by Justin Dyer
In both Dred Scott and Roe, the justices of the Supreme Court had to decide what it means to be a person, whether human beings can be considered property, and what it means to be deprived of liberty. They got it wrong both times.
Analogies between slavery and abortion are frequent in American politics. In his recent decision in Planned Parenthood v. Abbott (2013), federal district judge Lee Yeakel joined the long list of people who insist that abortion “is the most divisive issue to face this country since slavery.” Politicians and pundits from Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush to Alveda King and Laura Ingram have invoked the history of slavery when speaking about abortion. Mike Huckabee and Paul Ryan are the most recent conservative figures to make headlines for drawing analogies between these two issues.
Commentators on the left invariably denounce such comparisons, yet many show very little familiarity with the arguments they are denouncing. In arecent article for the Daily Beast, for example, Jamelle Bouie offered a confused commentary directed at Huckabee and Ryan. “That slaves, unlike embryos, were fully autonomous doesn’t seem to occur to either,” Bouie writes, “nor does do [sic] they seem to understand that the earliest abolitionists were slaves, a far cry from anti-abortion activists, who—from what I can tell—aren’t fetuses.”
Although pro-life activists—like all adult human beings—once were human beings in the fetal stage of human development, this is completely irrelevant to the actual points of the comparison. The analogies between slavery and abortion are made to highlight some legal, moral, or political principle thought to overlap both issues. There is certainly room to criticize and debate the merits of these analogies, but critical engagement first requires understanding.
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