On Tuesday, July 12, 2022, Northwestern University hosted a webinar entitled, Implications of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Decision. Faculty members of Northwestern participated in the webinar: Dr. Cassing Hammond (abortion practitioner), Professor Paul Gowder, Professor Heidi Kitrosser, Professor Andrew M. Koppelman, Professor Doreen Weisenhaus, and Dean Hari Osofsky (she/her) moderated the event.

The lament from these esteemed members of the once Christian Northwestern University is to be expected. I want to call attention specifically to Prof. Andrew Koppelman who claimed that the right to abortion should be protected by the 13^th amendment.

Distinguished Senior Fellow and Scalia Scholar Ed Whelan in a recent tweet noted that by his count the 1^st, 3^rd, 4^th, 5^th, 8^th, 9^th, 13^th, 14^th, and 19^th Amendments have all been cited in support of the non-existent constitutional right to abortion. Like the astronomer Percival Lowell, who spent 15 years studying canals on Mars, progressive experts think they find abortion everywhere they look in the US Constitution.

The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and proclaimed in the final days of 1865. The text of this amendment has two sections.

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

It is interesting to recognize in these debates that those who advocate for killing unborn children proclaim themselves to be the compassionate abolitionists. Those who want to save children from being dismembered and vacuumed out of their mother’s wombs are the evil slave owners.

According to the perverse logic of these supposed abolitionists, pregnancy is slavery. If you “force” someone to carry a child to term, that would go against the Thirteenth Amendment. Really?

Now I should point out that Prof. Koppelman did not develop his argument in this webinar. He has written a 30-page paper on the subject. His abstract states, “The Thirteenth Amendment’s purpose is to end the specific institution of antebellum slavery. A ban on abortion would do to women what slavery did to the women who were enslaved: compel them to bear children against their will.”

Let’s accept this argument for just a moment. Where does it end? What about a distressed mother who has to provide care for her ornery two-year old who whines, demands, runs away, and never sleeps when the mother desires? Forcing a mother to care for this child sounds a lot like slavery to me. Or what about a son or daughter who provides care for an aging relative who suffers from dementia or Alzheimer’s? Without any thanks, care must be provided around the clock for someone who often has no resources to compensate for the care given. That sounds a lot like slavery to me, well, at least according to this perverse logic.

Stick with me as we finish off the illogic of this argument, if something appears to be slavery, the answer is to kill.

The mother is free to kill her unborn child to prevent a forced pregnancy. The mother or father is free to kill a born child because this precious one might be a burden. A son or daughter is free to kill a parent who needs round-the-clock care all in the name of the ending of slavery.

It is abhorrent and illogical to compare slavery with pregnancy. I recognize that not all who are pregnant made that choice. There are difficult cases, but to suggest that what slaves endured is what mothers face is perverse and wicked logic.

Dan McLaughlin, a senior writer at National Review Online, has written a very similar article on this very subject that I would also highly recommend.

Ed Whelan of the Ethics and Public Policy Center has been doing a great job at National Review Online debunking Judge Richard Posner’s opinion striking down the Indiana and Wisconsin marriage laws for a panel of the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit on September 4 (see here, here, here, and here).

I will note here just one thing that jumped out at me in both the oral arguments and the opinion. Judge Posner makes the following argument (pp. 22-23 of the opinion):

Consider now the emotional comfort that having married parents is likely to provide to children adopted by same-sex couples. Suppose such a child comes home from school one day and reports to his parents that all his classmates have a mom and a dad, while he has two moms (or two dads, as the case may be). Children, being natural conformists, tend to be upset upon discovering that they’re not in step with their peers. If a child’s same-sex parents are married, however, the parents can tell the child truthfully that an adult is permitted to marry a person of the opposite sex, or if the adult prefers as some do a person of his or her own sex, but that either way the parents are married and therefore the child can feel secure in being the child of a married couple. Conversely, imagine the parents having to tell their child that same-sex couples can’t marry, and so the child is not the child of a married couple, unlike his classmates.

Judge Posner’s set-up of this hypothetical situation sounds like a demonstration of how same-sex “marriage” couldharm children raised by same-sex couples:

Suppose such a child comes home from school one day and reports to his parents that all his classmates have a mom and a dad, while he has two moms (or two dads, as the case may be). Children, being natural conformists, tend to be upset upon discovering that they’re not in step with their peers.

Perhaps it is a function of his long judicial career, but Judge Posner seems to think that it is entirely the law which will determine whether such a child experiences “comfort” or distress from such a situation. If the law says that the two women or two men raising the child cannot be “married,” the child will experience distress. But if the law says that the two women or two men raising the child are “married,” then they will experience “emotional comfort,” presumably from the knowledge that their family is just like that of their friends.

Except, even in Judge Posner’s own framing of the situation, it is not the absence of a marriage certificate that makes the children feel different from his peers. It is that “all his classmates have a mom and a dad, while he has two moms (or two dads, as the case may be).” If the child’s “two moms” or “two dads” are permitted to “marry” — well, “all his classmates” will still have “a mom and a dad,” while the child in question will still be “not in step with [his] peers” because he will still not have a mom and a dad!

Judge Posner is naïve in the extreme if he thinks that such a child would care more about whether his caregivers have a certificate from the government than about whether his family includes something as fundamental on a human level as a mother and a father.

This article was originally posted at FRCblog.com.