Anti-Slavery and Anti-Abortion Similarities

Have you ever thought that the now decades-long hassle over abortion is somewhat similar to the hassle over slavery in the decades between our country’s founding in 1776 and the Civil War? Abolitionists were taking every opportunity they could to decry the evils of slavery, while their opponents who were pro-slavery wanted to keep the system going.  

Attempts to define the slave as a person were fought in courts, and the courts rejected these calls to define the black person as a human person deserving of all of the rights of a white person.  The courts found that slavery was constitutional.  Compromises were sought between those who were abolitionists and those who were pro-slavery; and still the issue would not go away.   The 1820 Missouri Compromise limited the spread of slavery into the new territories as the US expanded west.  This Missouri Compromise prohibited slavery north of the parallel 36°30´ in the Louisiana Purchase, but it was knocked down by the Supreme Court in the infamous Dred Scott Decision in 1857.  That decision declared that the Compromise violated the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution which prohibits Congress from depriving persons of their property without due process of law. 

Hmmm.  The slave was the owner’s property.  Sounds like “my body, and I’ll do what I want.”

In that Dred Scott decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1857, seven out of nine Justices on the Supreme Court declared no slave or descendant of a slave could be a U.S. citizen, or ever had been a U.S. citizen. As a non-citizen, the court stated, Dred Scott had no rights and could not sue in a Federal Court and must remain a slave.

The abolitionists’ persistence, however, won the day, and won the war.

Do you see the similarity that I see?

 

[Image Credit: Digital image ©1998 Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis]