anti-choice is pro-forced slavery (with thanks to crispyq for this 13th amendment piece)

[niyad]

(spread this far and wide. we MUST frame the anti-choicers for exactly what they are--gestational slavers)

Is there a test that can determine paternity in the womb?

I don't know why the pro-choice movement doesn't have an ad campaign presenting the issue in this light:

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

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

snip...

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 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.

This argument makes available two responses to the standard defense of such
prohibitions, the claim that the fetus is a person. The first is that even if this is so, its
right to the continued aid of the woman does not follow. As Judith Jarvis Thomson
observes, "having a right to life does not guarantee having either a right to be given the
use of or a right to be allowed continued use of another person's body -- even if one needs it for life itself."7

Giving fetuses a legal right to the continued use of their mothers'
bodies would be precisely what the Thirteenth Amendment forbids. The second response
is that since abortion prohibitions infringe on the fundamental right to be free of
involuntary servitude, the burden is on the state to show that the violation of this right is
justified. Since the thesis that the fetus is, or should at least be considered, a person
seems impossible to prove (or to refute), this is a burden that the state cannot carry. If we
are not certain that the fetus is a person, then the mere possibility that it might be is not
enough to justify violating women's Thirteenth Amendment rights by forcing them to be
mothers.
=====

[Bayard]

1. Whoa......

That makes total sense to me. What would the Supreme Court make of that? This amendment was probably added while women were still thought of as chattel, with no real rights.

[niyad]

2. and women are STILL seen tht way.

[Aristus]

3. Hence the relentless, feverish drive to eliminate all aspects of a woman's personal freedom.

Prohibited abortion would, ipso facto, make women mens' chattel again.

[Igel]

6. Is voluntary slavery okay?

It's not just for 9 months. And if you enter the contract and change your mind, is it suddenly illegal?

And what if your kid's 6 months old and you're tired of being enslaved by him?

A slave could run away. If a mother runs away it's called "abandonment". Same for the father.

Moreover, does the fetus, or even the kid under 18, have property rights? Can they be emancipated? Buy and sell parents?

Trying to put a very recent construct on a very old process is a strange kind of thing. There's a goal that must be reached, and whatever it takes to justify it is apparently "valid logic."

[Lucky Luciano]

4. Seems sensible to me. nt

[Solly Mack]

5. K&R