Is Abortion the 21st Century Equivalent of Slavery?

In the ancient world, we know, slavery was ubiquitous. In They Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger write about people in England going to their lord and placing themselves in slavery when starvation threatened. And they write about the Vikings sailing up the rivers in the autumn, plundering the harvest, killing the men, and selling the women and children into slavery at the main slave market in northwest Europe: Dublin. That was in the year 1000 AD, or CE if that’s your preference.

The remarkable thing is not that slavery existed in 1800. The remarkable thing is that it seems to have died out in NW Europe. The remarkable thing is that there were people like William Wilberforce who had organized to stamp it out in the rest of the world.

And stamp it out they did, by ending the trans-Atlantic slave trade and ultimately provoking the great Civil War in the United States that ended slavery on these fruited plains.

The fierce opposition to VP candidate Sarah Palin raises the question as to whether abortion is the new slavery.

Because it is clear that the fact of Sarah Palin’s life, with its unrestained fecundity and its celebration of “special-needs” children, is an offense to our pro-choice liberal friends.

Sarah Palin’s life raises again the issue of abortion. And the fact is that the question of abortion must be decided by the people. It is not the job of the elite Supreme Court to issue a ukase, as it did in 1973. It is up to the people to determine, by political action in its largest sense, when the fetus carried by a woman becomes a life protected by the law.

When women emerged, in the 20th century, from lives completely circumscribed by child-rearing and domestic management, to lives lived more in the public square, a new era began.

This new era opened the question of What Women Want. What does a woman liberated from constant child-bearing want? Feminists like Simone de Beauvoir said that they wanted careers and creative originality and liberation from the domestic sphere. It was natural for upper-class women like her to think that way.

But Beauvoir’s feminism only appealed to an upper-class elite.

Women do want to work, usually with people, outside the home. But few women want male-type careers. And most women want lives fully integrated with children, marriage, family, and the community of women.

Modern western society has just begun to address this question.

If children are important then the issue of abortion is important as well. And it is not exhuasted by the notion that a woman should have absolute control of her body. Nobody in society has absolute control of their body, just as nobody in society has absolute control of their children.

Somehow, some way, in the coming decades, we will come to a resolution of the abortion question. But it won’t be pretty.