As Steve Benen notes, Rick Santorum's statements here are really pretty odious:
Every biologist in the world, Santorum said, would agree that a fertilized human egg is "a human life." Putting aside the dubious qualities of the observation, the former senator added, "The question is -- and this is what Barack Obama didn't want to answer -- is that, is that human life a person under the Constitution? And Barack Obama says no. Well if that person, human life is not a person, then I find it almost remarkable for a black man to say, 'No, we're going to decide who are people and who are not people.'"
So, in Santorum's worldview, African Americans can't be pro-choice because of slavery. That's quite an insight.
I find the slavery/abortion equivalence maddening, not because it's poignant but because it's dumb. Slavery wasn't merely about slaves not being "persons" in the manner we try to draw a line between the born and unborn, but about black people being genetically inferior. It suggests that there was ever any real question about whether or not blacks were actually people. They were property under the law, but never in any objective sense, and perhaps no one understood that better than the slave owners themselves. No one worries that their wheelbarrow is going to learn to read and someday escape. No one sires children with their plow. A woman's right to choose when and how she has children is not analogous to a slave owners' right to hold a human being as chattel.
As Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote last year, the comparison also ignores the vital role slaves themselves played in their own emancipation:
Abortion is a debate between two groups over the ultimate fate of embryos. The Anti-Slavery fight was a violent struggle between two groups over the fate of the enslaved, but with the enslaved as indispensable actors. Unlike embryos, black people were very capable of expressing their thoughts about their own personhood, and never held it in much doubt. Whereas the fight against abortion begins with pro-lifers asserting the rights of embryos, the fight against slavery doesn't begin with the abolitionists, but with the Africans themselves who resisted.
It is not surprising that Obama, who is black, would support a woman's right to choose when to bring a pregnancy to term. It is sadly less surprising that Rick Santorum would be unable to distinguish between embryos and people who actively asserted their own personhood. The narrative of emancipation is too dominated by the idea of heroic whites acting alone, an idea as packed with useless, guilt-ridden revisionism as the notion that the Confederacy was something other than treason in defense of slavery.
