Slavery, Abortion, and the Politics of Constitutional Meaning For the past forty years, prominent pro-life activists, judges, and politicians have invoked the history and legacy of American slavery to elucidate aspects of contemporary abortion politics. As is often the case, many of these popular analogies have been imprecise, underdeveloped, and historically simplistic. In Slavery, Abortion, and the Politics of Constitutional Meaning, provides the first book-length scholarly treatment of the parallels between slavery and abortion in American constitutional development. In this fascinating and wide-ranging study, Dyer demonstrates that slavery and abortion really are historically, philosophically, and legally intertwined in America. The nexus, however, is subtler and more nuanced than is often suggested, and the parallels involve deep principles of constitutionalism. is an assistant professor in the department of political science at the University of Missouri Columbia. He received a BA in political science and an MPA from the University of Oklahoma, and an MA and PhD in government from the University of Texas at Austin. Dyer s research has been published in Polity, Journal of Politics, PS: Political Science and Politics, Politics & Religion, and Perspectives on Political Science. He is the author of Natural Law and the Antislavery Constitutional Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and the editor of American Soul: The Contested Legacy of the Declaration of Independence (2012).
Slavery, Abortion, and the Politics of Constitutional Meaning JUSTIN BUCKLEY DYER University of Missouri Columbia
cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge University Press 32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, ny 10013-2473, usa Information on this title: /9781107680746 2013 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2013 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Dyer, Justin Buckley, 1983 Slavery, abortion, and the politics of constitutional meaning /. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-107-03194-4 (hardback) isbn 978-1-107-68074-6 (paperback) 1. Abortion Political aspects United States. 2. Abortion Law and legislation United States. 3. Slavery United States. 4. Slavery Law and legislation United States. 5. Constitutional law United States. I. Title. hq767.5.u5d93 2013 342.73 dc23 2012036929 isbn 978-1-107-03194-4 Hardback isbn 978-1-107-68074-6 Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
For Bennett and Pierce
Contents Acknowledgments Preface page ix xi 1 The Conscience of a Nation 1 2 Substance, Procedure, and Fourteenth Amendment Rights 14 3 Dred Scott, Lochner, and the New Abortion Liberty 43 4 Constitutional Disharmony after Roe 75 5 The Politics of Abortion History 105 6 Private Morality, Public Reasons 133 7 Personhood and the Ethics of Life 156 Index 189 vii
Acknowledgments I am grateful to friends and colleagues who were willing to offer advice and criticism at early stages of this project. Fellow panelists at the 2012 Southern Political Science Association annual conference shared penetrating insights and gave challenging suggestions for the arguments presented in Chapter 5. Stephen Simon and Joshua Hawley pushed back against and sharpened my thoughts on several of the constitutional issues in Chapter 2. J. Budziszewski, Greg Casey, and Gary Jacobsohn each gave meticulous and thoughtful comments on the penultimate draft, and the final product is better for it. Likewise, the counsel I received from the anonymous reviewers at Cambridge University Press has done much to improve the project. As always, Lew Bateman was a gracious and encouraging editor, and I owe special thanks to his editorial assistants, Anne Lovering Rounds and Shaun Vigil. My colleagues at the University of Missouri have been continually supportive, and I am often struck by how fortunate I am to work where I do. Michael O Brien, Dean of the College of Arts and Science, and John Petrocik, Chair of the Political Science Department, have fostered an ideal environment for intellectual pursuits. In addition to general support from the college ix
x Acknowledgments and department, I benefited from the research assistance of Katie Vandermolen and Patrick Shami. Although many people have had a hand in shaping this book, writing is a solitary affair, and I am sustained in my work by the faces I see when I come home. For her patience and commitment to the demands of academic life, I thank my wife and best friend, Kyle; and for the joy they have brought to our lives, I thank our sons, Bennett and Pierce, to whom I dedicate this book.
Preface There is a pervasive feeling among many conscientious citizens that the battle over the institution of slavery in the nineteenth century somehow sheds light on the contours of contemporary American politics. The Supreme Court s landmark decision in Roe v. Wade (1973), which established a constitutional right to abortion, is repeatedly mentioned in the same breath as the Court s notorious pro-slavery ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). Prominent pro-life politicians and judges routinely accuse opponents of engaging in Dred Scott like legal reasoning, and activists of various stripes proclaim their commitment to a standard of lawfulness that transcends any mere Supreme Court opinion. Meanwhile, many participants in the anti-abortion movement claim to be following in the footsteps of the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, even as those who resort to violence see themselves as the progeny of the radical abolitionist and domestic terrorist John Brown. For many Americans, the abortion controversy touches a deep nerve, and the search for historical analogs continually leads back to the memory of slavery and abolition. Similar, perhaps, to the ways in which the legacies of Nazism and Fascism are haphazardly thrown around in our political discourse, many of the contemporary invocations of slavery are, no doubt, sloppy attempts to score xi
xii Preface partisan points over ideological rivals. Still, slavery and abortion do have a historical, philosophical, and legal nexus in American history. That nexus, however, is subtler and more nuanced than is often suggested, and it is bound up with the meaning and legacy of the Constitution s Fourteenth Amendment, which has become the primary vehicle for the Supreme Court s modern abortion jurisprudence. The story of how an amendment to the Constitution designed to protect the civil rights of newly freed slaves led to the overturning of state abortion laws nearly a century later is complex, to say the least, but one of the key intellectual developments was the rejection of the natural law tradition by influential thinkers in the early twentieth century. For it was the natural law tradition diverse as it was that provided the intellectual scaffolding for both the Fourteenth Amendment and state anti-abortion laws (many of which were written during the era of Reconstruction), and it was the rejection of this tradition by the intellectual class that preceded the embrace of abortion rights during the latter half of the twentieth century. The following chapters chronicle the processes of constitutional thought and development that led from the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 to the line of Supreme Court cases inaugurated, a century later, in Roe v. Wade. The story, however, begins at the end, so to speak, with the complicated life of Norma McCorvey and the ubiquitous sense among many that the current controversies over abortion are somehow illuminated by the history and legacy of American slavery.