AHA touts the parallel between abortion and slavery. If slavery could be abolished, so can abortion. But even though there are moral similarities, there are crucial differences.
Most folks didn't own slaves. It was basically an upper class thing. So most folks didn't have a direct stake in slavery. Just the ruling class, which was a tiny minority of the overall population. And in America (by the 19C), it was regionally confined.
In principle, it's a lot easier to abolish something that most folks never had or never use. You're not taking anything away from them. That's cost-free.
To the extent that there was a perceived stake in slavery, that's because an agrarian economic is labor intensive, and slave labor is a source of cheap labor.
Mind you, even from an economic standpoint, that's unnecessary. To begin with, slaves need to be fed and sheltered. So it's not free. Moreover, slaves are motivated to do the least they can get away with. So even apart from moral considerations, there are more efficient alternatives.
By contrast, there's a huge demand for abortion–national wide, from top-to-bottom. Many people want access to abortion at all social strata. And that includes a significant voting block.
That makes it far harder to abolish abortion. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try. But the facile parallel between slavery and abortion is politically disanalogous.
A better comparison would be Prohibition. That failed because popular demand was too great. Same thing with hard drugs. We can't eradicate substance abuse. The best we can do is to minimize it as much as possible.
Regarding slavery in the American South I believe there a social component that is being ignored. The social makeup of a region consists of a relatively small number of oligarchs, in this case the slave owning planters and a majority group of what can almost be described as subsistence farmers, the existence of slavery stabilized the social order to the benefit of the rich planters because the non-slave owning majority did not see themselves as being on the bottom of the social and economic order thus giving them a stake in preserving the status quo. It is the only compelling reason I can see to explain why the vast majority in the South were willing to sacrifice so much to preserve a system that did not benefit them at all
ReplyDelete" It is the only compelling reason I can see to explain why the vast majority in the South were willing to sacrifice so much to preserve a system that did not benefit them at all"
DeleteWhich might give one pause to consider alternative explanations; to wit that perhaps slavery as an institution wasn't the only or even primary reason for the Confederacy.
To the original point of the post, the disanalogy is well stated. Rather than "abolitionists" the AHA folks are much more akin to "prohibitionists", except prohibitionists actually had a political platform and power within existing governmental structures.
This leaves AHA sort of where it is today, as a loose coalition of protestors. "Protest Human Abortion" doesn't sound nearly as righteous though.