A Hard Topic, Without Apology

Dallasblog.com | Tara Ross:

“Americans pulled through the moral crisis of the 1800s, correctly deciding to recognize all American men and women as human beings, fully protected by the Constitution, regardless of their race. Indeed, today, we are rightfully shocked that anyone could ever have viewed slavery as defensible. Here’s hoping that a day will soon come when all Americans recognize the indefensibility of labeling one group of individuals as 'not persons,' allowing them to be killed, simply because they are younger and more vulnerable than the rest of us.”

Ed Cognoski responds:

Ms Ross is right that abortion is the great legal question of our age. Slavery isn't. No American today would defend slavery. Ms Ross does us all a disservice by implying that the issue of abortion is as simple as condemning slavery. If society ever reaches a consensus on abortion that fetuses, zygotes, fertilized eggs should have civil rights equal to hers and mine, then the parallels she wants us to see would be hard to deny. But that won't happen because her analogy is wrong.

Slavery has been with us since biblical times. Slowly, but surely, nations recognized its injustice and outlawed it. The United States was a relative latecomer and it required a great civil war, but it was finally stamped out here. There was a progression from slavery at one time being common, legal, and widely practiced to slavery being illegal and, where practiced still, at least denied.

Abortion does not have the same history at all. It's not the case that abortion was once common, legal and widely practiced, but is now slowly being suppressed as societies develop rule of law. In fact, it's more the opposite. As societies recognize and honor individual liberties, abortion rights are more likely to be recognized as well. At the same time, scientific advances make it possible to separate primitive religious notions of God breathing a soul into a fertilized egg from a more mature understanding of human development as a gradual process from sperm and egg to fully aware adult.

In short, as much as Tara Ross would like to equate the evil of slavery with the evil of abortion, the analogy fails because the difference between a superficial trait like skin color is very different from the difference between an adult human and a zygote. African-Americans could be forgiven if they are insulted by Ms Ross's sophistry.