Last Friday Robert Dear allegedly opened fire at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, leaving three people dead and several others injured. In the last week, we have seen pro-abortion media outlets, individuals, and Planned Parenthood itself use this attack as a new PR tactic.
This is simply another weapon in the arsenal of celebrities and reporters who regularly go to bat for the abortionists. It follows Lena Dunham’s Planned Parenthood abortionist costume at Halloween (forceps and syringes not included) and Katie Couric’s recent softball tour of an abortuary (baby parts, perforated women, and dead babies not included).
Before Thanksgiving, abortionist Willie J. Parker wrote in The New York Times how he was inspired by the Bible’s life-saving “Good Samaritan” story when he decided to set aside his moral objection to abortion and kill the unborn in Mississippi and Alabama.
But it is perhaps most disturbing, ironic, and contradictory that voices at Salon and “The View” compared pro-life advocates to slave owners. Media outlets and some of the public will devour and regurgitate these ideas as truth, while staying in the dark about how the Left’s glamourizing of abortion and scapegoating of pro-lifers have disturbing similarities to arguments for slavery and against slavery abolitionists in the nineteenth century.
Historically, a slave has been defined as “one who is the property of, and entirely subject to, another person, whether by capture, purchase, or birth; a servant completely divested of freedom and personal rights.” Before the Civil War, it was common to see slave owners purchase the rights to control other people. Slave ownership increased profit on plantations and stimulated the Southern economy.
Substitute “abortion” and “women’s liberation” for “slave ownership” and “the Southern economy,” respectively, and things start to look mighty familiar.
Abortion as a Three-Fifths Compromise
Almost 230 years ago, the Constitutional Convention decided slaves would be worth three-fifths of a person when deciding population counts for representation. While this certainly harmed the slave trade when elections came around, it also created a systemic mindset that reduced the innate human value of each slave.
Our government today sanctions Planned Parenthood: a business model that literally fractions and rations out the body parts of aborted children.
The three-fifths compromise of the nineteenth century did for slavery what Roe v. Wade did for abortion. The growing field of reproductive technology has reduced the human child to transferrable and purchasable property much like the system of colonization reduced the unpaid human being to a dispensable machine. By treating the unborn child like property, our healthcare system can be selective in choosing when and how it will value life.
Property always implies some level of value. We see this in the instability of abortion and fetal homicide laws. In 2013, a woman tried to criminalize her husband for tricking her into swallowing abortifacients. The only thing standing in the way of a criminal offense was the fact that under Roe. v. Wade the child was not viable and could be legally aborted.
Similarly, a woman was acquitted of a charge under the “manslaughter statute” for recklessly causing the death of her daughter. The court ruled it wasn’t murder because the 36- week-old preemie was not yet born, and thus not a human, when the accident took place—even though the baby died out of the womb a few days later.
The Market for Humans
Just as the economic benefit of slavery provided slave owners with the logical reason to trade human beings for profit, so does the “women’s health” mantra provide abortionists with a physical reason for women to trade their children for peace of mind.
Contrary to pro-abortion arguments, it is indeed the pro-life movement that re-enacts the abolitionist movement. Pro-lifers in pregnancy centers are today’s members of an “underground railroad” for women with unplanned pregnancies. In this daily reenactment, the unborn child is the slave, and the confines of the womb leave the unborn child in a state of dependency, not unlike the confines of skin color that were used to deny African-Americans independence.
Attesting to the issue of in vitro fertilization technology, Robert Oscar Lopez of California State University-Northridge told LifeSiteNews, “It is money and legal possession that forces the child into an emotional relationship, a kind of captivity, under the authority of two adults who have purchased the right to control this person…this is the transformation of human beings into chattel in a way we haven’t seen since before slavery was abolished.”
This transformation is not just a figurative assumption. The abortion transaction is colored with words copied-and-pasted out of the “slave” definition:
- “One who is the property of”: Fetuses are “products of conception” until they are full-grown “products of birth.”
- “Entirely subject to, another person, whether by capture, purchase, or birth…”: the unborn child’s life is subject to the whim of the mother—the woman trades her child and pays for the abortion, but leaves the clinic with a sense of freedom.
- “…a servant completely divested of freedom and personal rights”: there is no freedom and no personal rights in the womb; “birth” is the ambiguous moment that a child can claim “freedom and personal rights” equal to the mother’s.
Government-Sanctioned Slavery In and Out of the Womb
It seems intuitive that owning another human being denies his humanity, but in today’s culture, half of America struggles to see the basic right to life that is denied every unborn child in abortion clinics. The most radical pro-abortion advocates now claim it is not the abortionist who is to blame, but rather the white, male conservative politician who is scapegoated as an antebellum slave owner.
Chauncey DeVega of Salon insisted that “conservatives who want to limit women’s reproductive rights and control over their own bodies have more in common with the whites who ran the slave labor rape and charnel camps of the American South.” Likewise, on “The View” Raven Simone quipped that conservative lawmakers are “doing the exact same thing that the slave owners did.”
If this argument is true, then abortionists and Planned Parenthood are comparable to abolitionists and Frederick Douglas. The leftist narrative makes the abortionist into a heroine: swooping in and saving women from Washington. Dunham’s Planned Parenthood lab coat was not supposed to be scary; for leftists, the Planned Parenthood logo is cool and iconic.
In reality, abortionists are the inverse of compassionate. An abortion clinic in Mobile, Alabama, was caught providing two abortions to a 14-year-old minor in a four-month period, and a state employee who explained this to LifeSiteNews asked that coverage of the situation be framed to protect the Department of Public Health from “a lot of attacks from the anti-abortion people.”
Government employees disguise the government’s complicity in abortion transactions. By funding Planned Parenthood, our government has normalized an economic process fully dependent upon processing human bodies. The response of the liberal left has been to dress up the economics of abortion as a necessary “good” for women’s rights.
Is There Any Value in Human Life?
It took an abolitionist like Frederick Douglass to voice the rights of dehumanized African-Americans, but in a congressional hearing Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards did the work for an entire industry already falling on its own forceps. Their business model is indefensible against claims of inhumane profiting. Devaluing the unborn child is necessary to justify abortion. How else could parents decide to leave both their money and their child at Planned Parenthood’s doorstep?
Dunham should be ashamed of dressing up as a modern-day slaveholder. While her costume may resemble a knight in shining armor to radical pro-choice advocates, it makes no reference to the unborn children that are part of daily transactions in an abortion clinic. Donning an abortionist’s scrubs and gloves is not going to change the oppression the unborn child must endure in an abortionist’s clinic any more than a smile would make a slave feel any better under the whip.
