Is Abortion Like SLavery?

I was recently Googling the words slavery and abortion and came up with 2,020,000 hits. All the pages I read were comparing abortion to slavery and saying why abortion is as evil as slavery (hint: both treat a person as a non-person).

It is interesting that the religion pushing hardest against abortion, the Southern Baptist, is also the religion that justified slavery based on the teachings of the Bible. Not only justified it, but made it morally wrong to oppose slavery.

Since the same religion is involved in both supporting slavery and opposing abortion because they say it is like slavery, my guess is that even to this day, they don't "get" why slavery was wrong. Although they did issue an apology for supporting slavery in 1995,

Why is slavery not like abortion?

1. With abortions, nobody is profiting by causing the misery of others.
2. Abortion is not a form of State sponsored terrorism against one race of people.
3. No babies are being taken away from their loving mother and sold as slaves.
4. No women are being used as "breeders" to produce "goods" to be sold.
5. Abortion does not promote rape, it tries to correct the results of rape.
6. No people are kidnapped on the streets or in their homes to be sold into abortion.

Now for some speculation on the the attitudes toward abortion back in the "good" old days of the Southern Baptists. African women knew how to do abortions, because they had been doing it for thousands of years and still do it in Africa. I am speculating that it must have galled the slave owners that they could not stop or even detect most of these abortions. The only time they could punish a black woman was if she decided to let the masters know she was pregnant, and then later on didn't produce the baby. As a pregnant slave, she would qualify for a little extra food, and was given a slightly less burdensome workload. Many women told their masters they were pregnant for these advantages, and carried on the pretense as long as possible before getting the inevitable whipping.

African women, as accustomed as they were to infants dying shortly after childbirth, did not consider the fetus to be a person even when the umbilical cord was cut. They would wait a while until they were more certain it would live. This contrasts with the current religious view that the first meeting of a sperm cell and an egg constitutes a "person" with all their protections and rights. Ironically, without the despised scientists, today's religious extremists would not have a clue that a sperm even met an egg, let alone when it happened.

Slave women used their ability to perform abortions to gain some control over their lives, and this was maybe the only thing that the slaves ever successfully pulled off that the slave owners could not find any way to control through terror and violence. The slave women had created a bargaining chip, and used it with some finesse. Even to admit that the slave women were intelligent enough to get away with this scam undermined the current slave owner view that slaves were less intelligent than the white owners. So I am assuming this game was tacitly understood but never clearly stated. In 1808, the importing of any new African slaves was prohibited, this gave the slave women even more power. Which I am again going to assume they knew, even though the slave owners took great pains to prevent the slaves from learning anything. I would bet that that the slave women figured out that no new African slaves were being imported. they would know that this made their breeding work more valuable to the slave owners. If you don't think that African women understand the law of supply and demand, go shopping at a market in Sierra Leone.

Now this brings us to today, when the original slave owners religion is trying to make abortion the most important issue for American voters. You have to wonder whether it isn't a little bit of payback for their impotence in the old days. In my opinion, that is the real connection between slavery and abortion.

If the anti-abortion crowd was actually interested in saving lives, about a million infants die each year in Africa, along with 250,000 mothers in childbirth (in Sierra Leone, one mother in eight). It has been estimated that about a billion dollars a year would save 800,000 lives a year in Africa. That's equal to all the abortions in one year in the USA.