It’s a crazy comparison to make, but it’s happening. During a Wednesday Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on abortion, University of California, Irvine Chancellor’s Professor of Law Michele Goodwin compared the harm imposed by anti-abortion laws to slavery.
Goodwin testified during a hearing on “The Assault on Reproductive Rights in a Post-Dobbs America” Wednesday, continually comparing the harm black women experienced during slavery and Jim Crow to modern abortion restrictions. It’s worth noting that these restrictions are spreading particularly in the areas formerly known as the U.S. Confederacy.
“The state of Mississippi has notoriously been a death sentence for black women dating back to the time of slavery, through Jim Crow into the present,” Goodwin said. “If we don’t thread that needle together, then there’s a lot that we are missing…Mississippi is one of the deadliest places not just in the country to be pregnant, but one of the deadliest places in all of the industrialized world to be pregnant.”
Not only did Goodwin make this comparison, but Democratic Hawaii Sen. Mazie Hirono agreed. To me, this is just flat out wrong and a complete insult to the memory of those who suffered under slavery.
To compare saving the life of an unborn baby to slavery is absolutely ridiculous and offensive. To suggest that anti-abortion laws are like slavery and Jim Crow laws is an outrageous and ignorant statement.
For starters, slavery was a system of involuntary servitude that saw one group of people deprived of their fundamental human rights and treated as property. In the case of abortion, no one is being deprived of their rights and no one is being treated as property.
It’s also worth noting that slavery was an institution that lasted hundreds of years, while abortion laws are just one issue on the legislative agenda.
Furthermore, the people who are truly being harmed by the abortion laws are not black women, as Goodwin suggests. The ones who are truly hurt by abortion are the unborn babies who are denied the right to life.
I understand that abortion is a sensitive and complex issue, but to compare it to slavery is outrageous and insulting. We should not be comparing the two, but instead be focusing on how we can protect the rights of both mother and child.
