Dr Stevensen is the one whom I referred to at our meeting. She did a great job on the topic of “The Roots of Slavery and the Holocaust of abortion.” She treated the two not just as a parallel situation (destruction of freedom, now destruction of life) as we are oft wont to do; but as a cause and effect: the shame of motherhood in the slave population wearing its scars has impacted on the dignity of motherhood (negatively, since the slave owner would care less about the mother than the lucrative sale of her child, and since her own relationship to child was violently severed. There is much to look at in this perspective, more than the parallel (and powerful) situations of loss of personhood as a basis for tolerating either slavery or abortion.

Fr Denis