Arguments for slavery mirror those on abortion

By Donna Volmerding
This is a reprint of an article first published in the August 1989 issue of The Fort Wayne Lutheran.
One of the most heated arguments in our country stems from the Supreme Court decision of Roe vs. Wade, an issue that has since divided our country into warring factions. Since the right to an abortion was made legal in 1973, I have felt this issue to be a parallel one to that of slavery. Granted, the biggest difference is the fact that one enslaves human life, the other is its ultimate destruction. But in so many other ways, I find several similarities.
Particularly in the 1850s, slavery was an issue so hot it was already threatening to divide the country into open warfare. These arguments to defend slavery mirror those used today to defend abortion:
• You have no right to impose your moral beliefs on me. If you think slavery is wrong, don’t own any slaves, but don’t tell me what to do.
• Slavery rights are simply a matter of freedom of choice. I have the right to choose slavery, and you have the right not to.
• Are you willing to take care of thousands of freed slaves who have no job skills, education or means of making a living?
• Do you want to destroy the South and an entire way of life? Do you want to see hundreds, perhaps thousands, of families thrown off their property because they can’t make it without the help of slaves?
• Slaves aren’t really people; they’re just property. (Unfortunately, the Supreme Court fanned the flames to this belief with the Dred Scott decision of 1857, declaring that no black — free or slave — could claim United States citizenship. The decision also stated that Congress could not prohibit slavery in United States territories.)
• It’s my property, and I have a right to do with my own property what I see fit.
Just as we have today concerning abortion, there were many violent outbursts and conflicts between pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces. Because the country was divided almost equally, there seemed to be no chance for compromise; either one believed that slavery should be allowed to exist, or one believed it was morally reprehensible and should not exist in any state of the Union.
Abortion is another “all or none” decision. Those who feel abortion to be morally wrong cannot, in good conscience, say it is all right for someone to take the life of an unborn child growing in another’s body. Nor could an anti-slavery person say it was all right for someone else to own slaves as long as he or she personally did not.
While the lines of conflict are not so clearly drawn as they were during the Civil War, we have a modern day “civil war” brewing as federal and state legislatures hash out this issue and other life issues, such as embryonic stem-cell research, cloning, etc.
Slavery, abortion and other life questions are moral issues with moral consequences, not mere matters of private convenience. I think we all need to quietly sort out on our own, away from the screeching crowds, how we feel about such explosive issues. More importantly, we need to ask our God what He would have us do. We have to sift through so much diatribe to ask ourselves the same question that many devout Christian people 170 years ago asked themselves about slavery: “What is morally correct? And how would God want us to respond?”