Applying Lincoln's Logic to the Abortion Debate

On December 6, 1865, the 13^th amendment to the U.S. constitution was ratified and with it came the formal abolishment of slavery in this country. It states, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude…shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” This amendment was especially significant considering that just eight years prior in 1857 the Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford that blacks were property and non-persons.

Even earlier than this, on July 1, 1854, Lincoln wrote this small fragment to address some of the popular arguments but forward by pro-slavery choice advocates who argued that whites should have the right to enslave blacks based on color, intellect, or interest:

“You say A is white and B is black.  It is color, then: the lighter having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule, you are to be a slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own. You do not mean color exactly?—You mean the whites are intellectually the superiors of the blacks, and therefore, have the right to enslave them?  Take care again. By this rule, you are to be a slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own. But, say you, it is a question of interest; and, if you can make it your interest, you have the right to enslave another. Very well. And if he can make it his interest, he has the right to enslave you.”

Read that again. The importance of Lincoln’s logic should not be overlooked. Lincoln realized that if you try to establish human rights or personhood by appealing to a set of arbitrary degreed properties which carry no moral weight or significance, properties such as color and intellect which none of us share equally, then you end up undermining human rights for everyone.

Did God Condone Slavery?

(Stand to Reason) Amy Hall

Since God regulated slavery in the Old Testament, does this automatically mean that He approves of slavery? Just as some answer "yes" today, the Pharisees also jumped to a similarly wrong conclusion in Matthew 19 when they asked Jesus a question:

"Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason at all?" And [Jesus] answered and said, "Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'?...What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate."

They said to Him, "Why then did Moses command to give her a certificate of divorce and send her away?" He said to them, "Because of your hardness of heart Moses permitted you to divorce your wives; but from the beginning it has not been this way."

Notice what happens here. The Pharisees come with a legal question about which regulations ought to govern divorce, and Jesus responds in a very unexpected way, saying there shouldn't be any divorce. The Pharisees are immediately confused. "But how could it be that there shouldn't be any divorce if God regulated it? Doesn't that mean He thinks it's hunky-dory as long as it's done right?"

Jesus makes it clear that this is not the case.

The Pharisees had missed something very important about law: there's a difference between what's legal and what's moral--between the practical need to deal with reality and the existence of an ideal. The Law was not meant to be an exhaustive list of everything moral and immoral. It functioned as every national set of laws functions--as reasonably enforceable rules to govern their society. And the Pharisees had made the mistake of focusing on merely staying within the regulations instead of going beyond them to seek the goodness of God's ideal.

As with divorce, the same was true for slavery. The rules regulating slavery were added "because the hardness of the hearts" of humanity had created a situation where slavery existed and served certain functions in their societies, "but it was not that way from the beginning." In the beginning, there was human dignity and equal value resulting from the fact that every single individual--young or old, rich or poor, royal or commoner--was made in the image of God. But after the Fall, the ideal society was out the window, and God had to deal with what was actually there.

Deeply ingrained cultural patterns don't change overnight, but must be redeemed over time. Slavery was intricately woven into the cultures of the day, so, as with divorce (neither being the situation God desired), God made rules to keep the evil of the practice to a minimum. For example, if you kidnapped someone and made him a slave, you were put to death. If a slave escaped from his master for whatever reason, you were not allowed to return him. If you harmed so much as a tooth of your slave, you had to let him go free--in other words, no person was allowed to keep a slave if he mistreated him or her. Slavery in Western countries would never even have gotten off the ground had these rules been followed; the first rule alone would have prevented it.

Regulating a bad situation is not a foreign concept to us. We see some people using this same principle today regarding abortion. They say it's too much a part of our society at the moment to enforce a complete ban, though abortion is immoral, so they support regulating certain things about it for now in order to reduce the evil of it (banning only partial-birth abortions, or third trimester abortions, or regulating the issues surrounding abortion, for example). That doesn't mean either that they think abortion is fine or that they intend for the situation to remain in that same state forever.

God regulated divorce, and yet He explicitly said He hates it, so the regulation of the practice did not mean He condoned it. Therefore, one cannot assume that God's regulation of slavery meant God condoned slavery.

All that said (and much more could be said), the question remains: If God opposed slavery and would need to redeem the culture from it slowly over a long period of time, why not just prevent it from ever existing in the first place? The same question could be asked of all suffering that results from human sin--why does God allow it? Since the Fall, suffering has served an important purpose in this world. God's highest goal for us is not our comfort, but our more intimate knowledge of, appreciation of, and love for Him. The existence of suffering around us has long been used by God to remind us of the ugliness of sin--a physical illustration of the fact that our hearts are far from God's perfection, and a reminder of our desperate need for Him and His mercy.

Slavery has served this same purpose. Freedom is God's ideal --the kind of freedom found in the Garden at the beginning before the Fall (that is, the freedom to follow God openly and completely, without hindrance). And God's rescuing the Israelites from slavery served for them (and for all generations) as a physical illustration of a spiritual truth. Because they understood the meaning of physical slavery, the invisible truth of their spiritual slavery to sin and their need for redemption could be made visible for all to see and understand. And because they knew God orchestrated their release from slavery, they knew not only that slavery--physical or spiritual--was not the ideal, but that He cared about their condition and desired to release them from it.

The existence of slavery in the world taught God's people both the condition of their own hearts and a crucial truth about their great, good God. This is why it was Christians in the 18th and 19th century who not only worked to see that others were freed from their spiritual slavery, but who also led the way in following God's desire to free others from physical slavery.

As with the other suffering of history, God did not prevent slavery from ever existing, though He could have. But this was neither random, senseless, nor in vain. Just as Joseph said of his own suffering as a slave that "[they] meant it for evil, but God meant it for good," slavery did not pass through this world without accomplishing a purpose even greater than the suffering.

Abortion and Human Rights

(Stand to Reason) Greg Koukl

Let me ask you a question. Are you against slavery? Do you believe that the issue of slavery is a moral position? Are laws legislating that particular moral position appropriate? What you've said is that it's appropriate to legislate certain moral issues and that you'd be in favor of that. The economic issue would actually be on the side of the South because slavery is what propped up the economic system of the South. When slaves were emancipated it gutted them of their economic force. Let's remove the economic argument.

Based solely on morality, are you willing to say that the moral issue of slavery should be enforced simply as a moral issue? This is a very important point. Many people have offered the objection that we should not force a particular morality in the issue of abortion. My questions are very pointed and leading, and they were simply to make the point that virtually everybody who makes that kind of objection actually does believe that there are cases in which morality should be legislated. We talked about the obvious issue of slavery because there is the human rights issue that is at stake.My encouragement to you and anyone else who would espouse the same position is to understand that the pro-life side is arguing this issue on the basis of human rights. The question for us is whether the unborn child is a human being that has inalienable rights in the same way that a black is a human being that has inalienable rights. If that is the case, it is just as appropriate for us to legislate on the abortion issue as it is in the slavery issue. It's not just a casual parallel because in 1859 Judge Taney on the Supreme Court handed down the Dred Scott decision that declared that black people were not human beings and did not deserve protection under the law. That was a Supreme Court decision that was later overturned by The Emancipation Proclamation.

The point I'm making is that if you don't address this issue on a human rights basis then you're not addressing it on the basis that pro-lifers are addressing it. The questions should be asked about the appropriateness of abortion or about laws against abortion based on a human rights issue. To be honest with you, I and virtually every other pro-lifer will abandon the fight if the unborn child is not a human being worthy of being protected. We're not interested in getting into people's bedrooms and telling them how to have sex and how to live. We're not interested in restricting choices because we are bigoted and want to make people's lives miserable. We're interested in human rights just like those who argued against slavery.

If you are to reject my position on abortion, that's your prerogative. I respect your right to do that. But I would encourage you to engage intellectually the real critical issue: is the unborn child a human being? If you can answer for yourself with some rationality that there is no reason to believe that this is a human being, then I think you've justified your position. But I don't think the simple objection that it's not appropriate for one person to force their morality on someone else is ultimately legitimate. When questioned a little bit you acknowledge that that's not a valid way of approaching human rights issues.

What about cases of rape and incest?

I don't say that it's permissible in those cases. I think you're pointing out an inconsistency in this discussion that is very valid. I agree entirely and this is why I do not hold that abortion should be allowed in those cases. This really demonstrates how important the question of the human rights of the child is because it compels us to certain conclusions. It removes from us the liberty of making ad hoc decisions based on our emotions. We must approach this in a disciplined way as a transcendent human rights issue. If we don't do that we are not doing the issue justice.

But what I don't want anybody to do is to mistakenly frame this issue as one of choice. It is not an issue of choice any more than slavery was an issue of choice. It's not an issue of what a woman can do with her body. Frankly, a woman can't do what she wants with her own body and neither can men. Laws restrict those freedoms given the right set of circumstances.

The issue to be considered here is the issue of human rights. It's unfortunate that the press and certain people arguing for one position have framed the question differently because they have missed the entire point. During the slavery debate, both in this country and at the turn of the century in England, the issues were framed in the same way: choice, the government shouldn't be in the position of legislating morality, the government shouldn't tell us how to run our private lives. Yet there a human being clearly was at issue. Even then when you had a living, breathing human being standing there staring back, they still could argue that way. I'm not a bit surprised that it could be done with an unseen infant that is growing out of sight in the womb of its mother.

Anyway that's my personal challenge to you to rethink this issue in a different fashion.

Keyes vs. Obama: Death Penalty and Abortion

Unfortunately, Keyes did not get a chance to respond to Obama's last statement but I would like to make a few observations.

Obama attempts to differentiate between the slaveholder and the pregnant woman "exercising her right to choose" by saying that the woman is making her choice "in extraordinarily painful circumstances." He attempts to dismiss Keyes' comments as mere rhetoric. This reply is weak and mistaken for several reasons:

First, Obama never addresses the argument. The analogy by Keyes is plain and provocative. Both the slaveholder and the pro-abortion choice advocate discriminate based on a morally irrelevant factor: level of development. Obama never addresses this but simply attempts to dismiss it as "rhetoric."

Second, Obama resorts to rhetoric himself. He characterizes abortion as a woman's "right to choose." Of course the question is, "choose what?" If abortion takes the life of an innocent human being, no one should have this "right." Obama does not address the only important question of the debate: what is the unborn? In refusing to address this, Obama must resort to euphemisms such as "right to choose" which, ironically, amounts to empty rhetoric in the absence of reason.

Third, Obama begs the question by assuming the unborn is not a human being. Imagine you lived back when slavery was under debate in this country. What if someone were to say, "Yes, but you don't understand. Slaveholders are exercising their right to choose slavery in extraordinarly painful circumstances. Times are tough. Slaveholders have families to feed and businesses to run. If you don't like slavery, then don't own a slave. But don't force your morality on others."* In point of fact, this was the exact logic used by some pro-slavery advocates. But notice all of this assumes slaves are not persons and instead are property, which is exactly what Obama is doing in the case of the unborn. He is assuming that which he must prove. He is begging the question.
____________________________________________

* As a side note, this line of reasoning also commits the relativist fallacy. It treats an objective truth claim as if it were a relative or subjective preference claim. In other words, when a person says that abortion or slavery is immoral, they are making an objective truth claim. They are not making a subjective preference claim such as "I don't like abortion or slavery." To treat an objective truth claim as if it were a subjective preference claim is to commit the relativist fallacy, which is what both the slaveholder and Obama do. This is why the bumper sticker "Don't like abortion? Don't have one!" completely misses the point.

Obama Is No Lincoln

Anthony Horvath has posted an excellent article entitled "Abortion and Slavery: Obama as the Anti-Lincoln":

Right there on the Drudge Report was a picture of Obama posturing in front of the Lincoln Memorial. It doesn’t take much to see the relevance. Lincoln was instrumental in liberating black people from slavery in this country. 150 years later, a black person is president. The spin doctors aren’t content to leave it at that. The effort is on to try to relate Obama to Lincoln’s style, intellect, etc. But Obama is no Lincoln.

The prevailing argument in the hundred years leading up to the Civil War was this simple question: is a black person a human person, entitled to the rights and privileges granted to all members of the human race. The debate raged even in Christendom, with pro-slavery Christians trying to manipulate the Bible so as to justify slavery. Among these Christians, sometimes the argument wasn’t so much that blacks weren’t persons as that they deserved what they were getting (mark of Cain type arguments). The Civil War didn’t end the debate. For one thing evolutionary theory provided a new justification, asserting that black people were lesser evolved- animals, if you will.

The question of ‘personhood’ for blacks, at least, has been settled. But the question of ‘personhood’ in general is nowhere near settled.

Today, hundreds of thousands of unborn are slaughtered every year. Today, one can find Christians straining to find ways to continue justifying this from the Scriptures, hoping beyond hope that when we read we are created in God’s image, that image is only imprinted in the birth canal (except in cases of partial birth abortion- the image in that case is only imprinted once the child is fully out. Except when the child isn’t wanted… etc). And Evolutionists continue to leave their mark, thinking in terms of over-population and costs to society.

And where does Obama fall? Obama insists that he finds abortion regrettable and wishes it were rare. And yet he has vowed to pass FOCA “as the first thing he will do” in office. This legislation, it is universally agreed, will toss out all restrictions on abortion, like for example against partial birth abortion and other late term abortions. Obama claims to be a Christian, and yet, like the southern plantation owners of old, has managed to find a way to tell himself that the unborn are not persons. Obama is no Lincoln. He says one thing but does differently.

The woman says “I have the right to do what I want with my body!” irrespective of whether or not there is another body involved. The southern plantation owner made the same argument: “I have the right to do what I want with my property!” irrespective of whether or not there is another body involved.

The argument is extended: “Well, how do you know it is only your body and that there isn’t another body involved?” “Because its my body!” Right. “Well, how do you know that slaves are only property?” “Because they are my property!” See? Settled.

We’ve come so far and yet not far at all. It is a strange irony indeed where a black man takes the presidency, his ‘personhood’ status assured by the spilt blood of hundreds of thousands of Americans in the Civil War and hard fought for the hundred years after, and then that black man makes himself very comfortable depriving another oppressed people their personhood status. It’s a bit like if Jew survives the Nazi holocaust only to come to power and do the same thing to a different class of people.

Obama is no Lincoln. Andrew Jackson, perhaps. He thanks the Lord for his own freedom while continuing to restrict it for others.

The irony persists- this black man also tries to justify his position about the personhood status of another under the guise of Christianity. Meaningless, meaningless, says the teacher: There is nothing new under the sun.

While it is understandable why so many black Americans are cheering the election of Barack Obama it is tragic that they were willing to abandon the very principles that brought them their own freedom, overlooking the fact that there exists in this country, and in the man they elected, the view that that there is another ’subset’ of humanity that does not warrant personhood status. Their success, therefore, is no success at all. They elected ‘one of their own’ and didn’t care if it meant something worse than slavery for millions of people. And many of these believe they are doing the ‘Christian’ thing. It will only be a genuine success after it is achieved in such a way to respect the rights of all individuals- not just those with your skin color or stage in human development.