It is one thing to oppose abortion. I can understand and respect that position, despite disagreeing with those who would restrict women’s bodily autonomy in deference to fetal life.

But it’s quite another to analogize the anti-abortion movement to the movement to abolish enslavement or the larger civil rights struggle — to suggest that the fight for fetal personhood is comparable to the battle to recognize Black personhood in this country.

That position is worthy of no respect whatsoever.

And yet, it’s an argument made often by those in the anti-abortion movement.

The analogy goes like this: Racist defenders of slavery didn’t think Black folks were people. Liberal defenders of abortion don’t believe unborn children are people. Both are obviously wrong. Thus, these denials of personhood are the same, and those fighting for Black folks then or fetal and embryonic life now are comparable.

Despite how deceptively persuasive this might seem to some, there are five reasons why the analogy between the anti-abortion and anti-slavery movements is inappropriate.

And this is putting aside the fact that the types of people making the comparison are those who would never have been abolitionists or civil rights activists.

During enslavement, conservatives were the enslavers, seeking to preserve traditional authority.

During the Civil Rights Movement, conservatives were the ones attacking sit-in protesters, marchers, and Freedom Riders, not joining them.

But putting that aside, here are the principal reasons why the fight against abortion is nothing like the fight against enslavement.

First, the personhood of fetal or embryonic life is not as apparent as that of a Black person.

No one who was remotely rational could have looked at a Black person in, say, 1820 and denied that that person was a person in the existential sense. After all, they would have had all the features and capacities of any other person, including consciousness of self and independent thought and action.

But fetal and embryonic life does not possess all those features. And while one can argue that not all are necessary to make one a person, the fact that no fetal or embryonic life possesses those features — while almost all born life does — makes evaluating their respective personhoods more complicated.

To say that a fetus is obviously a person — and that only irrational people would deny this — is to say Judaism is irrational. Because in the Jewish tradition, fetal and embryonic life has never been imbued with full personhood status on par with born life.

Likewise, to suggest the unborn are obviously persons in the complete moral sense is to say that most of Protestantism until the mid-1970s was irrational. Even the Southern Baptist Convention held a more liberal position on abortion and the status of fetal life until that time.

If rational people have long disagreed about the personhood status of the unborn — and given that this matter has vexed even the world’s great religions — fetal personhood is obviously not as cut-and-dried as the issue of whether a born Black person is a person.

The latter, when denied, has been rejected for purely cynical political reasons.

The former, when denied, has been dismissed for reasons rooted in philosophy, theology, and epistemology.

Second, abortion opponents are the ones whose position is consistent with enslavement.

It is the anti-abortion side that would require pregnant women to labor, literally, on behalf of another, against their will.

Under a regime of abortion abolition, women would become, if not slaves, certainly indentured servants, forced to sacrifice on behalf of fetal or embryonic life at the behest of state officials.

Unlike a woman who chooses to bear a child, thereby voluntarily sacrificing her body, a woman forced to do so is, in effect, someone else’s property — whether the developing fetus or the courts or lawmakers ruling on behalf of that fetus.

Third, forced breeding was central to enslavement. Thus, the anti-abortion movement is following in the footsteps of that system.

Under enslavement, Black women were forced to bear children for the benefit of white elites. The more children born to enslaved women, the more wealth possessed by their owners. Black women were denied autonomy, bred with enslaved men, or forced to birth the products of rape by their enslavers.

Then, after enslavement, when increasing the Black population no longer provided benefits to white property owners (and was even deemed a threat to their power), white supremacy pivoted, opting to limit Black reproduction.

Tens of thousands of women — disproportionately Black and Indigenous — were sterilized without their consent throughout the 20th century to limit their populations.

But either way, any time a woman is coerced, either to have children or not, her autonomy is violated.

It was the enslavers who did that, not the abolitionists.

It was the racists under Jim Crow who did that, not the civil rights movement.

And here, it is the anti-abortion fanatics who seek to limit women’s autonomy while the rest of us are fighting to preserve it.

Fourth, the clear majority of Black people reject the anti-abortion position.

To say that fighting to end abortion is no different from fighting to end slavery, even though most Black people support preserving legal abortion, suggests Black people don’t understand slavery as well as white conservatives.

Or Black people aren’t as upset about the horrible history of that practice as white conservatives are. If they were, presumably, they would understand that abortion is the same thing.

And if I have to explain why making these kinds of arguments would be inherently offensive, you’re clearly not prepared to engage in this discussion.

But thanks for reading this far.

And fifth, it is anti-abortion forces in red states seeking to force other states to abide by their laws, much as slave states tried to force free states to go along with theirs.

In the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, dozens of states have passed abortion bans. But many are going beyond simply ending the practice within their own borders.

Much as slave states sought to compel free states to go along with enslavement by returning runaways, anti-abortion states are passing laws empowering legal action against abortion providers elsewhere who provide abortions to women from states where the practice is outlawed.

Though not the same as forcing the return of women who run away from restrictive states to freer ones, these laws would create such a legal threat — of criminal prosecution or crippling civil liability — as to keep women from seeking to escape forced servitude in the first place.

It would be equivalent to Alabama passing a law in 1850 empowering any resident of Alabama to sue anyone in New York, Connecticut, or Massachusetts who helped facilitate the escape of an enslaved Black person.

We would recognize such a law as an injustice of the first order and those supporting it as evil and vile agents of Black oppression.

The same is true here.

Such laws would be an injustice of the first order, and those supporting them are evil and vile agents of women’s oppression.

Bottom line: abortion opponents are not the new abolitionists.

They are not following in the footsteps of those moral giants.

They are not fighting for liberty and justice but their opposites.

If anything, it is the anti-abortion movement whose politics, ideology, and desired laws mirror the thinking and actions of enslavers and white supremacists throughout history.

It is they who believe that persons should be forced to labor against their will.

It is they who believe in denying the bodily autonomy of others. Like this guy — a speaker at the “Million MAGA March” in 2020 — who openly says the endgame of the war on abortion is eliminating women’s rights entirely:

And it is they who must be defeated, completely and without apology, by the rest of us.