Abortion and Our "Moral Sense"
When intellectual arguments against abortion fail to persuade, recourse must be had to images and strategies that awake what David Hume considered our "moral sense."
Roe v. Wade is often compared to the infamous Dred Scott decision, and much has insightfully been made of the parallels between the issues of slavery and abortion. These parallels are usually drawn more for the benefit of persuading the opposition than for the benefit of pro-lifers themselves--pro-lifers already know that abortion is evil without the helpful comparison to the evil of slavery.
I recently had occasion to revisit Frederick Douglass's immortal "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" speech in a course I'm teaching on slavery, and I realized that one crucial parallel between the issues of abortion and slavery has gone mostly unnoticed, or perhaps has been unduly neglected. The reason for this is simple: It is a parallel that some pro-lifers may find unsettling or uncomfortable, and therefore one that few have been especially eager to find.
In this famous speech, Douglass imagines a member of his audience imploring him to "argue more, and denounce less"--to push rational discourse about the slavery issue toward acknowledging the wrong of slavery, and thereby to further the cause of abolition in a calm and civilized manner.
In response, Douglass asserts that "where all is plain there is nothing to be argued." He then unleashes a powerful barrage of rhetorical questions on his audience: "Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? That he is the rightful owner of his own body? Am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty . . . to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters?" According to Douglass, the slavery issue has already been settled on the level of reasoned argument, and "it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder."
While there were in fact a variety of pro-slavery arguments current at the time, Douglass was of course absolutely right: The humanity of the slave was obvious, and the right to liberty was, and is, an obvious concomitant of this humanity. The practice of slavery wasn't being upheld by the force of rational argumentation, but by slaveholders' desire for self-preservation and non-slaveholders' apathy or inactivity. The battle to be fought wasn't a battle of ideas--that battle already had been won--but a battle of conscience.
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