New Underground Railroad and the Old: Abolitionists' Perspectives on Abortion, The

Human Life Review, Fall 2007 by Quinn, John F

When discussing abortion, activists often draw parallels with slavery to support their views. For abortion supporters, legalizing abortion was a move to emancipate women and thus the Roe v. Wade decision should be seen as a modem-day analogue to the Thirteenth Amendment. No doubt with this understanding in mind, a group of New Yorkers have banded together to provide what they consider to be a "new underground railroad": They open their homes for a night or two to women from other states who come to Manhattan seeking late-term abortions.1

Some pro-choice scholars seem to see a natural link between these two phenomena. Lawrence Lader, who founded the National Association for the Repeal of the Abortion Laws (NARAL) in 1970, began his publishing career in 1961 with a book on abolitionism: The Bold Brahmins: New England's War against Slavery, 1831-1863. Five years later, he produced an influential work on abortion.2 In subsequent years, he completed books supporting population control, sterilization, and the legalization of an abortion pill, RU486. Similarly, David Garrow began his career as a historian in the 1980s with a prize-winning book chronicling Martin Luther King's role in the civilrights movement. In the 1990s he produced a lengthy account of the legal cases that led up to Roe v. Wade?

Opponents of abortion allude to slavery just as often. For them, the two issues are joined because both practices deny human beings the right to live their lives to their full potential. Two of the more notable proponents of this view are Republican politicians: Lewis Lehrman and Alan Key es. Lehrman ran for governor of New York in 1982 and narrowly lost to Mario Cuomo; Keyes was a presidential candidate in 2000. Both men have argued that Roe is the 20th-century analogue to DredScott, the Supreme Court's 1857 decision affirming slavery and denying Scott's claims to citizenship. Pope John Paul II drew the same sorts of parallels when he visited St. Louis in 1999. Appearing near the courthouse where the Scott case was first heard, the Pope denounced the Court's decision for declaring "an entire class of human beings ... outside the boundaries of the national community and the Constitution's protection. Today the conflict is between a culture that affirms, cherishes and celebrates the gift of life, and a culture that seeks to declare entire groups of human beings ... to be outside the boundaries of legal protection."4

What anti-abortion forces have failed to do thus far, though, is publicize the abolitionists' attitudes towards abortion. While abolitionists were of course principally focused on ending slavery and promoting racial equality, many were also involved in campaigns for women's suffrage and temperance, and a number worked to oppose abortion and prostitution as well.5

Abolitionism's Advent

American abolitionism dates back to the early 1830s, when some opponents of slavery decided that the efforts then being made to gradually eliminate slavery were simply wrongheaded: If slavery were an evil, then it had to be rooted out at once. The leading spokesman for this view was a young Boston journalist, William Lloyd Garrison. Raised a Baptist, Garrison had embraced a more radical "perfectionist" creed as an adult. Convinced that Gospel principles had to be applied to society as a whole, he called for immediate freedom for the slaves, sobriety for the nation, and peace for the world. While committed to many reforms, Garrison was first and foremost committed to abolitionism.

In 1831 Garrison established The Liberator to champion the abolitionist cause. Garrison demonstrated his militant mood in the newspaper's inaugural issue: "I am in earnest-I will not equivocate-I will not excuse-I will not retreat an inch-and I WILL BE HEARD."6 By the mid-1830s, Garrison and his allies were confronting the slaveholders head-on. They printed antislavery pamphlets and shipped them by the thousands to the slaveholding states. Tactics such as these infuriated most Southern whites and many Northern whites as well. Indeed, Garrison was almost lynched by an angry Boston mob in 1835.7

Through the 1840s, abolitionists made little headway as the country was led by three slave-holding presidents in succession: John Tyler, James Polk, and Zachary Taylor. Not until the 1850s would a sizeable segment of Northem opinion start to move in an anti-slavery direction. Many were disturbed by two pieces of legislation enacted in the early 1850s to appease slaveholders. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 made it easier for slave hunters to catch escaped slaves and return them to their masters, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 raised the possibility that all new territories might allow slavery. These laws angered many in the Northern states and led to the creation of an anti-slavery party, the Republicans.8

Crusading Physicians

While most Americans were caught up in the increasingly rancorous debate over slavery in the 1850s, a small group of physicians were devoting themselves to the abortion issue. In 1855, Dr. David Storer, a professor at Harvard Medical School, delivered a much-publicized lecture rejecting the widely held notion that abortion was acceptable if carried out before "quickening," when the mother felt movement in her womb. He assured his listeners that fetal life began at conception and should never be terminated unless the mother's life is endangered.