Abraham Lincoln noted, with sorrow, that many of the best educated Americans of his day did not understand slavery because they had never truly discovered the slave.  In like manner, most proponents of abortion have never disvovered the child aborted.  When they make that discovery, they usually turn pro-life. Much has been written in recent years about the parallels between slavery of the past century and abortion today. In 1857, the Taney (U.S. Supreme) Court attempted to "settle" the slavery issue by ruling 7-2 that Dred Scott, a black man from St Louis, was not a legal person but, instead, was the property of his owner. In 1973, the Burger Court attempted to settle the abortion issue by ruling, also 7-2, that an unborn child lacks personhood and, in effect, is the property of its mother.  As such, she may either save her child or have it killed. Opponents of slavery were accused of "imposing their morality" on slaveholders and their "pro-choice" sympathizers.  Today, prolifers bear the same charge for urging mothers not to have their own offspring put to death.  This is a peculiar charge indeed, and by those who cry "poor taste" if pictures of aborted children are shown publicity. Slavery were not content to own and work their slaves.  They demanded and held unrestricted control over every aspect of their slave's lives.  In like manner, pro-abortionists oppose all legal attempts to protect unborn children at any point during pregnancy - or to allow requirements that mothers be accurately informed about abortion and its aftermath.  Abortion opponent and syndicated columnist George Will has labeled this anomaly the woman's "right not to know." The Constitution came to mean whatever pro-choice (slavery) advocates chose to make it.  Whereas Lincoln stated that his entire philosophy was based on the Declaration of Independence, slavery defender John C. Calhoun declared:  "There is not a word of truth in it."  As to the premise that "all men are created equal" and deserve "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,"  Calhoun insisted that "Men are not born.  Infants are born.  They are not born free.  White infants, they are incapable of freedom."  With simillar disregard for ethics, science, and logic, Justice Blackbmun and his Court majority spotted the word "privacy" in a penumbra, of all things, to the to the 14th Amendment and deemed it their best hope to justify a woman's "right" to an uncontested abortion.  As to when human life begins, Justice Blackmun refused to address the issue.  Since passage of Roe vs Wade (1973), pro-abortionists have lauded abortion for its "mercy" to unwanted children, much as plantation owners praised their practice of enslaving the poor blacks in acts of "positive good." Slave owners were at liberty - and some used their liberty - to beat, starve, yoke, bell, and gag their property.  They could tear out their slaves' teeth for easy identification, rub pepper and turpentine into their stripe wounds, draw the claws of angry cats over their naked bodies, brand them with hot irons, cut off their ears, knock out their eyes, revive them after beatings in order to beat them more, and use them for targets after hunting them down with blood hounds. Today in America, unborn children, the property of their mothers, may be scraped into a thick paste; torn, pulled, or cut into "manageable" pieces; poisoned and burned alive (saline); drowned, sufficated, crushed, choked, or left to starve to death in a "surgical bucket."  All are means of "cleaning the uterus" and "eliminating the remains of conception."  In comparison, most slaves were fortunate. American Medical Association of 1871 While Lincoln was fighting to free the slaves, the American Medical Association of his day was fighting to save unborn children from the hands of abortionists.  Wrote the AMA in 1871:  "These men should should be marked as Cain was marked;  they should be made the outcasts of society  ...  respectable men should cease to consult with them, should cease to speak to them, should cease to notice except with contempt... "Resolved, That we repudiate and denounce the conduct of abortionists, and that we hold no intercourse with them professionally or otherwise and that we will, whenever an opportunity presents, guard and protect the public against the machinations of these characters by pointing out the physical and moral ruin which follows in their wake." Planned Parenthood, Racism and Abortion The world's chief abortion advocate Planned Parenthood was founded by "Radiant rebel" Margaret Sanger, self-proclaimed eugenicist and adulterous "free love" queen, who said of her new birth control organization:  "Our objective is unlimited sexual gratification without the burden of unwanted children." "I love being ravaged by romances," she declared, adding that "only individuals count, not families."  She termed marriage "the most degenerating influence in the social order." While moving steadily from one lover's bed to another and urging women to use their "biological powers" to take control of society, Sanger praised Nazi theories of race superiority and set out to eliminate "the dead weight of human waste," in her judgement, among poor immigrant families, "the Negro population," and other minorities she labeled "inferior." In America today, blacks are aborted about three times as frequently as whites, while women of Spanish American, American Indian, and Puerto Rican descent also share uncommonly high abortion and sterilization rates. Given to drugs, alcoholism, and mysticism, Sanger's final years were marked by depression, bitterness, and lunacy.