Abortion and Slavery

If you’ve spent much time in Civil War discussion groups you’ve probably run into the argument that slavery would have ended in the South without the Civil War; therefore, the War hadn’t needed to be fought. Indeed, occasionally some southern apologist will insist that the South was well on the way toward giving up slavery and would have done so freely had the statist, Big Gubmint damnyankees not pushed the issue prematurely.

Well, certainly, by now slavery would have ended, although probably not by the free will of the slave states. It more likely would have ended by constitutional amendment once enough “free soil” states had entered the Union to form a majority.

In fact, that is what the plantation owners feared. And in 1860 Abraham Lincoln was elected on a platform of keeping slavery out of the territories, which would ensure that new states entering the Union would be free soil states. Thus the election of Lincoln touched off the secession crisis, which in turn took the nation to war.

The southern plantation class, which controlled the South economically, politically and socially, was certain that the abolition of slavery would ruin them. They were prepared to fight to the death (or compel non-slave-owning whites to fight to the death in their place) to preserve slavery. The Declaration of Causes documents adopted by the states of Georgia, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Texas make it clear that secession was all about preserving slavery.

And may I suggest that a people determined to fight to the death to preserve something are not on the brink of giving that something up?

Anyway, the South started the war when South Carolina fired on the federal military reservation of Fort Sumter, and ever after they have blamed Lincoln for making them start it (that’s why it’s called the “War of Northern Aggression,” see; the damnyankees fought back). And after the war the former secessionists blamed Reconstruction for making them engage in race riots, lynchings, and other violence perpetrated upon the freed African Americans (even though much Reconstruction policy was enacted in reaction to the race riots, lynchings, etc.). Had the white plantation class been allowed more time to change their minds about slavery and end it on their own, which they would have done someday, then white southerners wouldn’t have been left with all those hard feelings that made them so violent. And then there wouldn’t have been a Ku Klux Klan or Jim Crow or any of that stuff.

But after the war those damnyankee carpetbaggers conspired to temporarily disenfranchise southern white men just because they had engaged in armed rebellion against the government and thereby forced through the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. And then the poor downtrodden southern white people just had no choice but to form the Klan and enact Jim Crow laws, because they hadn’t been given enough time to adjust.

Those of you who are much younger than I am and/or did not grow up in hollerin’ distance of Dixie might not have been exposed to this line of reasoning much, but believe me, it was common. Still is, in some circles.

Fast forward to today’s anti-abortion rights movement. Fetus People like to see themselves as the heirs of the abolitionists, and they compare the struggle to protect fetii with the stuggle to end slavery. And they like to evoke the Dred Scott decision, which declared that a black man could not be a citizen and could have no standing to bring suit against a white man. The “antis” want fetii to be given full citizenship status; those who would deny them that status are bad people, just like the justices who ruled against Dred Scott.

But in truth, the anti-choicers more and more remind me of the old white supremacists and Klansmen, not the abolitionists.

First, the line of reasoning that blames the abortion wars on Roe v. Wade (see previous post on abortion) and not on a faction of fanatics who will try to stop abortions by any means is just too much like saying the 13th Amendment was responsible for the formation of the Klan. Let’s pretend that tomorrow Roe is reversed. Does anyone seriously believe that states which allowed abortion to remain legal would not be descended upon by Randall Terry and the screaming culture of death hoardes? Puh-leeze

The Right argues that the Roe v. Wade decision amounted to judicial activism and judges “ruling from the bench,” which is exactly the same thing they said about Brown v. Board of Education. Many on the Right insist they don’t really want to impose a ban on abortion; they just want the question to be decided by elected state legislatures according to the democratic process. Does anyone really think that if Roe were overturned tomorrow, and abortion given a full and fair debate in every statehouse, and the 50 states separately wrote abortion law that reflected majority opinion in each state, that the Fetus People would accept any state’s decision to keep abortion legal?

Hah.

The Fetus People simply do not accept any position on abortion but theirs, and they will not give up until their will is law. For the past 33 years these people have engaged in systematic intimidation and terrorism to impose their will. Let me repeat this passage from Eyal Press’s “My Father’s Abortion Wars” …

The flip side of the desire to rid the world of evil in accordance with your spiritual beliefs is the impulse among some of those convinced of their righteousness to demonize, and in extreme cases to want to eliminate, anyone who does not subscribe to them, something that, as I saw up close in Buffalo, is not a mind-set unique to Islamic fundamentalists. When the police removed protesters from a clinic in Buffalo one time, a spokeswoman for the local branch of Operation Rescue likened them to Nazi storm troopers. When a group of local religious leaders sympathetic to abortion rights held a meeting on another occasion, a protester assailed them as “ministers of Satan.” Driving past my father’s office while still in high school, I saw the signs emblazoned with his name. “Murderer!” “Baby-Killer!” On several Jewish holidays, including Yom Kippur and Hanukkah, a group called Project House Call organized demonstrations in front of doctors’ homes, choosing as their targets two local physicians who happened to be Jewish: my father and Slepian. Later, during the Spring of Life, radio ads blared, announcing: “Some doctors deliver babies. Some doctors kill babies!” My father and several other physicians were singled out by name. On the corner of Maple and Exeter Roads, a quarter-mile or so from my parents’ home, a six-foot red banner reading “Press Kills Children” was unfurled. In case anyone missed the banner, leaflets were distributed throughout the neighborhood.

These are not people who give a bleep about debate or the democratic process. And they are the cause of the abortion wars, which would be waged Roe v. Wade or no.

Some might argue that the pro-privacy Left is just as adamant to have its way, but when has anyone on the pro-privacy Left committed arsons and bombings, butyric acid attacks, and murders to get their way? In the 90 or so years in which abortion was illegal in most states — abortion didn’t become illegal until the late 19th century — I do not believe activists for abortion rights killed anyone, bombed anyone, or issued fatwas against the opposition. Instead, they worked within the system, which includes court challenges.

Let us revisit the old plantation slaveowners and ask another hypothetical question. Let’s say they’d been allowed more time to decide to give up slavery. Surely another generation, probably two, maybe more, of human beings would have lived their lives enslaved. And even if the slave states had been given more time, there is no guarantee that all slaveowners would have given up without a fight, or that slavery would not have left a residue of white supremacy no matter where or how it ended.

Today some on the Left argue that giving up Roe v. Wade would be smart strategy. Republicans have hidden behind Roe v. Wade long enough, they say. Without it, they’d be forced to deliver on their promises to ban abortion, thereby alienating the majority of voters. Or, they’d be forced to disappoint the Fetus People and forfeit their votes. Yet this would not end the abortion wars, and many women would suffer. And where abortion becomes illegal, the Fetus People will press for more — banning birth control and sex education, for example. The war will continue as long as the Fetus People choose to wage it. They will not be appeased.

So let’s stop kidding ourselves that there is anything that can be done to end the abortion wars. Like extremist Islamic terrorists, the Fetus People believe in their own absolute righteousness and will not stop fighting — to the death — to get their way. Like the slaveowners of earlier times, there is nothing else to be done but oppose them.

See also: Fetus People Follies.

Blog for Choice Sunday

Eyal Press’s “My Father’s Abortion War” in today’s New York Times magazine is a sometimes sobering, sometimes frustrating reflection on Press’s father, an ob-gyn who devotes part of his practice to performing abortions, and the larger struggle over choice.

Eyal Press provides keen insight into opposition to abortion — the sobering part — but blames Roe v. Wade for the ongoing abortion wars — the frustrating part.

Dr. Press’s medical practice is in Buffalo, New York. Until 1998 he and Dr. Barnett Slepian often covered for each other on weekends at a Buffalo abortion clinic. Then Dr. Slepian was murdered — shot in the back by an anti-choice fanatic — and Eyal Press feared his father was next. Both Dr. Slepian and Dr. Press had been “subjected to abrasive treatment – protests in front of their offices and homes, harassment of their patients, death threats,” writes Eyal Press. “I had witnessed some of this firsthand while growing up.”

After Dr. Slepian’s murder, Eyal Press tried to persuade his father to retire.

There was silence. He cupped his chin in his hands and sighed. Then, looking over in my direction, with weariness but no hint of acquiescence in his eyes, he started telling me about his upbringing in Israel, how he got used to living in a world full of danger and not allowing it to deter him from doing what he felt was right.

“It’s wrong, wrong,” he said.

“What’s wrong?”

“To give in to fanatics, to terrorists.”

The very next morning, around 10, as I was talking to my mother, the phone rang. She picked it up.

“Death threat?” she said. “Death threat?. . .Excuse me, you’ll have to speak with my son.”

Her hand shook as she passed me the phone. It was a detective from the Police Department. He was calling to inform us that a newspaper in Hamilton, Ontario, which days earlier received a package containing a photograph of Slepian with an X drawn through his face, had just received an anonymous threat that my father was “next on the list.”

After interviewing a soft-spoken woman who has dedicated her life to abortion clinic protests — Eyal Press doesn’t say if he told her his father was an abortion provider — Press praised her religious sincerity, and added,

Yet as the scholar Jessica Stern notes, there are two sides to religion – “one that is spiritual and universalist, and the other particularist and sectarian.” The flip side of the desire to rid the world of evil in accordance with your spiritual beliefs is the impulse among some of those convinced of their righteousness to demonize, and in extreme cases to want to eliminate, anyone who does not subscribe to them, something that, as I saw up close in Buffalo, is not a mind-set unique to Islamic fundamentalists. When the police removed protesters from a clinic in Buffalo one time, a spokeswoman for the local branch of Operation Rescue likened them to Nazi storm troopers. When a group of local religious leaders sympathetic to abortion rights held a meeting on another occasion, a protester assailed them as “ministers of Satan.” Driving past my father’s office while still in high school, I saw the signs emblazoned with his name. “Murderer!” “Baby-Killer!” On several Jewish holidays, including Yom Kippur and Hanukkah, a group called Project House Call organized demonstrations in front of doctors’ homes, choosing as their targets two local physicians who happened to be Jewish: my father and Slepian. Later, during the Spring of Life, radio ads blared, announcing: “Some doctors deliver babies. Some doctors kill babies!” My father and several other physicians were singled out by name. On the corner of Maple and Exeter Roads, a quarter-mile or so from my parents’ home, a six-foot red banner reading “Press Kills Children” was unfurled. In case anyone missed the banner, leaflets were distributed throughout the neighborhood.

I call Eyal Press’s work frustrating because it is too much written through the prism of his experiences in Buffalo, New York, a city with a large Catholic population that is far, far away from the Bible Belt. In Eyal Press’s version of anti-choice history, abortion didn’t become a hot-button issue until after Roe v. Wade, and the anti-choice movment didn’t get organized until well into the 1980s. “During the 1970’s, when the opposition to abortion indeed came almost exclusively from Catholics – the Catholic Physicians Guild, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Buffalo – the right-to-life movement wasn’t terribly radical,” he writes. But the mid-1980s saw the “political reawakening of evangelicals” who began “filtering into the movement.”

Had Eyal Press grown up closer to the Bible Belt, he would have seen a very different history. The way I remember it is that before Roe v. Wade the Missouri state legislature was engaged in a Second Civil War over whether to legalize abortion. The state capitol at Jefferson City was besieged with pros and antis, and it seemed little else was on the legislative agenda. In 1972, when I was a journalism student at the University of Missouri, contingents from various evangelical student organizations regularly marched into the newsroom of the Columbia Missourian (the J School publishes a community daily newspaper to provide students with real-world experience) demanding that their anti-abortion press release du jour be given space on page 1, unedited. (Fortunately the “professors,” who were mostly former newspaper reporters, were a thick-skinned crew who didn’t like being told what to publish.)

Eyal Press of Buffalo, New York, thinks that Roe v. Wade began the abortion wars, but in Missouri and other midwestern states the announcement of the Roe decision in 1973 brought about a temporary cease-fire. State legislatures were allowed to turn their attention to other matters, and anti-choice groups withdrew to consider new strategies.

Abortion clinic arsons began three years later, in 1976. Bombings began in 1978.

Other nations are not tearing themselves apart over abortion, writes Press.

“No other nation obsesses about abortion the way we do,” the columnist Michael Kinsley noted recently. Not Italy, home to the Vatican; not France, England or Germany. Only in America is a medical procedure that was legalized more than three decades ago at risk of once again being criminalized. Only here have doctors routinely taken to wearing bulletproof vests and hiring armed guards for protection.

He blames Roe v. Wade for this. “By short-circuiting a debate that was only beginning (not unlike the issue of gay marriage today), Roe would escalate the very conflict it was designed to quell.”

Many argue that if only the SCOTUS hadn’t handed down Roe v. Wade, by now most state legislatures would have at least partly legalized abortion, and the American people would have reached something like a consensus. Some even argue that most states were well on the way to legalizing abortion, and the Roe decision had the effect of making anti-choice opinion more entrenched. To which I say … hooey. In a large part of the country the abortion wars were hot and heavy before Roe v. Wade was decided, and I believe that in most of the South and Midwest abortion would never have been legalized.

The argument is that most citizens, even in the South and Midwest, support keeping abortion legal; therefore, state legislatures would have bowed to the will of the majority and legalized it. Maybe; maybe not. A pro-choice majority nationwide doesn’t seem to stop the U.S. Congress from passing anti-choice legislation. And geographic proximity does not make state legislatures more sensitive to the public will; if anything, most citizens know less about what their state legislature is up to than they do about what goes on in Washington. As long as social reactionaries are able to swing close elections (or convince politicians that they can), politicians will cater to them.

Press writes that, in Europe, nations “decriminalizing abortion on the grounds of health rather than rights” and left open the possibility that abortion could be re-criminalized through regular legislative channels. Hence, anti-abortion terrorism didn’t catch on there. But according to Scott Lemieux of Lawyers, Guns and Money,

What’s interesting about this is that Canada’s abortion policy–there are no legislative restrictions on abortion at all–was created by the judiciary, which struck down a national abortion law. While many people assert that judicial policy-making is much more “divisive” than when issues are resolved by legislatures, the court’s intervention is so popular 15 years after the fact that proposing even modest abortion legislation is electoral suicide. The lesson of this is obvious: people evaluate judicial policy-making the same way they evaluate other forms of policy-making. The idea that prior to Roe v. Wade American abortion policy was represented by a stable consensus is absurd, but a convenient myth for people who oppose abortion, because the legislative status quo was heavily slanted against the pro-choice majority. Abortion policy in the U.S. is divisive because it’s divisive; it doesn’t matter whether it’s courts or legislatures that do the policy-making.

I agree with Scott. I believe hysteria over abortion reflects something in American culture; the same something that keeps us fighting over evolution and other aspects of modernity long accepted in the rest of the civilized world. And later today or tomorrow I want to blog about the parallel between the abortion controversy and the abolition of slavery — and it’s not the parallel the Right sees, believe me.

See also: Other recent Mahablog posts on abortion; Blog for Choice.