FRC Asks: Can We Outlaw Roe v. Wade In Five Years?

[CrispyQ]

3. This will make women slaves to a fetus.

I don't understand why the pro-choice groups don't add this as one of their arguments for choice. I know it wouldn't matter to the religious nuts, but it might sway a lot of other people who are on the fence, or never really gave the issue much thought.

https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1031&context=facultyworkingpapers

2010
Forced Labor, Revisited: The Thirteenth
Amendment and Abortion
Andrew Koppelman
Northwestern University School of Law, [e-mail]

I. The basic argument

The Thirteenth Amendment reads as follows:

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.

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

My claim is that the amendment is violated by laws that prohibit abortion. When
women are compelled to carry and bear children, they are subjected to "involuntary
servitude" in violation of the amendment. Abortion prohibitions violate the
Amendment's guarantee of personal liberty, because forced pregnancy and childbirth, by
compelling the woman to serve the fetus, creates "that control by which the personal
service of one man [sic] is disposed of or coerced for another's benefit which is the
essence of involuntary servitude."6

Such laws violate the amendment's guarantee of
equality, because forcing women to be mothers makes them into a servant caste, a group
which, by virtue of a status of birth, is held subject to a special duty to serve others and
not themselves.