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When discussing abortion, activists often draw parallels with slavery to support their views. For abortion supporters, legalizing abortion was a move to emancipate women and thus the Roe v. Wade decision should be seen as a modem-day analogue to the Thirteenth Amendment. No doubt with this understanding in mind, a group of New Yorkers have banded together to provide what they consider to be a "new underground railroad": They open their homes for a night or two to women from other states who come to Manhattan seeking late-term abortions.1
Some pro-choice scholars seem to see a natural link between these two phenomena. Lawrence Lader, who founded the National Association for the Repeal of the Abortion Laws (NARAL) in 1970, began his publishing career in 1961 with a book on abolitionism: The Bold Brahmins: New England's War against Slavery, 1831-1863. Five years later, he produced an influential work on abortion.2 In subsequent years, he completed books supporting population control, sterilization, and the legalization of an abortion pill, RU486. Similarly, David Garrow began his career as a historian in the 1980s with a prize-winning book chronicling Martin Luther King's role in the civilrights movement. In the 1990s he produced a lengthy account of the legal cases that led up to Roe v. Wade?
Opponents of abortion allude to slavery just as often. For them, the two issues are joined because both practices deny human beings the right to live their lives to their full potential. Two of the more notable proponents of this view are Republican politicians: Lewis Lehrman and Alan Key es. Lehrman ran for governor of New York in 1982 and narrowly lost to Mario Cuomo; Keyes was a presidential candidate in 2000. Both men have argued that Roe is the 20th-century analogue to DredScott, the Supreme Court's 1857 decision affirming slavery and denying Scott's claims to citizenship. Pope John Paul II drew the same sorts of parallels when he visited St. Louis in 1999. Appearing near the courthouse where the Scott case was first heard, the Pope denounced the Court's decision for declaring "an entire class of human beings ... outside the boundaries of the national community and the Constitution's protection. Today the conflict is between a culture that affirms, cherishes and celebrates the...