Strategic Similarities, Practical Differences: A Comparison of the Anti-Slavery and Anti-Abortion...

Introduction

The right-to-life movement in the late-twentieth-century United States has

numerous fundamental differences from and only four real similarities to the movement

in the mid-nineteenth-century United States to abolish slavery. The similarities are that

both movements possessed religious antecedents; both found compromise to be

anathema, forcing them into a rhetorical strategy of “over-weighing;” both looked to the

Republican Party as the political vehicle that would carry them to victory; and both

contained a vanguardist minority which chose direct violent action over peaceful

persuasion. One additional similarity is in the names this author will give the movements

in this paper. Except in quotations from source material, both will hereafter be referred

to as “anti-“ because both sought to change existing law. Casual students never read

abolitionists described as “pro-freedom” even if that effectively is what they were.

If this paper is about the “antis,” who are the “pros”? Catholic writer John T.

Noonan wrote in 1977 of an “abortion movement” whose excesses would eventually

alienate moderate opinion in the same way those of the “slavery movement” had in the

1860’s.1 It may perhaps be useful to subdivide the concept of “movement” into “interest”

and “sentiment” the way D. E. Fehrenbacher does in examining the impact on the United

States of the Dred Scott case. At the beginning of Constitutional government, both

House and Senate were evenly divided between “slave” and “free” states. The lack of a

national consensus is one reason the three-fifths compromise was the only language on

slavery found in the original Constitution.2 However, supporters of slavery at the

1 John T. Noonan, quoted in Donald DeMarco, “Abortion: Fear of the Actual and Preference for the Possible,” in New Perspectives on Human Abortion, ed. by Thomas Hilgers, Dennis Horan and David Mall (Frederick, Maryland: University Publications of America, 1981), 440.2 D. E. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1978), 19.

1

Constitutional Convention were so much more “concentrated, persistent, practical, and

testily defensive” than its opponents that Fehrenbacher labels the former group an

“interest,” with antislavery qualifying only as a “sentiment.”3 Antislavery rose to the

level of an “interest” in practical political terms during the 1830’s when, recognizing

earlier advocates’ gap between sincerity and intensity, abolitionists increasingly made

getting rid of slavery their lives’ mission.4 The Constitution’s ambiguity on slavery

questions led to a great deal of argument among antislavery advocates as to whether that

document and system of government were in fact salvageable.5 From 1831, the left wing

of the anti-slavery movement, which condemned both Constitution and Union as

impediments to abolition, had a strident spokesman in the person of William Lloyd

Garrison and his Liberator magazine.6 To match Garrison’s influence in the print media,

former President John Quincy Adams emerged as the champion of abolitionism in the

Congress even after his body, the House, had formally gagged itself in an unsuccessful

attempt to prevent the issue from tearing the nation apart.7

Only five years after the founding of The Liberator, Fehrenbacher already finds it

fair to call the South “a closed society of closed minds where slavery was concerned,”

largely as a result of this ideological transformation of abolitionism, but perhaps in small

part due to small and scattered but widely reported slave uprisings like that of Nat

Turner.8 By imposing a gag rule and treating Northern travelers in their states with

“increasing suspicion,” Southern slaveholders managed to create a long-term momentum

behind their opponents in precisely the way Noonan described. The slaveholders were

3 Id. at 28.4 Id. at 118-119.5 Id. at 47.6 Id. at 117.7 Id. at 121.8 Fehrenbacher, 120.

2

increasingly viewed as the enemies of freedom for the extraordinary steps they demanded

government take to protect their peculiar institution.9 For example, the first Southern

state resolution calling on Northern states to “promptly and effectually suppress” anti-

slavery societies was passed on December 16, 1835 by South Carolina.10

Jack Willke, an Ohio anti-abortion physician, contributed a history of the

movement to Teresa Wagner’s 2003 compendium Back to the Drawing Board: The

Future of the Pro-Life Movement, the major anti-abortion sourcebook used for this essay.

He would probably cite 1980 as the year anti-abortion went from “sentiment” to

“interest.” In this year not only was Ronald Reagan, the first avowedly anti-abortion

President of the United States, elected, but Willke himself became president of the

National Right to Life Committee, which he then claims “became dominant” among anti-

abortion organizations.11 By that time, however, anti-abortion sentiment could already

claim two significant victories. In 1976, Congressman Henry Hyde, later the right wing’s

greatest impeachment hero after Kenneth Starr, succeeded in passing into law a ban on

Federal funding of elective abortions.12 Also, the Equal Rights Amendment to the

Constitution was perceived by anti-abortion activists as threatening to insert abortion into

the Constitution, which contributed to its defeat.13 The anti-abortion interest has

9 Id. at 120-121. By the mid-1850’s, some Republicans even opposed slavery mostly as a way of getting back at the South! Id. at 191.10 Herbert Aptheker, Abolitionism: A Revolutionary Movement (Boston, Massachusetts: Twayne Publishers, 1989), p. 105. Over the next few months, some in Northern states initiated mob action against anti-slavery presses there; Salmon Chase, later Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, was among many Northerners inspired to become anti-slavery activists by the destruction of a Cincinatti paper’s office. Id. at 106. 11 Jack Willke, “For Better or Worse,” in Back to the Drawing Board: The Future of the Pro-Life Movement, ed. by Teresa Wagner (South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 2003), 125-127. In 1980 the National Right to Life Committee already had $400,000 annual cash flow.12 Willke, 125.13 Id. at 126.

3

succeeded in passing a partial-birth abortion ban into law in this century, but its

constitutionality is still an issue before the Federal courts.14

In sharp contrast to the antebellum period, Congress today does not have a

gag rule to prevent introduction of anti-abortion legislation or discussion of

petitions on the subject. It is understood that the ball is in the Supreme Court, or

will return there periodically. This is why Roe v. Wade is so often compared to

Dred Scott v. Sandford: both severely limited Congress’ freedom to act by

elevating one side’s policy preference to a Constitutional necessity. Among the

more eloquent opponents of Roe v. Wade today is Justice Antonin Scalia, who

referred to Dred Scott and slavery by way of a paragraph of Justice Curtis’ dissent

incorporated into his own from the holding in Planned Parenthood v. Casey.15

Scalia went on to imply some very unflattering things about his pro-Roe

colleagues, essentially that they would pay a staggering personal price for their

perfidious views of the Constitution:

There comes to vividly to mind a portrait by Emanuel Leutze that hangs in the Harvard Law School: Roger Brooke Taney, painted in 1859, the 82nd year of his life, the 24th of his Chief Justiceship, the second after his opinion in Dred Scott. He is all in black, sitting in a shadowed red armchair, left hand resting upon a pad of paper in his lap, right hand hanging limply, almost lifelessly, beside the inner arm of the chair. He sits facing the viewer and staring straight out. There seems to be on his face, and in his deep-set eyes, an expression of profound sadness and disillusionment. Perhaps he always looked that way, even when dwelling upon the happiest of thoughts. But those of us who know how the luster of his great Chief Justiceship came to be eclipsed by Dred Scott cannot help believing that he had that case – its already apparent consequences for the Court and its soon-to-be-played-out consequences for the Nation – burning on his mind. I expect that two years earlier he, too, had thought himself “call(ing) the contending sides of national controversy to end their

14 Gloria Feldt and Laura Fraser, The War on Choice: The Right-Wing Attack on Women’s Rights and How to Fight Back (New York: Bantam Books, 2004), 13.15 Paul Finkelman, Dred Scott v. Sandford: A Brief History with Documents (Boston, Massachusetts: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1997), 5.

4

national division by accepting a common mandate rooted in the Constitution.” It is no more realistic for us in this litigation, than it was for him in that, to think that an issue of the sort they both involved – an issue involving life and death, freedom and subjugation – can be “speedily and finally settled” by the Supreme Court.16

It is not within the purview of this paper to respond directly to such a tirade. The

present author chooses to incorporate the passage to demonstrate how for some anti-

abortion activists, as for the most mystical of the abolitionists before them, only a biblical

extravagance of suffering is a fit recompense for opposing the truth. Scalia had no doubt

read and was partly motivated by (although he lacked the smooth veneer of) the

following words of the President who appointed him, written in a similar vein:

Despite the formidable obstacles before us, we must not lose heart. This is not the first time our country has been divided by a Supreme Court decision that denied the value of certain human lives. The Dred Scott decision of 1857 was not overturned in a day, or a year, or even a decade. At first, only a minority of Americans recognized and deplored the moral crisis brought about by denying the full humanity of our black brothers and sisters; but that minority persisted in their vision and finally prevailed. They did it by appealing to the hearts and minds of their countrymen, to the truth of human dignity under God. From their example, we know that respect for the sacred value of human life is too deeply engrained in the hearts of our people to remain forever suppressed. But the great majority of the American people have not yet made their voices heard, and we cannot expect them to – any more than the public voice arose against slavery – until the issue is clearly framed and presented.17

Reagan went on to quote Lincoln declaring how “nothing stamped with the divine image

and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on,” nor to be denied the right to exist.

Lincoln explicitly pointed out that while such denial was the lot of African-Americans in

his time, it could be the lot of any other group in future.18 Reagan wrapped up his essay

16 Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U. S. 833, 1001-1002 (1992) (Scalia, J., dissenting).17 Ronald Reagan, Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation (Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson, 1984), 19-21. Italics in original.18 Reagan, 28-29.

5

with the interesting statement, “we cannot survive as a free nation when some men decide

that others are not fit to live and should be abandoned to abortion or infanticide.”19

Reagan’s nationally distributed essay was skillfully deconstructed by Celeste

Condit, who claims that the analogy of abortion to slavery is broadly persuasive, if only

because “Individuals in the American community have not generally been given the right

to decide whether they are hurting someone else by their actions.”20 She goes on:

It is important to recognize that the relationship of theme to event derives less from historically accurate accounting than from a plausible, rhetorically constructed sense of the meaning of America’s heritage. . .Nonetheless, Reagan’s linkage was largely convincing because it was plausible. It provided a nominally appropriate chronological account featuring identifiable similarities (Supreme Court decisions were made) and a theme true of both events (they concern issues of human life). Given that our popular heritage had rewritten Lincoln’s goal as a concern with the humanity of blacks and the inhumanity of slavery, the equating of abortion with slavery and Roe v. Wade with Dred Scott was believable. Consequently, the two events appeared as a single line of “villainy” to be overcome by Americans. As a result of this linkage, abortion was not only “written out” of the American heritage, it elicited the same kind of passionate hatred stirred by a long-past Civil War.21

Reagan also obscured the issue somewhat by describing the abortion decision as

one made by men. This may reflect Reagan’s belief at least that his readers would be

more willing to impute evil characteristics to men. Ultimately of course it is pregnant

women who have to decide whether to have an abortion, although men may provide

welcome or unwelcome advice or pressure.

Bible and Constitution are both silent on the issue of abortion because when both

were originally adopted, surgical methods of abortion would have meant certain death for

the mother; however, herbal methods of bringing it about predate human history. 19 Id. at 38.20 Celeste Condit, Decoding Abortion Rhetoric: The Communication of Social Change (Urbana, Illinois: The University of Illinois Press, 1990), 164.21 Id. at 50. It does not seem excessive to characterize Justice Scalia’s preceding comparison of Harry Blackmun to Roger Taney as a statement of passionate hatred.

6

“Separate spheres” ideology in antebellum America and its equivalent in other societies

encouraged women to help solve each other’s most personal problems without the

knowledge or assistance of men. The desire of women to control their fertility is one of

the oldest themes of human civilization. In this respect it is comparable to the human

desire to have a slave or servant to do the work.

Science and technology have enabled the average human in Western society to

radically reduce both work and fertility. The emergence of such technologies, however,

goes hand-in-hand with a social consensus that there is too much of the ameliorated

phenomenon. Up until the arrival on the market some four decades ago of the oral

contraceptive pill, for example, the number of children a sexually active woman would

have was “subject to biological predispositions or male whim.” Around this time some

women were emboldened to argue “compulsory motherhood is a form of slavery,”

though most made less radical arguments for a better life.22 There is still a major debate

among American social historians as to whether medical advances such as the oral

contraceptive pill generated “the desire for Freedom” from unwanted pregnancy, or

whether the necessity for married women to work was the mother of the Pill’s invention.

Undisputed however is that as with abortion, the Pill allows women almost complete

control over when and whether to have children.23

The years just before Roe v. Wade were a crucible of change in public opinion on

the role of women. From 1968 to 1971, the percentage of the population claiming to

want a family of four or more children was cut by more than half, from 41 to 19 percent.

At the same time the percentage of people believing married women should work for

22 Condit, 72.23 Condit, 69.

7

reasons other than strict economic necessity was gradually increasing, reaching 68

percent by 1976, three years after Roe v. Wade.24 A 1978 Newsweek article on abortion

listed three major benefits women obtained by having one: the prevention of unbearable

financial strain, the ability to wait until marriage before starting a family, and the

opportunity to continue a lucrative career.25 This hardly means, however, that American

women were falling over themselves in their eagerness to have abortions. Ironically, in

fact, the majority of the American people had what could only be called a compromise

position on abortion. Surveys conducted throughout the first fifteen years after Roe v.

Wade indicated that a slight majority of Americans, around 60 percent, felt that “only

some abortions” should be legal, “but they did not have much consensus about exactly

which abortions, varying their decision by stage of fetal development and by the motive

for the abortion.”26

Similarities

Religious motivation was a primary factor in both the anti-abortion and the

abolitionist movements. The Quakers were the first Americans to oppose slavery as a

bloc, a position some Quakers were advocating within two generations of their

emergence as a separate sect in the seventeenth century.27 In describing as “important but

ambiguous” Protestant churches’ part in bringing about the abolition of slavery,28 J.

Robert Nelson probably means that the churches, like every other institution in American

society, divided along sectional lines. Or he may mean that the most important leaders

24 Id. at 71.25 Id. at 72. Condit notes that the emergence of choices other than full-time motherhood for married women lowered the status of motherhood only in the eyes of “those who viewed the other choices negatively.”26 Id. at 149.27 Fehrenbacher, note 12, 598.28 J. Robert Nelson, “The Divided Mind of Protestant Christians,” in Hilgers, Horan and Mall at 387.

8

and groups were not inspired by or bound to one another through denominational

affiliations.

With the major exception of the Catholics this is also true of the anti-abortion

movement. The Catholics were the first major group to organize against abortion rights

and have consistently opposed abortion across the board.29 In 1973 Catholics were

perceived by the larger society as being the only religious group which sought to reverse

Roe v. Wade.30 In appearing opposite Paul Hill on Nightline in the winter of 1994, Helen

Alvare of the Catholic Bishops’ Pro-life Committee represented the traditional Catholic

position rejecting deadly violence either against fetuses or anyone else.31 Katha Pollitt

wrote about an encounter with one anti-abortion Catholic named Ramon who picketed

the headquarters of The Nation magazine, which also contained a women’s health clinic,

trying to figure out which women entering the building were carrying an unwanted fetus.

Women whom he judged likely candidates received pictures of the results of abortion

along with the warning, “You’re killing an innocent baby.”32 Ramon was not a typical

Catholic; according to Pollitt, he had no social outlets other than his picketing the clinic

and vigils at the old Vatican Pavilion from the 1964 World’s Fair with other “followers

of Veronica Lueken, the seer of Bayside, Queens,” whose visions feature the Virgin Mary

condemning various aspects of modern life, including birth control.33 By 2004 the unity

of Catholic laity at least against abortion seemed to be eroding, with Planned Parenthood

officials Gloria Feldt and Laura Fraser listing “Catholics for a Free Choice” as one of 38

29 Condit, 52-53.30 Willke, 124.31 Feldt and Fraser, 185-186.32 Katha Pollitt, “Our Right-to-Lifer: The Mind of an Antiabortionist,” in Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 134.33 Id. at 135-136, 141.

9

activist organizations readers of their book The War on Choice were urged to volunteer

with or contribute to.34

Reflecting their division into a multitude of denominations, Protestants are in

much the same splintered state as they were with slavery. For some abortion is not an

issue; still others support abortion rights. As for those Protestants who oppose abortion,

Focus on the Family founder James C. Dobson writes that as with the fight against

slavery, the pro-life movement is inspired by Jesus’ commandment to care for and protect

the “least of these.”35 The broad mass of both Catholic and evangelical Protestant clergy

are occasionally criticized by anti-abortion leaders for not preaching as consistently and

unremittingly against abortion as evangelical clergy across the North did against slavery

in the late antebellum era.36

Both the anti-abortion and the anti-slavery movements had some potential for

violence. In the 1850’s, both pro- and anti-slavery forces were guilty of extensive

violence in Kansas, which first threatened to explode in violence in December 1855,

although “open hostilities. . .were narrowly averted” then.37 By the spring of 1856, John

Brown emerged as a leader of the violent abolitionists. Perhaps because the pro-slavery

side had set up its territorial government first, President Pierce chose to recognize it as

the official government.38 With the Kansas violence “the paramount political issue of

1856,” the nation’s voters apparently sided with President Pierce and blamed the

abolitionists side, re-electing his Democratic party.39 Already in that year, Southerners

34 Feldt and Fraser, 274.35 James C. Dobson, “Letter to the Troops: The Grassroots of the Pro-Life Movement,” in Wagner, 212.36 Willke, 131.37 Fehrenbacher, 285.38 Id. at 193.39 Id. at 197.

10

began to assert that election of any Republican as President was a red line the crossing of

which would doom the Union.40

Such declarations are notably absent from the pro-choice side today, in part

because anti-abortion sentiment is diffused almost evenly across the U. S. In the wake of

the Dred Scott decision, however, the political balance in Kansas, as in the rest of the

North, changed. When the abolitionist side prevailed in the Kansas legislature with a bill

outlawing slavery in late February 1859, the pro-slavery side was apparently too

exhausted to return to open warfare.41

Also by that time, Brown had moved on to more ambitious goals. From March

1858 he and a group of six New England abolitionists – Theodore Parker, Samuel G.

Howe, Thomas W. Higginson, Gerrit Smith, Franklin B. Sanborn, and George L. Stearns

– were planning the ill-fated raid on the Harpers Ferry arsenal.42 The Secret Six believed

not only that Brown would succeed in arming a large body of slaves, but that the actual

outbreak of widespread violence by slaves would permanently transform the mental and

political outlook of both whites and blacks. The slaves in particular would become, if not

Yankees, at least individualists. In this respect they had more faith in the slaves than in

Brown himself.43 At a minimum, Brown was able to convince them “that any ‘normal’

person had a right and a duty to strike a violent blow for freedom and that slave

insurrection was the first step in breaking down ‘class feeling’ and inculcating ‘normal’

values.”44

40 Id. at 189. In that year, Professor Benjamin Hedrick was dismissed from the University of North Carolina for expressing his preference for John Fremont, the first Republican candidate for President of the United States. See Aptheker, 94.41 Id. at 526.42 Jeffrey Rossbach, Ambivalent Conspirators: John Brown, the Secret Six, and a Theory of Slave Violence (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 3.43 Rossbach, 9.44 Id. at 62-63.

11

Closer examination of three members of the Secret Six is revealing. One

member, Samuel Howe, had been struggling “with the idea of using violent means” since

at least the early 1850’s, when he was willing to recommend no more than staring down

the bounty hunters who came north to claim escaped slaves. He passed up another

opportunity to call for violence in 1854 when he addressed a crowd Theodore Parker

attempted half-heartedly to goad into saving captured fugitive Anthony Burns.45 Parker

himself argued that abolitionists should always “go unarmed when there is a chance of

success” in keeping an escaped slave free, and on that crucial night in 1854, he wasted his

chance, actually trying to talk the crowd in Fanueil Hall down when its members started

shouting that they would rescue Burns at once.46 Eventually, Parker supported the

Harpers Ferry raid as a result of his realization that most reform movements, including

abolition, were led by people who egotistically sought to prove their own “righteousness”

to themselves or the world. Therefore, an afflicted community such as African-

Americans would have to bring about their own betterment. In the case of slaves this

would probably require insurrection.47 For his part, more than a year before Brown’s

Harpers Ferry raid, Higginson was arguing in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly that an

elusive “superadded something,” made available by outstanding moral leadership, could

confer upon slaves “courage of emulation” that would enable them to fight for their

freedom.48 Rossbach argues that Brown and Higginson stand apart even from other

members of the Secret Six because they alone were “able to translate the sanction of

Higher Law into a practical commitment to forceful means.”49

45 Id. at 29-30.46 Id. at 19, 32.47 Rossbach, 155.48 Id. at 183.49 Id. at 7.

12

Higher Law is exactly what the violent fringe of the anti-abortion movement

believes it is in touch with. In late 1984 four young people built bombs which succeeded

in blowing up three Pensacola, Florida abortion clinics on Christmas morning. In

contrast to the bloody denouement of the 1859 Harpers Ferry raid, no one was killed or

physically injured, one of the doctors whose clinic was destroyed ceased to provide

abortions, and the bombers received light sentences.50 By the 1990’s, however, some

individual anti-abortion activists were going still further than the Gideon Project had,

shooting abortion providers to death as they arrived at work or even in their homes.51

Willke says of the shootings that they were committed “not by members of legitimate

pro-life groups.”52

Condit describes these and other pro-life activists who “moved to violence” in the

1980’s and later as removing “themselves from the public process of persuasion,”53

largely because persuasion would no longer achieve significant results:

The ideology and values from which the foursome acted were clearly Christian and anti-feminist. This ideology was, in its pure form, the underlying ideology of the Right-to-Life movement as a whole. Such a hierarchical, authoritarian, coercion-focused, and militarist discourse is a partial pre-condition of violence. . .At such a point (as had been reached by 1984) late in a public argument, seasoned movement advocates are well aware that the audience is familiar with the strong points in the opposition’s case. If they are also unwilling to adopt a compromise position that takes into account those strong points, then ‘over-weighing’ – the claim that one’s values outweigh those of the opposition and so necessitate a complete sacrifice of the opposing values – is virtually the only strategy open. The abortion controversy in the eighties increasingly presented precisely such a case – refutation had been lacking and the activists on both sides were unwilling to settle for compromise.54

50 Condit, 153-163.51 Feldt and Fraser, 183-186.52 Willke, 130.53 Condit, 164.54 Id. at 158-159.

13

Over-weighing is in fact the basic strategy of both sides in the abortion debate. It is an

alternative to compromise in which a person or group simply assumes that its opponents’

arguments are so obviously wrong that they will (with a little help) collapse. Condit

warns that “any means are justified to secure those ends (associated with one’s own

ideology)” once the values of the opponent are totally ignored. The American political

system, insofar as it “relies on partisan activists,” made adoption of this strategy

“predictable.”55

Condit’s argument and the similarity between the movements only goes so far;

that much was also true of the American political system in the 1850’s. The difference is

that in that decade, the Republican Party was both brand-new and entirely sectional.

With the rise of the Republican Party the anti-slavery movement at last contended with

slavery on something like an equal footing. In the Republicans the movement had a

vehicle that had no need to look South for votes, although the party was made up of more

than just anti-slavery men.56 Indeed, the great danger for Republicans in the last years

before 1860 was that they would come to be identified too closely with abolitionism,

which is why they moderated their response to the Dred Scott decision. There remained

little sympathy even in the North for the anti-Federalism of Garrison’s followers.57

Republican political platforms have denounced legal abortion from 1976, the first

Presidential election following Roe v. Wade, onward.58 A political party, however, is

compelled to compromise with almost universally shared values such as constitutionalism

to the extent that it frames its arguments and issues on the basis of those values. A

55 Id. at 160.56 Fehrenbacher, 192.57 Id. at 419. Indeed, as late as the early 1850’s a Northern state university could dismiss its chaplain for his anti-slavery activities; see Aptheker, 94.58 Feldt and Fraser, 263.

14

contemporary GOP politician attempts in the following passage to speak to those activists

who feel betrayed by even minimal efforts to compromise:

Peaceful abolitionists in the United States were also accused of rocking the boat and even causing hatred and violence. The Democrat and Whig parties refused to take a stand on slavery or talk about it because they did not want to alienate the supporters of slavery. Even evangelical churches split, North and South, instead of tackling the scourge of slavery head-on. William Wilberforce, the great champion for the elimination of slavery in the United Kingdom, had to work against the political parties of his time, and he relied on members of the Whig party more often than the support of his own Tory party. At least current-day pro-life advocates have a party willing to publicly take a stand in favor of life.59

Differences

The most important difference between the movements is that the debate qua

debate over abortion itself does not threaten to destroy the United States or even

inconvenience many people in the way the debate over slavery did. Anti-abortion

speakers and activists have a task before them which is harder than the anti-slavery task

in four ways, but easier in at least two. First, it is much harder to convince the average

American today that a fetus is human than it was to convince white people in the mid-

nineteenth century that black people were human. It is impossible to converse with a

fetus, make it carry out your instructions, or listen to the music it makes with its friends.

It is unproductive, though not impossible, to preach to it. Nor is a fetus conscious of the

precariousness of its position or capable of taking action to improve its lot in the ways

slaves usually were, from community solidarity to escape.

Second, and the key difficulty faced by the anti-abortion movement, is the fact

that fetuses are also far easier to destroy than slaves were. This is not so much a factor of

slaves’ efforts at individual or collective self-defense as it is of the relative value of a

59 Congressman Christopher H. Smith, “GOP Must Do More,” in Wagner, 154-155.

15

fetus and a slave. For the reasons spelled out in the previous section, women not ideally

positioned in social terms to have children will tend to see pregnancy as a severe

inconvenience at best and more often as a grave threat to their quality of life. If a fetus is

permitted to become a child, it is a drain on productive resources. By contrast, a slave

was him or herself a productive resource almost by definition, from the time he or she

was old enough to perform simple repetitive movements. There were therefore powerful

economic arguments for both slavery and abortion.

Third, and for related reasons, the existence/possession of a fetus is much easier

to conceal than the existence/possession of a slave. Adult human beings take up

considerable space and resources, and yet in some cases they can still be kept hidden and

subjected to a state of slavery even in the majority of countries where slavery is abhorred.

The likelihood of actually enforcing a ban on abortion even as thoroughly as the ban on

slavery is enforced is almost nil, a fact that escapes most anti-abortion activists.

It is at this point that the connection between abortion and the right to privacy

becomes most clear. A woman does not have complete control over whether her fetus

lives or dies – many die despite the best efforts of mothers to carry them to term.

However, she has far greater control over it than the control implied by any other

relationship in modern society outside the arena of warfare or capital punishment. This is

true not only in law but by the biological fact that she carries the fetus around with her for

nine months. If abortion providers hold a position comparable to that of slave traders in

anti-abortion discourse, pregnant women hold a position comparable to that of slave

owners.

16

There are two ways to keep a pregnant woman who is determined not to have a

child from aborting her fetus. She can be immobilized against her will and force-fed, or

the pregnancy can be concealed from her. The latter is not always impossible – women

whose weight is prone to fluctuate may not know they are pregnant – but the key to either

is to ensure that some outside authority discovers the pregnancy before the woman does.

In other words, to make a ban on abortion practically effective would require a doctor –

or if he lacks the proper ideological and religious motivations, the government – to know

about the pregnancy before the woman does.

Such a radical degree of government control over the bodies of citizens is not

literally sought by most anti-abortion activists, even if it does have a parallel in the access

of Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspectors to all industrial facilities,

theoretically preventing slavery. They would probably be happy with a restoration of the

laws that existed fifty years ago and severe criminal punishment of doctors who are

caught performing abortions thereafter. The anti-abortion movement seeks to get around

the conundrum of the previous paragraph by simply persuading women who are on the

fence to have their babies. Although this sometimes works, it usually requires a good

deal of propaganda about the dangers of abortion. As of 1994, however, women in the U.

S. were seven times more likely to die in childbirth than from abortion.60 By 2004 the

ratio had increased to 11-1.61 Observing the propaganda disseminated by anti-abortion

activists, Katha Pollitt argued that for the pro-life movement to reinvent itself in an

“honorable” way, it would have to straightforwardly argue “that a pregnant woman has a

moral duty to bear the child, no matter what negative consequences ensue. That

60 Pollitt, 140.61 Feldt and Fraser, 122.

17

argument, however, would win about as many adherents among the pregnant as natural

family planning does among the married.”62

On the basis of the above statistics, women have no good reason to believe that

abortion is particularly hazardous to their health in a physical sense. Slavery could be

hazardous to the physical health of slave owners only inasmuch as the slaves frequently

revolted, an act which, like all acts, a fetus is incapable of undertaking. This is precisely

the reason for John Brown’s plan to spread arms and revolt among slaves throughout the

South. The moral argument having failed, slavery would simply be made too hazardous

to the health of slave owners. The experience of previous slave revolts, of course,

indicates that the likely response would not have been an end to slavery, but more

violence and repression.

Just as a minority of slave owners were always cruel to their slaves, however, a

minority of pregnant women will always choose to abort their babies regardless of the

risks. Comparing pregnant women to slave owners is also useful for analysis in that the

behavior of both groups is socially as well as economically conditioned. It is

theoretically possible that a Third (Fourth?) Great Awakening could create irresistible

social pressure on women to bear children whenever pregnant (the ultimate meaning of

the mystical call for a “culture of life”). Willke wrote, “As this nation slowly returns to

its religious base, the high number of God-fearing, ordinary citizens will yet turn this

thing around. I may not live to see the end of abortion, but I am convinced my children

will.”63 This is about as likely, however, as it was that the Second Great Awakening

would lead to the freeing of all slaves in the United States. As mentioned above, not all

62 Pollitt, 140.63 Willke, 135. Willke also referred to the United States, the most intensely religious of all industrialized societies, as a “secular” nation.

18

religious groups demand the bearing of unwanted children, any more than all of them

demanded the freeing of slaves.

Fourth, by the mid-nineteenth century, apart from a few very elderly slaves in

Northern states unaffected by gradual emancipation, slavery existed in only fifteen states.

Pregnancy and abortion take place in all fifty, although some regions of the country have

marginally more anti-abortion sentiment than others. The lack of opportunity to interact

regularly with slave owners is one reason Northerners typically did not sympathize with

them. In contrast the dilemma faced by an unmarried or poverty-stricken pregnant

woman can be regularly observed by nearly everyone in society, creating at least a

minimum of sympathy for those who choose abortion. While this makes abortion harder

than slavery to defeat, it also makes things easier for anti-abortion activists in that there is

no region of the country where all of their activities must be concealed, as the South was

a no-go area for open anti-slavery.

Of the anti-abortion interest’s two advantages, the first is mostly theoretical. If

the humanity of the fetus is conceded, then women who have abortions can be made out

to be just as violent as (indeed somewhat more violent in absolute numbers than)

antebellum slave owners. One glaring difference still stands out, however – the

advocates of the fetus are not subjected to violence anywhere. They are not condemned

as threats to the divinely mandated order of human society. Indeed they represent women

who seek to control their fertility as that order of threat. Condit interestingly argues that

coercion could have been an effective tactic for both sides, inasmuch as pro-choice

advocates could have sought “to force doctors and nurses to provide abortion services.”

However, “The basic ideological grounding in Choice probably. . .prevented” this.64

64 Condit, 164.

19

Even more so it was prevented by the pro-choice movement’s fundamental need to retain

the moral high ground, without which it would surely be crushed.

The anti-abortion interest’s second advantage is that the Republican Party did not

require an actual civil war to return to majority status in the 1990’s. The laws against

abortion in the first 45 states were passed during the first long-term Republican majority,

the Gilded Age.65 With overwhelming pressure on Republican Presidents from their own

base to appoint anti-abortion judges at all levels, the long-term survival of Roe v. Wade is

guaranteed only by the evaporation of this majority.

Conclusion

The end of slavery’s consequences for the Southern planter begin to seem at least

to the abortion rights activist not so very different from the hypothetical end of legal

abortion’s consequences for the career woman. While the class might continue at a

subsistence level, the proposed change would present such tremendous obstacles as to

destroy whatever privilege attaches to the class as well as its national influence. This

similarity between the consequences of the two movements’ success is matched by

another difference in the real-world facts, however: Legal abortion has been the status

quo in the United States for far less time than slavery was. Career women are not the

most powerful group in the United States. Indeed they are far more divided even on the

existential issue of abortion than Southern planters were on their existential issue. One

study quoted by Condit found that activists on both sides of the abortion debate tended to

be women, but those on the pro-choice side were mostly unmarried professional women

without children, while those on the anti-abortion side were more often married stay-at-

65 Id. at 22. Condit also notes that unlike slavery, the legality of abortion had a basis in common law. Id. at note 2, 36.

20

home moms.66 Ten of the 30 contributors to Back to the Drawing Board are women,

along with the editor.67

One of the 20 male contributors was liberal journalist Nat Hentoff, who entitled

his contribution “There’s More to Abortion than Abortion.” His essay recounts, with a

tone of detached amusement, his various differences with the rest of the anti-abortion

movement. Among the assertions in Hentoff’s essay is the claim that Jesse Jackson,

before running for President, was pro-life, saying the right to life trumped the right to

privacy and had even in slavery days, when it was argued that the welfare and fate of

privately owned slaves “was private and therefore outside of your right to be

concerned.”68 Hentoff’s title is entirely correct and probably explains why Jackson

changed his stance.

Looking at the violent response to abolitionism in the 1830’s (equaled at the time

only by the reaction against Mormon polygamy), historian Herbert Aptheker had this to

say:

The late Russell B. Nye. . .asked why it was that various pre-Civil War reform activities such as “prison reform, prohibition of alcoholic beverages, women’s rights, or any other reform could be preached without meeting violent opposition, but that antislavery agitation was immediately to be put down?” The answer is that in their time the other efforts (including even “women’s rights” as understood then) were not truly revolutionary, as was the Abolitionist movement.69

By contrast, the anti-abortion movement is counter-revolutionary. As the title of

Judith Reisman’s essay for Back to the Drawing Board -- “Sex-on-Demand,

Abortion-on-Demand” – should indicate, most of contemporary popular culture is

seen by the movement as the product of a disgusting and amoral revolution which 66 Condit, 150.67 Wagner, v-vii. Interestingly however not one of these ten compared abortion with slavery in her piece.68 Nat Hentoff, “There’s More to Abortion than Abortion,” in Wagner, 220.69 Aptheker, 105.

21

must be crushed in all its manifestations, not just abortion. It is not entirely

without reason, of course, that the anti-abortion interest sees legal abortion as tied

into the decline of the nuclear family in American society and the rise of

pornography and the fear of overpopulation.70 The other trends facilitated the

emergence of legal abortion, which began in state legislatures before Roe v.

Wade.71 Their reversal is probably a prerequisite for the success of the anti-

abortion interest, but it is difficult to see anything less traumatic than the Civil

War bringing that about.

70 Willke, 133-134.71 Id. at 123.

22