the days described in the book I’m editing, slaveowners thought they were entitled to treat slaves like animals because they believed black people WERE animals. Today, everybody (well, most people anyway) know that black people have every bit as much humanity as white people.

Not long ago, whether or not a fetus was human was a matter of philosophy, values, beliefs, opinions. However, since the sonogram, I can’t imagine anyone looking at a sonogram even early in pregnancy and not seeing signs of life.

I read recently (and I don’t have the reference so I’m relying on my memory) about an abortionist who gave up performing abortions and became avidly pro-life. He said he didn’t have a religious conversion or anything like that - he simply realized by seeing sonograms that what he had gleefully been destroying in the pursuit of money was not just a blob of tissue, but a living human being.

Freedom of choice gives the right to the mother (or in many cases the father or other family members who force young girls to have abortions) to decide that the mother’s free will (or the protection of the adult male or the convenience of the family) is more valuable than the life of another human being.

There is a wonderful book (there are some writing flaws, but the story is wonderful) written by a woman who bore a child that was the result of rape. I can’t remember the name right now, and I don’t have time to look for it. However, she describes what she went through and how precious her daughter is and how thankful the mother is that she didn’t have an abortion. It was not easy, and she describes the pain and the challenges. But in the end, she is convinced she made the right choice.

I have read stories of teens and adults who were born after their mothers had botched abortions. Even though they were unwanted, they have become assets to society. They are examples of others who never got the chance to live because their mother thought her free will was more important than their life.

Many abortions result from bad choices and irresponsible behavior on the part of the woman. Just because a woman made a mistake, she doesn’t have the right to wipe away her mistake by killing her baby.

Of course, many abortions result from rape or incest, and those women (or in many cases young girls) have suffered already. It’s not fair they have to carry a baby they don’t want, but they still don’t have the right to murder their child.

And you mentioned a woman being forced to carry her child … unfortunately, there are far too many cases of women (especially young girls) being forced to have abortions against their will. Often the father is an adult who could be prosecuted for statutory rape so he forces the young, impressionable girl to have an abortion. And there have been lots of examples of abortion clinics who facilitate this and don’t make the reports they are legally required to make. Isn’t it wrong to force a young girl to have her baby ripped from her body against her will? The life of the baby is lost, and the life of the mother is damaged forever.

The self-centered nature of our society in which people put their individual comfort and convenience above other people encourages abortion. Just like slavery, when white people considered their comfort more important than the lives of black people, abortion puts more value on the comfort and convenience of the woman (or the man who has raped a young girl or the family who doesn’t want to deal with their daughter’s pregnancy) than on the living human being the woman is carrying.

But Lillie, with all due respect, you did not address my point which is that prohibition of abortion is sexual slavery. You say yourself:

Freedom of choice gives the right to the mother (or in many cases the father or other family members who force young girls to have abortions) to decide that the mother’s free will (or the protection of the adult male or the convenience of the family) is more valuable than the life of another human being.

Exactly. People intrinsically have a choice of what to do with themselves. It is because of this freedom of choice that human morality was developed and codified; without it, a human being can not live and be content with itself. However, a society needs cooperation to function, so some choices are preemptively barred by the society. By definition this means removal of one’s freedoms (such as de facto freedom to murder and rape people) to establish rights of another, in a fashion where everyone fairly gets equal rights. Every time one’s freedoms are removed, everyone’s freedoms are removed, and the servants of the public become its tyrants. Erosion of freedoms is not a natural thing, it is a tool of the tyrants. Every time such erosion is proposed - such as the case with abortion - we must evaluate such proposals very harshly and sceptically, which means that the bar must be high. We live in a society which is designed to be free of tyranny, which it is not, and free of fear, which it is not also, and every reduction of our freedom brings on more tyranny and more fear.

But now I would like to ask you directly on your points.

1) Yes, many people who could’ve never been born because of abortions were born, and were great people. How does this constitute an argument against abortions? I can show you at least two reasons why it isn’t. It might be a valid personal reason not to perform one.

2) You say that many abortions result from a woman’s mistake which she does not have a right to wipe away. How so? A woman owns her body, and is accountable to no one about it. Is there someone I don’t know about to whom a woman is accountable for her mistakes? This is not about wiping away mistakes, at all, but about a person’s right to do whatever they want with their body - a fundamental freedom that fell between the chairs of law.

3) You say that many women are forced to have abortions against their will. Yes, that is the case, and the proper response for that problem is not banning abortions, it is punishing the criminal behaviour which is unwanted intrusion into one’s body the same way rape is punished, and educating the people about the nature of this crime. Do you know that many countries today still do not have working anti-rape laws? Have you ever wondered why is that?

4) Yes, the self-centered nature of our society encourages abortion. So what? Abortion is a choice. Some people would find valid and appealing reasons in what you’ve written to not perform abortions on themselves (or someone else). Some would not - I do not - so we would like to retain our freedom thank you very much.

5) Your argument relies on the idea that unborn children are persons and thus abortion is infanticide. However, this argument is fundamentally flawed, since you basically want to define unborn children as persons to stop abortions, and you want to stop abortions because you define unborn children as persons. It’s a circular argument. You can break the circle by asking yourself: why is it that I want to see unborn children as persons? And why is it that they are not fundamentally defined so by law? You have already answered that question; and my response would be that neither Biblic instructions nor personal revelations derived from observing life on a monitor are sufficient to take away people’s freedom.

6) Whereas I maintain that not a single rational anti-abortion argument can be demonstrated, let’s suppose for a moment that some have been, resulting in common sense understanding that the question of abortions is morally complicated. Even in this case, how would you reconcile prohibition of abortions with the statement that forced carriage of a child is sexual slavery, which you did not challenge in any way?

I think we have to agree to respectfully disagree. I believe there is an absolute morality of right and wrong; obviously your absolute is personal freedom. With two such different value systems, I suspect neither of us will convince the other of our positions.

You’re missing two things in my comments: I never said abortion was slavery - I said abortion was the moral equivalent of slavery. And I never said anything about forcing anyone to carry a baby. If you read everything I’ve written, I’ve never addressed laws or forcing anyone to have abortion. I am addressing morality, right and wrong, good and evil.

We can have laws that make all kinds of things legal - that doesn’t mean they are moral. And obviously everyone has their own moral code. We won’t find out til we’re crossed over if our beliefs are right or not, but I’m going to opt to believe that we aren’t put on this earth for our own selfish pursuits.

Your argument is based on the assertion that a woman owns her own body and can with it what she pleases. My argument is based on the belief that there is a higher authority we are accountable to, and consequently we can’t just whatever we want to do - whether the issue is owning slaves, killing unborn babies, stealing, killing the elderly and sick … or any other moral issue.

Thank you for your honesty. I do not get that from many people these days. I am satisfied with your answer.

Thanks for discussing.