Who Will Fight for “Evil”?  

In the post-Dobbs era, the pro-life movement seems to lack a clear path forward. With expanded legal protection for abortion in many states and increasing access to the abortion pill, abortion numbers have continued to increase since Roe was overturned. The majority of the public has continued to vote in favor of abortion access, even at a time when medical advances have made the child in the womb more visible and viable earlier than ever before.  

Where do we go from here? The battleground is no longer primarily political, but moral. The fight is not principally for laws, but for the hearts and minds of well-meaning Americans. The “mushy middle” voters who perhaps would not choose abortion for themselves or a loved one, but feel bad eliminating that option for some other woman, need to be shaken out of the complacent stupor into which pro-abortion rhetoric has lulled them.  

And how exactly have abortion activists accomplished this? How have they convinced a majority of the population that abortion—stopping a beating heart and dismembering a living human being —is healthcare? How have they been able to make average citizens believe that murder is essential for women’s equality?  

In recent years, we have been hearing encouragement from many feminists for women to “shout their abortions” and proudly declare that “abortion is beautiful.” But if we rewind to the not-so-distant past, such language was found only in the most hardcore circles of feminism, and certainly not in mainstream cultural and political discourse.  

In the 1980s, ’90s, and early 2000s, the mantras of “safe, legal, and rare” and “pro-choice not pro-abortion” were considered much more palatable to the American public, and therefore, more politically potent. Abortion proponents leaned heavily into the “extreme cases” where abortion might not have been considered ideal but was “necessary” due to certain tragic circumstances. A 1980s pamphlet from NARAL, the longest-standing abortion rights group in the U.S., declares “We at NARAL don’t know anyone who is ‘pro-abortion.’” Fast forward to 2022, and the very same abortion advocacy group declares, “We encourage you to say abortion and to say it proudly!” 

How did these activists create the space to speak about abortion —a practice they themselves admitted was a “necessary evil”—in unapologetically positive terms? How did they manage to reframe the conversation around such a morally deplorable practice and bring public opinion along with them? 

History provides a striking comparison: nineteenth-century pro-slavery advocacy. Just as abortion advocates changed their rhetoric as noted above, southern proponents of slavery shifted from conceding in 1806 that “slavery is an evil, regretted by every man in the country,” to declaring in 1836 that “it is the greatest of all blessings which a kind Providence has bestowed upon our glorious region” (Annals of Congress, 9th Cong., 2nd sess.,174 (1806); 24th Cong., 1st sess., 2456 (1836)). 

Advocates of both abortion and slavery began by describing the practice in question as a “necessary evil” that was perhaps not desirable but was nonetheless unavoidable in an imperfect world. Over time, however, they came to discuss slavery or abortion in proud, glorifying, unapologetic terms as a social and moral good in and of itself. 

The trajectory that these two movements followed is shockingly similar. A deeper look at this phenomenon sheds light on the power of rhetoric on the perception of morally contentious issues and how we might extricate the American public from the madness into which abortion proponents have led us.  

On the Defensive    

First, the transition to discussing both slavery and abortion in bold, unapologetic terms was a strategy ultimately employed to reckon with accusations of immorality from the opposition. When opponents of slavery or abortion first developed cohesive movements to try to outlaw these practices, they centered their critiques around immorality, namely, that slavery and abortion were evil practices that violated the inherent rights of another human being. 

In both cases, when the established right first came under such concerted attack, pro-slavery and pro-abortion activists initially deflected the issue of morality altogether and relied on arguments of necessity to justify the practices they desired to protect. The anti-abortion movement mobilized in force after Roe v. Wade, and abortion advocates responded in the 1970s by downplaying abortion and emphasizing the broader notion of personal “choice” as the “crux” of the issue in the abortion debate. 

They tended to rely more on arguments of necessity, such as the need to prevent death from illegal abortion and to help women in tragic circumstances, and on vague appeals to rights of privacy, equality, and freedom of conscience. Many abortion proponents emphasized that the law should support a woman’s right to choose abortion even if a majority of the population viewed it as immoral. Consequently, they wanted to shift the focus away from the morality of abortion and toward personal choice and freedom from government interference. 

By the end of the 1980s, leading abortion activists were openly admitting that no one “liked” abortion! A NARAL brochure from 1987 asserted: “No one is for abortion, but the real issue is … who decides? You or the politicians?” In her keynote address at the 1987 NARAL Annual Conference, the organization’s executive director, Kate Michelman, said that abortion advocates needed to build a stronger “consensus” for abortion rights among Americans by articulating “a pro-choice vision which makes dignity and freedom, not abortion, the centerpiece of the debate.” She went on to concede: 

Let’s face it. Many people will never be abortion activists. Many will not even be abortion advocates. But if we raise enough questions, make enough connections, we can ensure that many people will not become abortion adversaries. […] We probably can’t get them to wave the pro-choice banner, but we can get them to cast a pro-choice ballot [emphasis added]. 

In much the same way, slavery advocates first deflected accusations of immorality from increasingly active abolition societies in the 1790s and early 1800s. They generally relied on arguments such as the infeasibility of emancipation and the destruction it would cause to the southern economy and society. They also appealed to states’ rights to declare that the federal government had no authority to legislate on slavery, regardless of its moral standing. Often, the actors even conceded that slavery was morally wrong—a “necessary evil” or “moral impropriety” —but they deflected the question of morality by asserting that the morality of slavery was of no concern to the law (Annals of Congress, 15th Cong., 2nd sess., 1436 (1819)). 

A Losing Strategy 

In both of these cases, the actors came to proclaim boldly the practice in question as a moral good, particularly in the wake of major countermovement achievements and perceived imminent danger to the legality of the practice. As anti-slavery and anti-abortion forces made considerable social and political gains, both pro-slavery and pro-abortion activists made an intentional choice to abandon the uncomfortable and weak “necessary evil” defense to appease people’s consciences and rally the public to their side; after all, who wants to fight for “evil”?  

As early as the 1980s, some abortion advocates were already noticing the futility of the “necessary evil” argument and calling on the movement to embrace positive good language. A 1989 article from NOW declared: 

Abortion is not immoral. It’s not evil. It’s not even shameful. But it well could be illegal. And if, in our “choice” of language, we inadvertently contribute to the notion that abortion is a “bad choice,” we may well be inadvertently helping speed the day it becomes illegal. After all, how long and how hard do we believe people will fight for something they believe is inherently bad? [emphasis added] 

By the 2010s, abortion activists finally decided that they had “ceded moral ground” for too long and allowed anti-abortion forces to shape public opinion about the immorality of the practice. NARAL focus groups revealed that many millennials “flat-out disapproved of a woman’s abortion” and believed it was “immoral,” which they attributed to the successful attempts of anti-abortion actors for decades to “refram[e] the abortion debate around the fetus rather than the pregnant woman,” especially by using ultrasound technology to “define how people think about a fetus as a full, breathing human being.” 

Subsequently, more and more abortion proponents began seeking to reclaim the “moral high ground” in the debate by proclaiming abortion as a moral and social good so as to take the offensive in the fight for abortion rights. A 2010 academic article in the Journal of Women’s History declared that the mantra “safe, legal, and rare” “both produces and reproduces” stigma around abortion, and that advocates should instead “work to articulate abortion as a social good.” The author succinctly emphasized: “The linguistic trick of affirming the right to abortion while simultaneously devaluing it is both harmful and ineffective as a strategy to securing rights” [emphasis added]. A 2013 article in The Nation similarly declared,  

Tiptoeing around the issue is exhausting, and it’s certainly not doing women any favors. It’s time to resuscitate the old rallying cry “free abortions on demand without apology.” It may not be a popular message, but it’s absolutely necessary. … The anti-choice movement isn’t pulling any punches—why should we?  

Thus, abortion proponents increasingly sought to “destigmatize” abortion and change public opinion around it in much the same way that same-sex marriage advocates worked to normalize homosexuality. From the 2010s on, abortion advocates began consistently declaring abortion a singularly positive thing that should be “normalized” and fought for “openly and enthusiastically.” Gone are the days of “safe, legal, and rare.” 

In a strikingly similar manner, by the 1830s, leading slavery advocates began emphasizing that speaking about slavery as an evil was enhancing the opposition’s attack on the institution. They explicitly criticized fellow pro-slavery actors who espoused the “necessary evil” defense. In 1837, John C. Calhoun accused fellow southern slaveholder William Rives of contributing directly to “the spring and wellhead from which all these streams of abolition proceeded” by discussing slavery as a moral iniquity. Calhoun further emphasized that because slavery was no evil and, in fact, “a great good,” the “slaveholders of the South had nothing in the case to lament or to lay to their conscience” (Register of Debates in Congress, 24th Cong., 2nd sess., 719 (1837)). 

Similarly, in 1853, William Gilmore Simms expressed gratitude to the abolitionists because, for all of their “annoyances and offences,” they, in fact, contributed to: 

our moral reassurance,—in the establishing, to our own perfect conviction, our right to the labor of our slaves. … Twenty years ago, few persons in the South undertook to justify Negro Slavery, except on the score of necessity. Now, very few persons in the same region, question their perfect right to the labor of their slaves,—and more,—moral obligation to keep them still subject, as slaves, and to compel their labor [emphasis added]. 

Redefining Morality 

How exactly did slavery and abortion advocates make this jump from the weak “necessary evil” defense to the unapologetic glorification of the practice? First, they both sought to eliminate the moral and legal status of the victim in order to downplay the evil of their actions. They needed to discredit the rights-holding status of the other “being” involved in the practice to make it appear obvious to the public that slaveholders were more important than black people, and women were more valuable than fetuses.  

They therefore employed rhetoric that classified the slave or the fetus as less than human, or less than a full “person” before the law, to undermine their claim to equal rights. They also often disregarded consideration of the slave or fetus altogether and insinuated that it was an assumed point of fact that they were inferior to slaveholders or women.  

Pro-abortion actors have used language that intentionally downplays the unborn child’s humanity. They call the child a “mass of living tissue,” “much like menstrual flow,” “contents of the uterus,” and a “parasite” feeding off of a woman’s body. Many have conceded that the fetus is human and even alive but claim that it is not meaningful because it is not “a free-standing person,” it is a “potential person,” or even that it is not yet a person in the same way a dead body is no longer a person. 

In the 1980s, as medical and technological advances began making the unborn more visibly human, pro-abortion activists have had to reckon with the humanity of the child in the womb in a new way. This they have done by attempting to shift attention completely away from the fetus and to focus entirely on women and their ability to make their own “moral” decisions.  

As early as the 1980s, abortion activists discussed the need for a new “feminist morality” to combat the guilt permeating even the pro-choice movement about the moral status of the unborn. A 1984 NARAL working paper claimed, “Viewing the fetus as a part of the pregnant woman’s body is the only definition that doesn’t dilute her control,” and it encouraged activists to “focus the debate on the women having abortions rather than on the fetuses that may survive.”  

Consequently, abortion advocates began to argue that the “moral” position is to allow women to make their own “moral decisions.” The author of a 2014 book on reclaiming abortion rights argued: “We need to see abortion as an urgent practical decision that is just as moral as the decision to have a child—indeed, sometimes more moral.” And in 2016, The Moral Case for Abortion author claimed, “When we prevent a woman from making her own moral choices about her pregnancy, we undermine her humanity by taking away that ability to exercise her agency.” 

In other words, regardless of the fact that the unborn child is human and is alive, the only moral choice is to let women decide for themselves “what meaning their pregnancy has”—a nonsensical argument that nevertheless appears irrefutable to a morally relativistic culture. 

In a similar way, slavery advocates discredited black people by stripping them of their personhood and rewriting the laws of nature. They discussed black people as being “negro property” and “an inferior race of beings” (Annals of Congress, 1st Cong., 2nd sess., 1244 (1790); 6th Cong., 1st sess., 242 (1800); 1st Cong., 2nd sess., 1505 (1790)). One pro-slavery writer asserted that it was proper to enslave “these reckless, wretched drones and cumberers of the earth, thereby compelling them to habits of labor … and raising them and their progeny in the scale of humanity.”  

They then began repudiating the principle of the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” by discarding traditional natural rights theory and arguing that this principle of equality was meant to be a mere abstraction and “taken with great qualification” (Annals of Congress, 9th Cong., 2nd sess., 227 (1806)). 

One pro-slavery actor proclaimed, “Perhaps there is not a phrase which has been more perverted to serve the purpose of the enemies to slavery, then, that all men are born free. In its perverted application, fact denies it, scripture denies it, the constitution denies it, and common-sense denies it.” 

Slavery proponents “constructed other concepts of the law of nature on which was based the justification of slavery.” This they did by proclaiming that the laws of nature made blacks inferior and fit for slavery, so whites had a “moral obligation” to enslave them both for their own good and the good of society. Such a statement was espoused by a Virginia congressman in 1849, who claimed: “If [slavery] be wrong or immoral, then are the laws of nature herself wrong, and of immoral tendencies; … then is it immoral to make a moral, religious, and comparatively intellectual being of one who, otherwise, would have been an ignorant and utterly degraded savage” (Congressional Globe, 30th Cong., 2nd sess., 173 (1849)). 

After removing the victim from considerations of the morality of the practice, slavery and abortion advocates undertook the ultimate move to redefine good and evil entirely. They strategically formulated an overarching defense of the practices they sought to protect as one aspect of a broader sociopolitical battle, thereby redefining the “moral issue” at stake as the prevention of a certain set of values—be they fanatically left-wing for slavery advocates or radically right-wing for abortion activists—from taking hold in American society. In doing so, they both succeeded in shifting the focus of the debate away from the victim and creating space to claim the moral high ground for themselves. 

From the 2010s on, abortion advocates increasingly linked the fight for abortion rights to the broader fight against “right-wing, extremist” ideology. In 2017, for example, NARAL declared, “Just as we have always said, this is not and never has been just about abortion. … Our mission now is to fight for the America we believe in: one where … liberty—to choose abortion, to make our own decisions about our families, to live free from fear—is unassailable.” And in 2021, “2020 was the culmination of a decades-long effort by the Radical Right working in lockstep with the anti-choice movement to gut our democracy to maintain white patriarchal power.” 

A 2021 article from Planned Parenthood entitled “Just Say Abortion” links abortion to gender ideology by arguing that the term “pro-choice” both perpetuates stigma around abortion and “erase[s] the trans and non-binary people who have abortions,” which is “transphobic.” The article goes on to reveal a fascinating encapsulation of the larger cultural phenomena at play: “Abortion stigma, the shared social and structural attitude that abortion is wrong or undesirable, is rooted in patriarchal ideas about gender. … We can push back against abortion stigma and transphobia at the same time.” 

In the same way, once they began championing slavery more boldly, slavery advocates increasingly made the glorification of slavery inseparable from the collective southern identity, and they associated the pro-slavery movement with a larger sociopolitical battle against both capitalism and socialism.  

Pro-slavery legislator John Henry Hammond claimed in 1836 that abolitionists had commenced a “war” on southern society, “proclaiming as their watchword that immortal but now prostituted sentiment, ‘that all men are born free and equal’” (Register of Debates in Congress, 24th Cong., 1st sess., 2448-62 (1829)). Others argued that slavery was integral to preserving “the heritage of their fathers” and “the security of their state and their friends” and that anyone who “who shrinks from taking the highest and the boldest ground [on protecting slavery] is a traitor” (Register of Debates in Congress, 24th Cong., 1st sess., 2448-62 (1829); Congressional Globe, 29th Cong., 2nd sess., 77 (1847)). 

This rhetorical strategy of the broader “culture war” is the culmination of the attempt to invert good and evil. The centering of slavery or abortion in a bigger battle to promote particular values and uproot extremist, unfavorable ones is a powerful tactic to refocus the discussion of morality on something separate from the harm done to the victim. To claim that those who dislike slavery or abortion do so because they want to promote some strand of fanaticism in our culture, and not because they are concerned about the slave or the unborn child, is a way to erase the victim from the debate. 

Going Forward 

These strategic choices made by both slavery and abortion advocates helped them craft movements that, in conjunction with sociocultural developments, made it possible to discuss slavery or abortion—practices that were historically viewed as morally ambiguous at best or repulsive at worst—in unapologetically glorifying terms. Clearly, the “necessary evil” position is uncomfortable and politically weak because, despite the influence of moral relativism in the culture, many people still live and vote through the lens of morality. People still tend to think in terms of “right” and “wrong” when it comes to politics and want to feel like they are fighting for what is “good.”  

As a result, abortion advocates have been using tactics eerily similar to those of nineteenth-century slavery advocates to “destigmatize” abortion, turn murder in the womb into a “good,” and make the public feel that they have a moral obligation to vote in their favor. Because such tactics work. Evil thrives in the shadows, robed in rhetoric, and ignored by those who do not want to know of its existence lest it nettle their consciences. But it is our job to drag it out of the darkness and into the light where all may see its ugliness.  

All of this matters right now because the pro-life movement must focus on shifting public opinion if laws are going to change. And one way to do that is to highlight this striking parallel between how slaveholders fought to justify the enslavement of fellow human beings and how abortion advocates are currently fighting to justify the ending of human lives.  

Just as slaveholders in the antebellum South sought to divert critiques of a practice they knew to be objectively immoral by altering the very nature of “morality,” so too are abortion advocates seeking to seize the moral high ground by convincing Americans that abortion, which they admit to be the ending of a human life, is simply a part of a broader battle for equality and freedom. But just as abolitionists sought to uncover the humanity of the slave from beneath the veil of pro-slavery rhetoric, so too must we persistently rescue the dignity of the child in the womb from the darkness and dehumanization of pro-abortion euphemisms. Let us boldly expose this evil masquerading as “good” and bring people back to their senses—because, as abortion activists have said, who really wants to fight for evil? 

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