[TW for accounts of punishments slave owners did to enslaved peoples, including rape and other truly disgusting things. This is a serious warning. This post is disgusting and disturbing.]

The fact that you are attempting to equate a slave owner owning an enslaved person to a person claiming rights to their own body is so infuriating I can barely stand it.

You are belittling the reality that was slavery, an institution that took away BODILY AUTONOMY and replaced it with the kinds of horrors that you probably can’t even imagine in your own damn mind. There were actual living, breathing people who were enslaved for the entirety of their lives, which could mean MANY decades. They were subjected to the threat of whipping and rape at any moment. They could be sold and moved without any recourse to fight back. Some slave owners, to punish enslaved people who didn’t do what they were told, would CUT OFF the enslaved person’s EARS, ROAST THEM, AND FEED THEM BACK TO THEM. Some slave owners, like Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, would punish a slave by having another slave SHIT IN HIS MOUTH and then would use a mask to force that slave to keep his mouth closed until he swallowed. They would burn their skin, hang them in cages in trees and let them slowly rot to death, cut off fingers and hands, brand them, and beat them. And they killed them. So many of them. They would toss their still living but diseased bodies over board into the Atlantic. They would use them up and then toss them into graves, merely buying another person and replacing their monetary loss. 

AND THAT is what you have the fucking audacity to compare to a person removing a lump of cells from their body?

Anyone who makes this argument is a total fucking asshole. You want to be against abortion? Fine. But you need to find a way to do it that doesn’t ahistorically remove the horrors of slavery in order to make your tidy little analogy. Because all you are doing with posters like this is showing how LITTLE you care about what ACTUALLY happened to enslaved people, even if what you think you are doing is showing how much you care about fetuses. There is NO comparison here. NONE.

This doesn’t even begin to get at the fact that this poster and this analogy deny the reality of enslaved women. As your bottom picture makes clear, no one ever seems to want to talk about women who were enslaved - who were forced to both labor in the fields and labor through reproduction. They produced and they reproduced. And they sure as hell aborted fetuses. When you act as if abortion and slavery are somehow standing in apposition to one another, you deny that reality. 

As I’ve written elsewhere:

If you do take the time to understand the intertwined history of abortion and slavery, it becomes painfully difficult to assert that abortion is wrong.  Because then you must defend the slaveholder who wanted the enslaved woman to birth that child so that he could enslave them both (even as he probably used religion and morality, rather than economics and labor, as his excuse and defense for why one shouldn’t turn to abortion).  Who would be willing to fault the enslaved woman who aborted her fetus because she didn’t want that child to be a slave?  Who would be willing to fault the enslaved woman who aborted her fetus because she physically could not bear the burden of labor and pregnancy?  Who would be willing to fault the enslaved woman who aborted her fetus as a punishment to the man who raped her, barely fed her, barely clothed her, denied her religion, denied her liberty, and whipped her when she worked too slowly, made a mistake, or attempted to flee?  Who would be willing to fault the enslaved woman who aborted her fetus to protect her life and to save the evils of her life from those of her child?  To include the history of enslaved women in the history of slavery and then compare that history to abortion is not easy.

This poster is disgusting. You are disgusting for propagating such inaccuracies about the past AND about the lived experiences of both enslaved peoples and pregnant people today.

[Also, this doesn’t even begin to address the fact that there are millions of people RIGHT NOW who are enslaved on this planet. GO HELP THEM if you fucking care so much about the horrors of slavery.]

4 weeks ago  /  398 notes  /   / /Source: craftychristianmamma