Mark Twain wrote that history doesn’t repeat itself, but that “sometimes it rhymes.” For decades, I’ve been writing that the pro-life movement is like the abolition movement before the Civil War, and waiting for the parallels to sink in with people. (I’m not holding my breath.)

But the hysterical embrace of the in vitro fertilization (IVF) industrial complex by otherwise pro-life Americans is making that rhyme more insistent and overpowering, like a distant drumbeat of war. This fact came home to me when I saw Nikki Haley claim on Twitter that IVF is “pro-life.”

IVF is pro life. My children are blessings because of fertility procedures. Many parents would love to have children. We should not be banning these procedures we should be encouraging them.

— Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) June 13, 2024

And I realized in what way support for IVF is in fact “pro-life.” It’s pro-life in the same exact way that the Atlantic slave trade was pro-African-American. I suppose that a slave-trader who enriched himself auctioning off men, women, and children in the markets of New Orleans could have claimed that he was an advocate of Africans in America: “I want to bring in a whole lot more of them!” That’s the kind of Disney witch-queen logic Nikki Haley offers us.

The Infallibility of the Southern Baptist Convention

Thankfully, the Right to IVF Act that was recently making its way through Congress seems to have stalled thanks to two Republicans from Mississippi. As The Mississippi Free Press reports:

A plan to make it a right nationwide for women to access in vitro fertilization and other fertility treatments will not become law after Republicans blocked a bill known as the Right to IVF Act from advancing. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer forced a vote on the matter Thursday in an effort to drive an election-year contrast on reproductive care.

Both of Mississippi’s U.S. senators, Republicans Roger Wicker and Cindy Hyde-Smith, voted against the Right to IVF Act.

Sen. Tammy Duckworth, a military veteran who has used the fertility treatment to have her two children, has championed the bill, called the Right to IVF Act. The bill would have also expanded access through insurance as well as for military members and veterans.

“As a mom who struggled with infertility for years, as a parent who needed IVF to have my two beautiful little girls, all I can say to my Republican colleagues in this moment is, ‘How dare you,’” Duckworth, D-Ill., said following the vote.

Far too many other putatively pro-life senators have signaled their support for IVF (if not this draconian bill), apparently afraid of the political backlash entailed by admitting the truth about the widely used procedure.

The Southern Baptist Convention (which has tragic pro-slavery roots) has shown more courage recently than most pro-life politicians, declaring:

In Vitro Fertilization most often participates in the destruction of embryonic human life and increasingly engages in dehumanizing methods for determining suitability for life and genetic sorting, based on notions of genetic fitness and parental preferences.

Between 1 million and 1.5 million human beings are currently stored in cryogenic freezers in an embryonic state throughout the United States, with most unquestionably destined for eventual destruction.

Last week, the denomination adopted a resolution opposing IVF throughout its 45,000 churches nationwide. 

Are We Approaching an 1860 Moment?

When large swathes of a country disagree about fundamental rights, and each side thinks that the other is sunk in profound moral evil, what happens to such a country? Well, what happened here in 1861?

The resemblances between the treatment of slaves in antebellum America and of preborn babies in our America keep piling up higher, to the point where it’s actually creepy, as if God were trying to warn us: Will this be the spark in the kindling accumulating all around us? Could it ignite a second civil war, which like the first will claim the lives of 2% of the entire population? Today that would amount to 6,658,000 people.

As Abraham Lincoln famously said in his Second Inaugural Address:

Fondly do we hope — fervently do we pray — that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

Which Is Actually Worse?

Now I know what some of you are saying: “Abortion is not exactly like slavery.” And you’re right, because in some ways abortion is worse. Slavery blighted the lives of millions of people, but at least they got to live. Their lives were not worthless to them. Enslaved African-Americans fell in love, had children, accepted the Gospel, prayed, created extraordinary music, and left behind a heritage that enriches our country. They didn’t just get snuffed out, bagged, and dumped in medical waste containers.

But there were aspects of slavery which were more obviously hideous: humiliation, oppression, torture, flogging, casual rape, grueling unpaid work, and families shattered when slaves got “sold down the river.” Slavery in America could be a kind of earthly Hell, and no effective laws prevented that from happening.

Our Sick Obsession with Preborn Babies

What nobody can deny, once you point it out, are the bizarre, parallel attitudes that free Americans had toward enslaved Americans before 1860, and born Americans have about preborn children today.

White Americans saw black slaves as dangerous potential menaces to civilized society should they be set free. Born Americans today see preborn babies as threats to their sexual freedom and lifestyles.

Slaveowners warned of the massacres that rebellious slaves committed against their former masters in Haiti. Feminists today keep making and remaking The Handmaid’s Tale, which Margaret Atwood wrote to warn against the pro-life policies of Ronald Reagan. In each case, the privileged class warned that any effort to help the people they victimized would end in some dystopian nightmare.

Slavery advocates warned that freed blacks would starve to death or turn to crime, unable to support themselves in a free economy. Pro-choicers today insist that “unwanted” children will get abused, languish in poverty, and likely end up in prison. The bestselling, widely lauded book Freakonomics even falsely credited legal abortion with bringing down crime in America. So much for eugenics having been hanged after the Nuremburg Trials. For the ways in which the eugenics movement directly contributed to the ongoing oppression of freed blacks after 1865, don’t miss the powerful film by black pro-lifers, Maafa 21:

Bodies We Can Use Any Which Way We Want

But the IVF issue really brings home one last, appalling parallel: Advocates of slavery saw the same black people they so feared as profit centers, as key to the highly efficient and growing export economy in cotton and tobacco. Because they had no legal rights, black Americans could be used for more purposes than back-breaking labor. They could also be forced into medical experimentation. As History.com reports:

Few medical doctors have been as lauded — and loathed — as James Marion Sims.

Credited as the “father of modern gynecology,” Sims developed pioneering tools and surgical techniques related to women’s reproductive health. In 1876, he was named president of the American Medical Association, and in 1880, he became president of the American Gynecological Society, an organization he helped found. The 19th-century physician has been lionized with a half-dozen statues around the country.

But because Sims’ research was conducted on enslaved black women without anesthesia, medical ethicists, historians and others say his use of enslaved black bodies as medical test subjects falls into a long, ethically bereft history that includes the Tuskegee syphilis experiment and Henrietta Lacks. Critics say Sims cared more about the experiments than in providing therapeutic treatment, and that he caused untold suffering by operating under the racist notion that black people did not feel pain.

In our coverage of the abortion-derived COVID “vaccine,” The Stream pointed out a bloodcurdling fact about the abuse of preborn Americans in the name of lucrative COVID research. As Center for Medical Progress founder David Daleiden noted in 2021, with NIH funds and federal approval, the University of Pittsburgh confessed to doing cruel human experiments on preborn Americans (whom pro-choicers pretend don’t feel pain, either):

[The University of] Pitt[burgh] is now admitting to news media that the aborted babies are still alive at the time their kidneys are cut out for NIH grant money. … [L]abor induction abortions, where the baby is pushed out of the mother whole, would be ‘used to obtain the tissue.’ … Pitt and the Planned Parenthood abortion providers responsible for its ‘research’ abortions are allowing babies, some of the age of viability, to be delivered alive, and then killing them by cutting their kidneys out.

Just as free Americans couldn’t decide whether enslaved blacks were a violent menace or a cash cow, born Americans today can’t decide whether preborn babies are a curse or goldmine.

But the God who made all of us has other ideas. So God help us all.

 

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. With Jason Jones, he also is coauthor of God, Guns, & the Government.