Hail, all 3.7 readers still receiving notifications for this blog! This is a bit unusual, but recently someone asked me about guest posting here and I said--why not? I've known the author of this post for a long time, and while she is not me, Miss Frenchhouse has some interesting things to say. Turning it over:
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Shortly after the Dobbs v. Jackson opinion was leaked in May, I got into an argument on social media about slavery and abortion. Now, I know what you're thinking, arguing with people on social media is an exercise in futility and only increases anger and frustration on both sides, especially when you are talking about hot button issues. Sometimes I can't help myself. It's good for people to hear a dissenting opinion from time to time and in this case, I actually learned something.
It all started when I happened upon some individuals insisting that the Confederacy was as bad as, if not worse than, the Third Reich. I certainly don't condone slavery, but after a considerable amount of Southern bashing, I felt obliged to wade in and defend the CSA against the Nazi's. I pointed out that while slavery was bad, genocide was worse. This had predictable results. I brought up the criminal code and the fact that while murder is punishable by life imprisonment or death, human trafficking and slavery has a maximum penalty of 20 years. Under international law, holding captives or prisoners of war is permissible, but killing the people you captured would be a war crime. On a very basic level, I think most people you ask on the street would rather be enslaved than shot dead or gassed in an oven. This is not to say that slavery is not an evil, it is just a lesser evil.
All of this got me nowhere. What emerged over the course of our discussion was that these people found it impossible to admit that slavery was not the worst evil. Everyone I was speaking with claimed to be from the US and presumably spent some number of years in the American public school system and what became increasingly clear was that the Confederacy and slavery had been so demonized that even Hitler killing 11 million was considered a saint next to Jefferson Davis. I was accused of being un-American for not valuing freedom above everything else. In their minds slavery is the 9th circle of hell and killing people is somewhere up around gluttony and lust.
Eventually we reached a stalemate and moved on to the much less contentious topic of abortion. Unsurprisingly, everyone else was in favor of abortion and I found myself in the hot seat again. What was enlightening to me, however, was how closely they connected abortion to slavery. They didn't maintain that a baby was a clump of cells, or that conception did not begin at birth, or even that a baby prior to birth had less personhood than the mother. Instead the argument was that a baby holds the mother hostage for nine months. Some mothers would probably extend that term to 18 years. But if you believe that slavery is the worst evil, then it is permissible to commit murder to free yourself. Most of the people I was talking to accepted that abortion was murder (perhaps somewhat reluctantly) but also held that murder is allowable if the mother felt enslaved by her child. And there is a certain amount of logic to that if you haven't correctly ranked your evils.
The abortion argument ended in a stalemate as well, but it brought out a side of the pro-abortion position that I hadn't considered before. For some people it's not about proving that life begins at conception, but more basically about degrees of evil and how do you know what the worst evil is and when can you commit a lesser evil to prevent a worse evil. It has to do with what is true freedom and how do we achieve it. I think increasingly the prolife argument is shifting from proving that yes, there is a little human in there to educating people on basic morals, ethics, and logic. I didn't win this argument and I didn't really expect to, but maybe I planted a seed, maybe one of those people will start thinking that maybe there are worse things than being a slave.
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