I have always been intrigued by the similarities between the struggle for abolition and the struggle to end abortion.

When abolitionists in the North would argue the intrinsic value and worth of all people, Southerners would argue that the states held the right to manage their own affairs. Are states’ rights important? Absolutely. Are states important as counterbalances to overreach of federal power? Absolutely. But the fact is that black people are people, and their essential personhood trumps any state’s decree that they are only 3/5 of a person or that they are chattels, property, able to be bought and sold.

I once wrote a letter to a local politician who had taken a public proabortion stance. I argued for two pages on the personhood and value of an unborn child. She politely wrote back but ignored my points about the unborn child. Her argument? The rights of women. She wanted to assure me that women were competent to decide what to do with their own bodies. The baby did not figure in her line of reasoning, undoubtedly because the politician didn’t see the “fetus” or “conceptive tissue” as a baby. It was just a growth on a woman’s body and, therefore, it was the woman’s call on what to do about it.

There still is enough desire, apparently, in the minds and hearts of Americans to keep abortion legal. It is thought to be needed as a safeguard “for the health of the mother.” The emotion-laden emergencies of crisis pregnancy due to rape or incest are usually trotted out as key reasons why abortion needs to stay legal in all trimesters and in all circumstances, including partial-birth abortions. Though some estimate that 98% of abortions do not involve rape or incest, those two examples come up repeatedly.

Abortion in all three trimesters is still legal in America, and over one million pregnancies are ended in clinics each year in our country. The Chicago Sun-Times reports that half of all pregnancies in America are unintended, and 40% of those are aborted. It has not been a particularly hot election issue this year until Republican Representative Todd Akin, in a tough political fight for one of the Missouri Senate seats, offered his views in a television interview on August 19. Attempting to make the point that hardly any of the 1.2+ million abortions result from rape, he uttered the now infamous observation that “if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” An immediate furor arose, and he was beaten like a gong, not only by gleeful Democrats attempting to portray yet another Republican “assault against women,” but by quite a few in his own party who encouraged him to drop out of his Senate race. He has apologized profusely for “using the wrong words,” but as of this writing he is still running for office.

Meanwhile, in Chicago on July 20, a 24-year-old woman named Tonya Reaves went to the Planned Parenthood office on Michigan Ave. for an abortion. She underwent a D & E, but after 5 ½ hours she was still bleeding. Taken to a local hospital, she died seven hours later from “an uncontrollable bleed” because of a perforation from the botched abortion procedure. I guess abortion does not always benefit the health of the mother.