Wild Faith (Talia Lavin) helped snap something into focus for me: the “abortion = slavery” argument isn’t just moral rhetoric. It’s a chassis for power, a way to turn a coalition into a disciplined legal-political machine. Lavin’s reporting treats the Christian Right as an organized movement with a long project to reshape law and public life, not a one-issue flare-up. If you’re building something that big, you need an emotional engine, and “abolition” is one of the strongest engines Americans recognize.

That’s why the slavery analogy keeps getting “reused” in opposite directions. Legal scholar Michael Stokes Paulsen calls it an “insistent” comparison with “a great deal of validity on many specific points,” and he says it should make anti-abortion advocates uncomfortable, because it frames incrementalism as complacency in a historic-scale evil.

Constitutional law professor Rebecca Zietlow flips the map: she argues a defining feature of U.S. slavery was the denial of reproductive autonomy, and that depriving people of reproductive liberty today can be treated as a “badge or incident of slavery” under the Thirteenth Amendment, going as far as to say forcing pregnancy to term “arguably imposes an involuntary servitude.”

Here’s the bridge that matters politically: one historical analysis by Robert P. Jones (Americans United) argues a key catalyst for the Christian Right’s rise wasn’t abortion or gay rights at all, but “religious freedom” claims intertwined with fights over tax exemptions for segregated Christian schools in the 1970s. Once you start there, “abolition” language stops looking accidental. It lets a movement with older institutional roots borrow the moral authority of America’s most celebrated moral victory.

What evidence would change your mind: records showing Roe v. Wade was the initial organizing catalyst for the Christian Right, or records showing the segregation/tax-exemption fights weren’t the trigger?