The Effect of Humanizing the Unborn

Editor's note. The following is excerpted from a December 23, 1994, interview with historian Paul Johnson appearing on the television program Think Tank, hosted by Ben Wattenberg. The interview drew on research Mr. Johnson had conducted which later was part of his book, A History of the American People.

The abortion issue has come and gone, and some people have said, "Oh, it's dead," and then it's reappeared again. And, of course, exactly the same thing happened with slavery in the 19th century. They would from time to time patch up a compromise, and the compromise would work for a time the issue would disappear from election rhetoric and then suddenly something would ignite it again and it would flare forth...

And I think one of the other interesting points to be made about slavery and abortion is this. The reason why slavery didn't disappear and why it eventually became an overwhelming issue was because the slave was humanized. Originally a lot of people in the North didn't see slavery in human terms. They were against it, but it was more a matter of statistics and economics and because most of them had never actually seen a man in a position of slavery.

And then along came books like Uncle Tom's Cabin and a lot of the propaganda produced by the northern emancipationists, who actually portrayed the slave in human terms. And once you can see the slave in human terms, you really can't tolerate slavery anymore. And I would say that similarly a process is going on over the abortion issue; that because of the advance of medical science, we now know to an increasing extent what actually takes place in the womb.

So we know that there is a creature in there, that it lives and breathes and exists, and that an act of abortion is something very brutal in itself. Now, you may say it [abortion] is still defensible, but it is being humanized. The fetus is being humanized, just as the slave was humanized. That is why I don't think this issue is going to go away.