In this episode Brian outlines the direct legal and historical connection between the banning of slavery and the banning of abortion in the United States.

It is critical to understand that it was the British who first ended slavery in the western European world. That happened in 1807 with the Slave Trade Act, and in 1833, ended throughout the Empire via The Slavery Abolition Act, which ended slavery in all UK possessions as well as on the high seas.

A young Bostonian physician who had graduated from medical school and began practice in 1857 decided to specialize in childbirth. He went to Edinburgh University, the finest medical school at that time. In 1857, even though the British had ended slavery 30 years earlier, the United States had cemented slavery through the terrible Dred Scott Decision of 1857, as well as attempting to expand slavery through the bloody Kansas-Nebraska Act.

Senator Douglas, the sponsor of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, said he was ‘personally opposed to slavery’ and he only wanted states to have a “choice” regarding slavery. This directly violated the compromises on slavery that started with the Constitution and lead all the way to the Missouri Compromise, all of which were designed to prevent the growth of slavery.

1857 was a very dark year for those who wished to end slavery - but back in the UK slavery had already come to an end. Another advancement in the UK was the dramatic advance of scientific medicine. Thirty years earlier, the invention of the modern microscope demonstrated beyond any question that life begins at conception. The legal and medical systems of the UK in that year were also addressing another human injustice - the injustice of ‘slave ownership’. In 1860, the UK Parliament passed a very important law which banned legalized abortion in the UK and its possessions. It was called The Offenses Against the Person Act.

At that time Horatio Storer was studying maternal care and childbirth. He, like other British doctors and lawyers, clearly understood as a medical scientist that this was a living and vulnerable human being from conception. He wrote on the matter and on the current injustices of abortion in America. He understood quite clearly that this was, “my second patient”. He determined, upon his return to the United States, to ensure that every unborn child was protected under the law. Because such laws dealing with health and safety and various forms of homicide are dealt with on the state level, Storer campaigned for the newly founded American Medical Association to help enact laws in every state.

Through his concerted efforts this would bring protection to those children, previously slaughtered in abortion and treated as mere ‘human possessions,’ and bring an end to legalized abortion in our nation. Just as our British ‘cousins’ first protected the obviously human slave and offered new legal protections, abortion laws would protect the obviously human child.

This campaign was dubbed the Physicians Crusade Against Abortion and it was extremely successful. By 1880, every then state adopted laws outlawing human abortion. And as each subsequent state came into the Union it also adopted laws regarding abortion, recognizing those children as part of the human family.

Nearly 100 years later in 1973, with the sweeping Roe v. Wade decision, all of those state laws were swept away. The tyrannical Roe v. Wade dictate created abortion clinics in every state and prohibited legal recognition for the child at any time within the womb.

Dr. Horatio R Storer, using medical science and knowledge and the law, was the true founder of the modern pro-life movement. In helping to ensure that once slaves were recognized as human beings under the law and that unborn children who also had not been protected by the law, that they too would be recognized as human beings and offered protection under the law.

095: The Direct Connection of Banning Slavery to Banning Abortion 27:57 Share

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095: The Direct Connection of Banning Slavery to Banning Abortion