During his 1858 debates with Abraham Lincoln, Senator Stephen Douglas said, "whoever wants slavery has a right to have it." Douglas owned no slaves himself and disapproved of the institution: "We have prohibited it in Illinois (and) I think we have done wisely." In other words, Stephen Douglas was pro-choice; personally opposed but didn't want to impose his views on others. As to the morality of the practice, Douglas said, "you must allow the people to decide for themselves whether it is a good or an evil."

Sound familiar?

Douglas' view of "choice" was to the slave as today's version is to the unborn child. In each case, the individual with the most at stake has the least to say about it. In each case, an entire group of people is classed as sub-human or, in the words of the Dred Scott decision, "a subordinate and inferior class of beings (with) no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them."

Indeed, how else could the actions against slaves or unborn children possibly be justified except by denying their humanity? And, in each case, the "pro-choice" argument uses the language of freedom and constitutional rights. Lincoln rightly called that "a specious and fantastic arrangement of words by which a man can prove a horse chestnut to be a chestnut horse."

A woman should be able to do as she sees fit with her own body, but not with someone else's body. And there's the rub. There are two distinct human beings involved in an abortion. Unfortunately, the law has declared one of them to be "subordinate and inferior" and having "no rights or privileges."

In both "Dred Scott v. Sandford" and "Roe v. Wade," the U.S. government effectively claimed the right to redefine the meaning of "human." Each time, it virtually erased an entire category of human beings from existence. How can anyone approve of such an outrageous assertion of power?

Abortion supporters like to insist that the beginning of life is a purely religious question, beyond the competence of the state to decide, and therefore out of bounds for the purpose of making public policy. But this is a dodge, an attempt to discredit pro-lifers by portraying them as religious extremists.

So when does life begin? As anyone who has taken high school biology should know, life begins at conception. Insects, starfish, reptiles, birds, cats, humans, name the species. Though there is a religious component to it in discussions of the soul, the beginning of life is explainable by science without reference to religion at all regardless of how desperate abortion supporters are to dismiss it as a "merely" religious issue.

It is not a matter of religion (still less of politics), but of biology. And with medical science allowing unborn babies to survive ex utero ever earlier, it is becoming more and more obvious that science is on the side of life. The extremists are those who deny this.

Defenders of slavery and abortion also are alike in their use of code words to hide the brutal realities which they are defending. Slaves were "servants." Abortion is "choice." Slavery was the South's "peculiar institution." Abortion is "reproductive health." Both slavery and abortion were declared by the Supreme Court to be constitutional rights of the people though, of course, "the people" did not include those whose lives were most affected by the decisions. In short, "choice" is a smokescreen and abortion is no more a proper object of personal choice than slavery was.

The legal, organized, and systematic killing of innocent and defenseless human beings is simply barbaric. We should be as ashamed of it as we now are of slavery. Those who oppose it are not the extremists. We deny no one's legitimate rights. We simply recognize the difference between horse chestnuts and chestnut horses.