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So latter-day feminists dehumanize unborn children with the chant "it' s my body" but racists preceded them by dehumanizing slaves with the refrain "it' s my property." Dumas Malone, in his book Jefferson the President, Little, Brown and Company, 1974, says John Randolph opposed restrictions on slavery as impinging "... on the right of private property."

MURDER VERSUS "CHOICE"

Others deny that abortion is genocide by insisting that the Holocaust and lynchings were "murder" and abortion is "choice." They say this because they believe Jews and blacks are "persons" but unborn children are not. Those who murdered Jews and blacks, however, denied the personhood of their victims just as vehemently as practitioners of abortion deny the personhood of the unborn.

JUSTICE VERSUS CONVENIENCE

Another startling parallel between the genocide of slavery and that of abortion can be seen in court decisions adjudicating issues related to the creation and abolition of each. Newsweek, October 26, 1998, in an article titled "Slavery' s Real ' Roots,' "reports"

By ... [1775], however, the plantation system had taken hold. America had become too dependent on slave labor to give it up easily. So the American Constitution chose slavery (albeit provisionally). And the nation justified the choice by formulating an ideology that made blacks into something less than human beings. The result, as historian Ira Berlin argues in a new book on slavery, Many Thousands Gone, Harvard University Press, 1998, is that African slavery became ' no longer just one of many forms of subordination -- a common enough circumstance in a world ruled by hierarchies -- but the foundation on which the social order rested.'

This is the same argument the U.S. Supreme Court offered in justification of its refusal to overturn Roe vs. Wade, supra, in its later decision in lanned Parenthood vs. Casey 505 U.S. 833, 1992. The plurality in Casey (O' Connor, Kennedy & Souter) made no serious attempt to justify abortion constitutionally or morally. They simply argued that the cost of ending abortion was too high:

... [F]or two decades of economic and social developments, people have organized intricate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail. The ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives. The Constitution serves human values and while the effect of reliance on Roe cannot be exactly measured, neither can the certain cost of overruling Roe for people who have ordered their thinking and living around that case be dismissed.

In his book Antislavery, Dwight Drumond, Norton, 1961, the author quotes from the decision handed down by the British high court which ended slavery in that country. Lord Mansfield settled the argument in the Sommersett Case, 98 English Reports, 509, 1773:

The state of slavery is ... so odious that nothing can be suffered to support it but positive law. Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from the decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England: And therefore the black must be discharged [emphasis added].

Halting the brutalization of blacks was inconvenient but the British (and later the Americans) were more committed to justice than convenience. Halting the brutalization of the unborn will also be inconvenient. Most contemporary British and Americans are now obviously more committed to convenience than they are to justice.

Convenience heavily influenced Jefferson' s view of justice concerning his own slaves. We read the following in The Jefferson Scandals, A Rebuttal, supra:

Since the number of slaves owned by Jefferson was in excess of two hundred at various periods, this constituted one of his principal assets. To have set them free would obviously have been a crushing financial blow.

The perceived financial burden of children is also listed by the Guttmacher Institute Web site, supra, as a primary motivator in the decision to abort.

ANTI-ADOPTION BIAS:

But wouldn' t the placement for adoption of "unwanted" children minimize the economic loss associated with unplanned pregnancy? Yes, but many mothers contemplating abortion report that they could never give their child up for adoption. This mentality is difficult to distinguish from the spitefulness of a divorced father who murders his newborn to avoid the pain of losing custody of the child to his former wife. Or as psychologist Dr. Laura Schlessinger has observed, it is reminiscent of the murder of an abandoned wife by a former husband who can' t bear the possibility of her becoming the object of another man' s affection. Narcissism on this scale is shameful beyond imagining.