The Fugitive “Fetus” Act: Some Historical Perspectives on a Recent Abortion Controversy

 by Brian Melton  

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If the idea that millions of children are being killed in this country doesn’t bother someone, perhaps the idea that he or she may be “legally” forced to participate will.

The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.
— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

In the past few months, a “new” issue appeared on the American stage that made Hegel’s words echo through time. I put the word “new” in quotes, because, as Solomon once observed, “there is nothing new under the sun.” The idea of the federal government forcing someone, like a Pro-life pharmacist, to violate even their most cherished religious beliefs for the convenience and profit of others bears a frightening resemblance to something that occurred in the decade leading up to the Civil War. That instance played a significant role in boosting the strength of the abolitionist movement, and therefore helped set the country on the road to war. I hope that we will somehow prove Hegel wrong and actually learn from our own mistakes this time.

I’m assuming that most of my readers who are even vaguely aware of the continuing abortion debate will understand what has been going on. Now that the FDA has approved various and sundry “morning after” pills, the Pro-Death Movement has reveled in the fact that abortion is more of a form of contraception than ever. Women can now walk down to the local pharmacy, pick up a few pills to pop, and kill an inconvenient child without the need for a messy trip to a clinic. But there is one problem: There are Pro-Life pharmacists whose conscience won’t let them dispense the pills. This has proven quite a cause for consternation, as the conduct of this woman shows, and the biased reporting in the article about her further demonstrates.

The controversy has since heated up. Wisconsin became the first state to reprimand a pharmacist for having a conscience, and the American Medical Association recently went on record saying that pharmacists should be forced to dispense prescriptions they do not agree with. Other states are fighting back. A North Carolina bill would protect Pro-Lifers.

So what does this have to do with the Civil War? If you cast your mind back to the first half of your U.S. survey class, you should remember the Compromise of 1850. This bill, or rather series of bills, contained points that benefited the North and points that benefited the South. One of the main Southern points was the new and improved Fugitive Slave Act.

This act gave slaveholders the authority to reach into free states in order to catch runaway slaves. In fact, it proved so powerful that there are documented cases where slave catchers dragged free born men and women off into slavery, all with the nodding approval of portions of the federal government. What it accomplished in the long haul of U.S. history isn’t our main point for the moment. What is important was how it was enforced.

Much like Pro-lifers today, quite a few people in the North had come to the point where they simply couldn’t stomach slavery anymore. They had refused to help federal or state authorities recapture slaves, specifically because they thought that slavery was immoral. This was particularly annoying, when the conscientious objector turned out to be the local marshal. The Fugitive Slave Act changed all that. It used the power of the federal government to force marshals and even average northerners to cooperate in capturing slaves wherever southerners found them. If they refused, they faced prosecution, jail time of up to six months, and fines not exceeding $1,000.00 (marshals were immediately fined the full amount), a significant sum of money by the standard of the day.

Recently, I stirred up a small hornet’s nest at the ChronWatch.com blog by suggesting that slavery and abortion were comparable. Perhaps I’ll stir up another one by saying that from our comparison here we can see that even the enforcement of the two immoral status quos bears significant similarities. Slaveholders felt they could use the power of the federal government to force slavery into the lives of people who firmly believed that it was wrong. Today, abortionists think the same of Pro-lifers, however “diverse” and relativistic their language may be.

The hypocrisy cannot be clearer. Just like the slaveholders, abortionists believe that everyone should enjoy equal rights, but the right to an abortion is somehow more equal than the right of a pro-life pharmacist to abstain. A Christian must remove even a small cross at work for fear of offending someone else, but an abortionist does not have to wait even an hour or two when requesting a drug that an offended Christian earnestly and honestly believes will be used to commit murder.

In reality, they sense the truth: There is no middle ground on abortion. Like slavery and the Holocaust it is simply evil, and no amount of semantical games could ever make it right. Therefore, for the sake of a million guilty consciences, the Pro-Life movement must be silenced completely.

So what was the ultimate effect of the Fugitive Slave Act? It did much more for the Abolitionist movement than it ever did for any slaveholder. As the bounty hunters began to haul men and women away, people in the North began to really see, first hand, what slavery really involved. When that happened, it steeled their resolve. Thousands of people, who once sat squarely on the fence thinking that slavery was someone else’s choice or someone else’s business, came down on the side of abolitionism. Hard. As one Boston factory owner put it, after seeing a former slave named Anthony Burns drug off in shackles, his captors protected by U.S. soldiers, “We went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, compromise, Union Whigs and waked up stark mad Abolitionists.”

While I’m not too sanguine about the chances (Abortion, at that stage, is literally a crime in which the victim has no face. There will never be pictures of haunting, vacant stares, or a chance for someone to see any tiny, broken bodies.), I can only hope that it might have a similarly galvanizing affect on today’s fence sitters. If the idea that millions of children are being killed in this country doesn’t bother someone, perhaps the idea that he or she may be “legally” forced to participate will.

Brian Melton is an assistant professor of history at Liberty University and a regular contributor to ChronWatch.com.

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