Slavery and Abortion Have More and More in Common - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Slavery and Abortion Have More and More in Common
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Can we learn to live without “abortion rights”? That’s the question we need to answer calmly and rationally in the furor erupting over the Supreme Court’s leaked draft opinion that concludes: “We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled.”

It is a troubling part of the human condition that an unjust practice can be kept in place long after its injustice has been exposed.

We argue earnestly that because we have relied on it for so long, it is now an indispensable part of who we are and of how we live. We convince ourselves that we can’t change it.

Such is the case with our practice of abortion.

Such was the case with our practice of slavery.

We seem to have forgotten just how fervently American slaveowners believed that it was critically essential to the well-being of their families, their way of life and their whole social order that their “right” to practice slavery be maintained.

Yet slavery was abolished in the Thirteenth Amendment.

We did learn to live without slavery.

Congress shall have power … 

Encouraged by this, we might look to Section 2 of the Thirteenth Amendment which provides:

Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Under the Thirteenth Amendment, Congress is empowered to prohibit and punish forms of private conduct mistreating persons as chattels.

The Thirteenth Amendment is self-executing.

This means that even without further action by Congress, the Thirteenth Amendment directly restricts conduct by private individuals who would mistreat human beings as “property.” 

Logically, such private individuals must include not just slave holders but also pregnant women “choosing” to have their “property” forcibly removed by their abortion “providers.”

The Slave, as a Chattel, is fed or famished, covered or uncovered, sheltered or unsheltered, at the discretion or convenience of his Owner.  [William Goodall, The American slave code in theory and practice (1853)]

So too with a daughter or son today in the womb of her/his “owner.”

An “unwanted child” is treated as a chattel — personal “property” to be cherished or abused, protected or destroyed, as if the child is just another optional product subject to the owner’s will.

Duty of the Congress

Yet congressional assumption of responsibility for eliminating treatment of human beings as property is mandated in the Thirteenth Amendment.

Congress has the power and the implied duty to “enforce” this article by appropriate legislation.

Congress is to enact and enforce “appropriate” (i.e., just and adequate) legislation prohibiting private acts which mistreat a human being anywhere (including in her/his mother’s womb) as an animate item of property. Even the smallest human being is not permitted arbitrarily through the owner’s ‘choice’ to be destroyed by her abortion “provider.”

The Supreme Court has held that the Thirteenth Amendment enables Congress to remove “the badges and incidents” of slavery. In Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co. (1968), Justice Potter Stewart, writing for the majority, found that

Congress has the power under the Thirteenth Amendment rationally to determine what are the badges and the incidents of slavery, and the authority to translate that determination into effective legislation.

Clearly, Congress has not just the authority but also the attendant duty to determine what constitute the badges and the incidents of slavery.

Congress has the duty to enact appropriate legislation to prohibit purposeful discrimination against vulnerable human beings entrapped in the power of others who “choose” to terminate the lives of their dependents rather than protect them.

‘Privacy’ rights — ‘a relic of slavery’?

So when “privacy” rights are awarded by a flawed Supreme Court decision to preclude from effective legislation discriminatory private acts by abortion providers that treat children in the womb as their mothers’ “property” to be destroyed at will, then is this not too a badge of slavery, an incidence of chattelhood? Is it not (to use in this ancillary context Justice Stewart’s term) “a relic of slavery”?

When the “private conduct” of pregnant women and their abortion “providers” herds unborn children in their millions into abortion clinics to be exterminated as part of the alleged “property rights” and “privacy rights” of their mothers, then isn’t this too a relic of slavery?

Relics of slavery are to be “abolished” not merely “regulated” by the states.

The Thirteenth Amendment instructs that slavery (essentially the right of property in a human being) shall not “exist in any part of the United States.”

The womb is a place

Anywhere and everywhere right across the United States, a child’s natural right to continue living and growing is to be protected. A child at home in her/his mother’s womb before birth has the same right not to be evicted as that same child at home in her/his mother’s house after birth.

The womb is a place. We may not practice lethal discrimination on innocent human beings on the grounds of where they temporarily must reside, through no fault of their own. A human being is entitled to full human rights — in jail in Iran, in a reeducation enclosure in Western China, in a sexual slavery brothel in North Africa, or in the womb of one’s mother

Place must not be used as grounds for discriminating between the rights of one human being and another.

A relic of slavery is not simply to be regulated by the States after the point of viability of the child in the womb on an “if we feel like it” basis. Maltreatment of “our Posterity” as property to be aborted at the discretion of their “owners” is to be abolished — absolutely.

We must learn to live without abortion

We must learn to live more carefully, more caringly — not just for “ourselves” but for “our Posterity.” The Constitution begins with the specific and purposeful dedication “to secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

We must continue to expand and improve our pregnancy help programs so that no mother anywhere feels compelled to abort her little daughter or son.

We must also begin to bring serious change to the widespread immorality that has structured our lives towards making abortion so widespread. (Since Roe v. Wade (1973), over 63 million American children have been aborted.)

We must all, both men and women, discipline ourselves in our sexual enjoyment and practices, reserving them for faithful, genuinely loving and enduring marriages.

We must teach our children to live without abortion — to live chastely, to eschew pornography and sexual incontinence, to learn to love with tenderness and fidelity, and to generate deep love and respect for all God’s children.

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