The abortion-slavery comparison

Two days before last month’s March for Life, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos spoke at Colorado Christian University’s annual president’s dinner. The event, which was held at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, was closed to the press, but a reporter for the Colorado Times Recorder news site attended and wrote that DeVos compared the fight against slavery with the battle against abortion.

“[President Abraham Lincoln], too, contended with the pro-choice arguments of his day,” she said. “They suggested that a state’s choice to be slave or to be free had no moral question in it.” Two days later, The Washington Post reported on a wave of criticism against DeVos for making the comparison. “To compare anything to slavery is to devalue America’s greatest crime and those who endured. Repulsive,” U.S. Rep. Katherine M. Clark, D-Mass., tweeted.

DeVos is not the only one to make the abortion-slavery analogy. Clarke Forsythe, senior counsel at Americans United for Life, said “reams of scholarship” exist that support the parallel. DeVos’ comparison, he explained, stems from the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858, in which Lincoln, seeking a U.S. Senate seat as a Republican in Illinois, criticized incumbent Democratic Sen. Stephen Douglas for not taking a position on slavery.

“[Douglas] contends that whatever community wants slaves has a right to have them,” Lincoln said in one of the debates in October 1858. “So they have—if it is not a wrong. But if it is a wrong, he cannot say people have a right to do wrong.”

Because slavery was wrong, Lincoln argued, the choice to participate in the institution should not have been an option. Douglas emphasized the choice of slavery to avoid having to make a moral judgment.

“Pro-choice is a dodge, which is what Lincoln said about slavery,” Forsythe said. “And the same dodge is used to defend abortion.”

Defenders of slavery in Lincoln’s time argued the South had come to rely on the slaves for its economic prosperity. Supporters of abortion argue that a woman’s ability to kill her child is essential to equal opportunity in American society. That reasoning propped up the Supreme Court’s 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey—a decision that reaffirmed the court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, Forsythe noted.

But recent data on the abortion rate and female unemployment show the error of the Casey decision. The unemployment rate among women fell from 5.5 percent in 1990, to 3.6 percent in 2019. Meanwhile, the abortion rate also dropped. “Both lines are trending downward,” Forsythe said. “I frankly don’t know of another phenomenon that so directly contradicts the notion that women need abortion to be successful. … According to the Supreme Court, those two trends can’t coexist.”

Justin Dyer, a politics professor at the University of Missouri and author of Slavery, Abortion, and the Politics of Constitutional Meaning, said he sees other commonalities between abortion and slavery. But he also recognized that a comparison between these two “unique historical evils” has the potential to offend people outside of the pro-life movement.

“We need to be prudent and careful in how we make the analogy,” Dyer said, noting that some people think it is denigrating to the enslaved to compare them to “fetuses,” whom they do not see as human. “That was never meant to be the analogy.”

Still fighting

Baby Tinslee Lewis spent her first birthday on Feb. 1 at Cook Children’s Medical Center in Fort Worth, Texas, where she has lived her entire life. On top of her rare heart defect, chronic lung disease, and severe high blood pressure, Tinslee went into respiratory arrest in July. Since then, she’s required a ventilator and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, in which a machine oxygenates the blood in place of the heart and lungs. Doctors had to put her on paralyzing drugs to keep her from disconnecting her tubes. Three days after her birthday, a Texas appeals court heard arguments in a case that will decide whether the hospital can remove Tinslee’s life support.

Under a 1999 Texas law that stipulates how doctors and families make end-of-life decisions in difficult cases, the hospital has a right to withdraw life support if the doctors and hospital ethics committee agree that Tinslee’s condition can’t be improved. Cook Children’s told Tinslee’s family back in October it would take her off of life support, and, according to the law, the family had 10 days to try to transfer Tinslee to another hospital. At least 20 facilities turned them down.

Tinslee’s mother, Trinity Lewis, has won temporary court orders to prolong her daughter’s life. She insists the girl is not suffering, but physicians say she is. Texas Alliance for Life and several other pro-life groups have come out in support of the law that would allow the hospital to end Tinslee’s medical treatment. They filed an amicus brief defending the law as a good compromise between the rights of the family to make end-of-life decisions and the hospital’s right to end treatment when doctors see it as extending suffering rather than offering a remedy. A different group, Texas Right to Life, represents the family and has enlisted support from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton, both Republicans. —L.H.

Abortion expansion in Louisville

The state of Kentucky granted Planned Parenthood a license to perform abortions after pro-life advocates worked for years to prevent the issuance. The facility in Louisville applied for the license in 2015 under Gov. Steve Beshear, a Democrat. He left office in December 2015 before his administration could issue the license. When Republican Matt Bevin replaced him as governor, his administration denied the application.

According to the inspector general at the time, the facility did not have the legally required arrangements with a nearby hospital and ambulance service to help patients in case of an emergency. Bevin also accused the facility of performing abortions without a license, although Planned Parenthood claimed it had done so with the previous governor’s permission. A yearslong court battle followed.

In 2018, a federal judge struck down the law that required abortion centers to have transfer agreements with hospitals. Beshear’s son Andy, also a Democrat, ousted Bevin from the governor’s mansion and took office in December. With a new administration and without the protection of the old law, the state let the Louisville facility have a license that will allow it to perform abortions beginning in March. Planned Parenthood joins EMW Women’s Surgical Center, also in Louisville, as the state’s second abortion facility. —L.H.​

‘Not guilty,’ but not innocent

After two weeks in court and eight hours of deliberations, a Belgian jury decided on Jan. 31 to acquit three doctors accused of performing unlawful euthanasia on a troubled 38-year-old woman. Belgian law allows euthanasia if a patient with an incurable disease is suffering severe pain and asks repeatedly to die.

Tine Nys, who struggled with depression, heroin addiction, and suicide attempts, requested euthanasia in 2009. A psychiatrist also diagnosed her with autism. After her lethal injection in April 2010, one of her sisters argued that the doctors had not given Nys sufficient advice or treatment before ending her life. The sister, Sophie Nys, filed an official complaint, and the doctors faced the possibility of life in prison for poisoning Tine Nys. But the jury decided they acted within the law.

The Nys case was the first of its kind in Belgium. It opens the door to the expansion of euthanasia as physicians become more confident the law will protect them. A lawyer for the Nys family called the ruling “disappointing” and said the doctors’ treatment of Nys was “very sad.” —L.H.