Alan Keyes gets flayed alove for putting it in the same terms.
Posted on 10/31/2004 8:30:54 AM PST by StAthanasiustheGreat
Human beings are property
James Fee shows the similarities between abortion and slavery
Posted 10-27-2004, 21:48 by James Fee
The abortion issue is often called the most contentious issue in American politics. One side argues that the unborn have a right to life and seek to protect these most helpless of all. The other side argues that the woman should have the choice of killing her unborn child (fetus) which she had a part in bringing into being. Rarely have the opposing sides been more clearly drawn over an issue. Very few issues have drawn such a distinction between good and evil. Very few issues so obviously have a right and wrong position. Abortion is one of those issues.
Those who support the slaughter of innocents argue that the unborn are the property of the mother and the mother has a choice as to the future of that life. Though the euphemisms they use ‘muddy the waters' as much as possible. The mother has the freedom of her reproductive rights to terminate an "unwanted" pregnancy because it is her body. The unmistakable argument being made -- the unborn child is a piece of property. Where have we heard that before?
Those who constantly support the right for the mother to kill her child are espousing the very same rhetoric that allowed other people to enslave millions of Africans because they were "property." The very same rhetoric that allowed other people to exterminate the different, the weak, the undesirable. The twentieth century is filled with examples of man's inhumanity to man: the Holocaust, Stalin's purges, Mao's long march and Pol Pot's Khmer Revolution. Add to that the sins of past centuries, namely, the inhumanity of slavery, where by one person born with the same soul of liberty as anyone else becomes the property of another.
There were brave voices in the wilderness, the abolitionists who warned the world of the injustice of slavery. The world listened; it took a bloody Civil War to end the institution of slavery in this country. It took a long march for civil rights to put away those last lingering vestiges of slavery.
Today these tragedies repeat themselves when the unborn are declared the property of those who gave them life. They are declared the undesirable because of the inconvenience to our self-centered lifestyles. They are truly the weak for they cannot speak for themselves. And we as a society slaughter them on a scale that puts all the mass murders of the twentieth century (Mao excluded) to shame.
The abortion issue is not one of grays, but of black and white. Evil and good. If the unborn child is the property of the mother who gave him life and she can do what she pleases to him, then there is no immorality to slavery. The slave was property and owner could do whatever he willed. There is no difference; both abortion and slavery declare a human person to be property. If such a concept of a person as property is abhorrent, as I hope and know it is except for the most hardened racists in this world, opposition to abortion is the only possible position. The contradiction posed by those who espouse civil rights for all and an individual right to abort, makes any platitudes to Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Lincoln, or any other pillar of abolition or civil rights by that person mute and worthless. They are hypocrites.
The right to life is the ultimate civil right. The right to not have ones life snuffed out before it has even begun. The right to be born into this world and to see it for all its beauty. The right to be born is the most basic civil and human right.
James Fee is a Weinberg senior. Contact him at j-fee@northwestern.edu.
God Bless
"James Fee shows the similarities between abortion and slavery"
About time. I've been hammering this one for years now.
I guess Bush's "Dred Scott" reference in the debates is a little less obscure, now.
ditto, fellow abolishionist.....
good article
Well you can forget about the concept of 'right to life' if American is STUPID AND SELFISH enought to put a treasonous MARXIST in the White House....
Alan Keyes gets flayed alove for putting it in the same terms.
alove = alive (sorry.)
How in hell can I have a right to life which is sufficient to compel hardship and suffering on another person? Moreover, if there is such a thing as a right to life in this world, then why are there predators?
"Alan Keyes gets flayed alove for putting it in the same terms."
You know what, I'm pretty sure I "invented" the parallel after listening to several of Keyes's speeches in the early 90's. Credit where its due.
"How in hell can I have a right to life which is sufficient to compel hardship and suffering on another person?"
so you are inferring that your rights end when they interfere with another human's rights? ;)
We do NOT have a right to life, same way we do not have a right to exist.
We have a right not to be killed.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident..."
I have said this hundreds of times. Either one condones the murder of the unborn or one does not condone the murder of the unborn. Its that simple.
Until you try to discuss it with a pro-abortionist, that is.
Pro-choice: Will Kill for Sex
Think about it. What party was mostly responsible for ending slavery? It was the Republicans. What party was mostly responsible for supporting slavery? It was the Democrats. What party was mostly responsible for discrimination and Jim Crowe laws? It was the Democrats. What party is generally supportive of reproductive "rights?"
Democrats again. They sure make it easy to vote Republican.
Nobody has a right to a life free of hardship and suffering.
Some confusion here.
We have a right to remain living if we are conceived, but we cannot be given a right to live/to be conceived. Otherwise contraception and onanistic practices, amongst other things, would be illegal.
I'm challenging the use of the cant term "right to life". No such thing. If you've never been alive, you can't be given life, not even by SCOTUS, not even by "hands of a healer" John Edwards himself.
You have a right not to have your life taken away from you, if you like, but couching these primal issues in terms of rights is misleading. Better is : "thou shalt do no murder."
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