Abortion Bans Constitute Involuntary Servitude

Part III of How to Talk About Abortion Bans

How we talk about abortion bans matters. It's time we all call abortion bans what they really are. This is our superpower. This article is Part III of the series How to Talk About Abortion Bans, and was made possible by the generosity rePro-Truth's supporters.

Outline

1. Reproduction is Labor

2. Forced Labor is Involuntary Servitude

3. Abortion bans, Reproductive Slavery, and Involuntary Servitude

4. *Abortion Bans Constitute Involuntary Servitude

5. Involuntary Reproductive Servitude and the Thirteenth Amendment

Reproduction is Labor

Gestation is hard work¹ — arduous, tiring, unceasing labor that is often obstructive of other work.² And sleep. And mobility. And normalcy in general.

24 hours a day.

For 270 days straight.

“Pregnancy's metabolic toll resembles that of an ultramarathon”³ and requires “the same amount of endurance as extreme sports.”⁴ As the author of a 2019 study on human endurance explained, “To think about pregnancy in the same terms that we think about Tour de France cyclists and triathletes makes you realize how incredibly demanding pregnancy is on the body.”⁵

Pregnancy is a long, “ongoing stress test that taxes body systems”⁶ as the pregnant person’s body works hard in service of the ever increasing physiological needs of the developing fetus. For example:

• To ensure that the fetus receives adequate oxygenation and nutrients, the pregnant body labors to produce and maintain a 50% increase in blood volume; and the pregnant person’s heart works overtime to circulate this immense excess of blood.⁷

• To transfer enough calcium from the pregnant person’s body to the fetus for its developing skeletal system, the pregnant person’s kidneys toil to reclaim more and more calcium from the renal filtrate; and the pregnant person’s gastrointestinal tract labors hard to double its surface area and completely restructure itself in order to maximize calcium absorption.⁸⁹

Those are just a few examples of the intensive, physical labor of gestation — arduous work undertaken by every single system in the pregnant body.

The oneruous, fatiguing, continuous “ultramarathon” of gestation finally culminates in the herculean work of delivery. “Labor of 12 or more grueling hours of contractions is not uncommon.”¹⁰ “Indeed, the actual process of delivery demands work of the most intense and physical kind.”¹¹

And all of this reproductive labor carries risks to the person performing that labor. In fact, the labor of gestation and birth are “more dangerous than” the labor required for “nearly every job in the United States.”¹²¹³

Forced Labor is Involuntary Servitude

Gestation is continuous, risky, laborious service to another, culminating in delivery— “work of the most intense and physical kind.”¹⁴

Many people will undertake the “ultramarathon” of reproductive labor willingly. When a government bans abortion, however, it forces people to perform this labor involuntarily.

There is a term for forcing a person to perform labor and put their body in service of another person against their will: involuntary servitude.

Involuntary servitude is:

• “the control of the labor and services of one [person] for the benefit of another, and the absence of a legal right to the disposal of [one’s] own person, property and services”;¹⁵

• “a condition of enforced compulsory service of one to another”;¹⁶ and

• “that control by which the personal service of one [person] is disposed of or coerced for another's benefit which is the essence of involuntary servitude.”¹⁷

“Women differ from men in that the services they are capable of performing include the production of human beings,”¹⁸ a physically risky and labororious service resembling “an ultramarathon”¹⁹ and which requires “the same amount of endurance as extreme sports.”²⁰ When a government bans abortion, it compels women to perform risky, laborious production, placing women into a state of involuntary servitude.

Abortion bans create “that control by which the personal service of one [person] is disposed of or coerced for another's benefit which is the essence of involuntary servitude.”

This involuntary servitude is not imposed equally; rather, through abortion bans, the government selectively imposes a state of involuntary servitude upon one group of people based on a biological trait.

America has been here before.

In fact, we had a whole, big war about it.

According to the National Park Service, 642,427 Union soldiers gave their lives so that all persons could be free from slavery and involuntary servitude.

“What is slavery if not claiming dominion over a body that isn’t yours?” asks Ja’han Jones in We need to call abortion bans what they are: Slavery.²¹ In the case of abortion bans, Jones explains, “lawmakers are claiming ownership over the bodies of pregnant people because they claim to have a vested interest in the babies those bodies can produce. It is literally forced labor” (emphasis added).²²

It is forced labor that is selectively imposed upon a particular group of people based on a biological trait:

• When the government forced Black people, based on a biological trait (skin color), to involuntarily perform labor and put their body in service of others, against their will, the government subordinated Black people to a biologically-determined servant caste— “a group which, by virtue of a status of birth, is” deprived of equality and “held subject to a special duty to serve others and not themselves.”²³

• When the government forces women-people, based on a biological trait (having a uterus), to involuntarily perform labor and put their bodies in service of others, against their will, the government subordinates women-people into a biologically-determined servant caste— “a group which, by virtue of a status of birth, is” deprived of equality and “held subject to a special duty to serve others and not themselves.”²⁴

This biological caste system of involuntary reproductive servitude is a relic of hereditary chattel slavery.

“Where is the precedent for the appropriation of a person’s body by the state? Where did we learn in this country that the state could define a fetus as a distinct matter of law and property and state intervention?” asks historian Jennifer Morgan.²⁵ “We learned that from the long and violent history of hereditary racial slavery” (emphasis added).²⁶

“Enslavers’ legal control over black women’s reproductive capacity and the law’s failure to afford black women any legal right to bodily autonomy cast an archetype for laws that compel pregnant people to give birth,” explains Dorothy E. Roberts, the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology and the Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at the University of Pennsylvania (emphasis added).²⁷

Forced reproductive labor was the backbone of hereditary chattel slavery in America.

“To be clear, the institution of chattel slavery was a uniquely dehumanizing and cruel institution that defies any analogy… [But] the deprivation of reproductive autonomy was a central component of the institution of slavery,”²⁸ and involuntary reproductive servitude is a relic of that system.²⁹ “To this day, people who lack institutionalized power — disproportionately likely to be people of color and descendants of enslaved people — are more vulnerable to coercion and the deprivation of reproductive rights.”³⁰

Abortion bans, Reproductive Slavery, and Involuntary Servitude

Long before states began to ban abortion in the latter half of the 19th century, abortion and contraception were already banned for enslaved women and girls.

“Because the international slave trade was prohibited after 1808, the only way to increase the slave labor force was to control the wombs of enslaved women.”³¹ “Breeding slaves became more economically efficient than profiting from their labor.”³² “It was seen as a wealth maximizing strategy that completely disregarded the mother” in order to benefit others.³³

Under the economic system of chattel slavery, each birth enhanced an enslavers’ wealth and, hence, his power. Nevertheless, enslaved women found ways to resist their reproductive exploitation.

“Women knew that enslavers valued and depended upon their ability to bear children and increase the slave population” and that “[n]ew mothers risked eventual separation from their children.”³⁴ “[I]f they had daughters, they knew any sexual violence they had experienced could become their daughter’s experience as well.”³⁵

With all of this in mind, “enslaved women participated in acts of resistance specific to the labor demanded of them. From avoiding sexual intercourse, to terminating pregnancy, to taking the lives of their own infants, some women resisted slavery by working to control their participation in producing more enslaved children… Women used this kind of resistance, therefore, to combat slaveholders’ control over their own bodies and protect their potential children from the horrors of bondage.”³⁶

One such means of reproductive resistance was cotton root. “Cotton root was used as a contraceptive by chewing on the fresh root bark. To induce the abortifacient properties, the root and seeds were used in a decoction.”³⁷

In Plantation Medicine and Health Care in the Old South, Glenda Sullivan notes:

“By terminating a pregnancy that would have resulted in an additional worker for the slave owner, and by utilizing the plant that provided him income, the female slave was exercising some control over her body and her enslaved situation.”³⁸

Through abortion, enslaved women “challenged the authority of their enslavers[]” and “contested the terms and logic upon which the white supremacist patriarchy depended.”³⁹ This infuriated enslavers.⁴⁰ Abortion was a threat to their wealth, power, and authority.

Enslavers frequently searched slaves’ quarters looking for and confiscating abortifacients like cotton root, and enlisted like-minded, White male obstetricians to try to interrupt and stop abortions in progress that enslaved women self-induced.⁴¹

Today, forced-labor states, with the help of anti-abortion doctors, are filing lawsuits arguing that women's access to abortifacients is a threat to their wealth, power, and authority.

For example, three Republican states are arguing - in court documents - that women should not have access to abortifacients, because abortion is a threat to their federal funding and political power. To maintain and increase their wealth, power, authority to push people around, these states seek “to control the wombs” of women, forcing them into procreative tools of the State.

This is involuntary servitude, “that control by which the personal service of [women] is disposed of or coerced for another’s benefit which is the essence of involuntary servitude.” This is the subordination of women, based on a biological trait, into a biologically-determined servant caste— “a group which, by virtue of a status of birth, is” deprived of equality and “held subject to a special duty to serve others and not themselves.”⁴²

During the time of slavery, “the law legitimated the white use of the Black woman’s body to increase the property owned by white men.”⁴³ “Many enslavers raped their Black female slaves… and compelled them to carry these pregnancies to completion to profit from the children. The impunity of rape extended not only to the slaveholder, but also ‘his sons, the overseer, or any other white man.’”⁴⁴ “By the time the Civil War broke out, ten percent of the slave population was legally deemed ‘mulatto.’”⁴⁵

In late November 1860, not long after the election of Abraham Lincoln, Mary Chesnut wrote of the prolific rape and forced breeding of enslaved women and girls. Mary was the wife of James Chestnut Jr., a U.S. senator for South Carolina. He “resigned his seat to protest Lincoln’s election and to more firmly ally himself with South Carolina’s drive for secession,” and would go on to serve as a member of the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States.⁴⁶

Mary was a staunch supporter of slavery who opposed abortion, yet she often wrote frankly about the horrors of slavery in her diary.⁴⁷ In a November entry in her diary, Mary wrote:

“God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system, a wrong and an iniquity!… [O]ur men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines; and the mulattoes one sees in every family partly resemble the white children. Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household but her own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds. My disgust sometimes is boiling over.”⁴⁸

During slavery, the law empowered White enslavers to force women and girls to bear their offspring through rape.

Today, abortion bans again empower men to force women and girls to bear their offspring through rape.

A rapist tells his victim, with brutal efficiency, the her body exists to be used in the service of others, to carry out their will, and that what she wants does not matter. — An abortion ban tells a rape victim, with brutal efficiency, that her government agrees with her rapist.

Abortion bans force rape victims into the service of men as sexual and procreative objects, biologically bound to satisfy the needs of others; and abortion bans force rape victims into the service of the State as procreative instruments used to carry out the State's interest in “protecting life,” biologically bound to satisfy the needs of others.

This is involuntary servitude, “that control by which the personal service of [women] is disposed of or coerced for another’s benefit which is the essence of involuntary servitude.” This is the subordination of women, based on a biological trait, into a biologically-determined servant caste— “a group which, by virtue of a status of birth, is” deprived of equality and “held subject to a special duty to serve others and not themselves.”⁴⁹

Brianne M. Posey, Associate Professor of Criminology and Justice Studies, notes in Reproductive slavery: Historical and present-day discussions of the Black female body as a condition of confinement, forced reproductive labor “was frequently used in the trade of child trafficking. When enslaved women gave birth, some owners opted to sell the child… After the child was sold to a new owner, the previous owner gained a profit.”⁵⁰

“In 1851, in her compelling speech known as Ain’t I A Woman, Sojourner Truth implored the crowd of men and women gathered at the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio to understand the gravity and depravity of American slavery on Black women’s reproductive autonomy and privacy. Reported by newspapers and recorded through history, Ms. Truth stated that she had borne 13 children and seen nearly each one ripped from her arms.”⁵¹

Today, that “racialized child-selling is still very much ongoing. Accordingly, as many modern opponents of abortion have touted adoption as an ‘ethical’ and ‘compassionate’ solution to unwanted pregnancies, the relationship between adoption and brokering for profit is strongly connected.”⁵²

During the Dobbs oral argument, Justice Amy Coney Barrett opined that forcing a pregnant person to carry a child to term would not be a problem because they could give the baby up for adoption. Noting the plaintiff’s argument that forced motherhood hindered women’s access to the workplace and to equal opportunities, Barret suggested ‘Why don’t the safe haven laws take care of that problem?’”⁵³

In the Dobbs decision, which ruled that states are free to pass laws instituting forced reproductive labor, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that “States have increasingly adopted ‘safe haven’ laws, which generally allow women to drop off babies anonymously; and that a woman who puts her newborn up for adoption today has little reason to fear that the baby will not find a suitable home.” In a footnote, Alito quoted a 2008 government report on the demand for adoption in the U.S.:

“[N]early 1 million women were seeking to adopt children in 2002 (i.e., they were in demand for a child), whereas the domestic supply of infants relinquished at birth or within the first month of life and available to be adopted had become virtually nonexistent” (emphasis added).⁵⁴

In other words, taking away women’s right to autonomy and self-ownership is not a big deal because women who are forced into reproductive slavery to produce a product (human beings) for the state can just give their babies away after birth. And these women shouldn't worry about the fate of the babies they are forced to birth, because lots of people want to purchase those babies through adoption.

Barrett’s rhetorical question during the Dobbs oral arguments, as well as the Dobbs decision authored by Alito, “reflect[] a callous disregard of the experience of women of color throughout our nation’s history. Beginning with the tragic cruelty of chattel slavery, women of color have often not only been forced to give birth, but also to give up their children after they were born… Women of color are also disproportionately likely to have their children taken away from them by state officials… [D]enying women reproductive autonomy not only reflects our [nation's] history of gender based subordination but [it] is also inextricably linked to the history of slavery and racial subordination.”⁵⁵

“[W]ithin the capitalist math of supply and demand” inherent in Barrett’s and Alito's comments, forcing predominantly disadvantaged women into involuntary reproductive servitude by “outlawing abortion [will] solve the adoption ‘supply’ issue.”⁵⁶ In this equation of family separation, infants exist as a product supplied for the enjoyment of prospective parents, and women exist to supply prospective parents with infants.

This is involuntary servitude, “that control by which the personal service of [women] is disposed of or coerced for another’s benefit which is the essence of involuntary servitude.” This is the subordination of women, based on a biological trait, into a biologically-determined servant caste— “a group which, by virtue of a status of birth, is” deprived of equality and “held subject to a special duty to serve others and not themselves.”⁵⁷

Some enslavers chose not to sell the enslaved children born from forced reproductive labor, because it allowed them to replenish their captive labor force and increase capital without having to incur the costs of purchasing more slaves.⁵⁸ Anti-abortion, forced-labor policies of all stripes are, after all, inherently capitalistic.⁵⁹⁶⁰⁶¹

Additionally, there was an “economic interest in not selling their slaves' children,” because “it decreased the likelihood of [slaves] running away or committing suicide. Instead, [enslaved children] would remain enslaved on the same plantation as their mother and used for physical or sexual labor. Albeit the result was still the same in terms of labor exploitation, as they were ultimately used to secure prosperity for their owners.”⁶²

Today, forced-birth advocates argue that the State has a financial interest in forcing a group of people, based on a biological trait, to perform labor and put their bodies in service of others, against their will.

In October 2024, rePro-Truth broke the news and subsequently reported that attorneys general for three Republican states are arguing - in a court document - that the teenage birthrate in their states had not risen as much as they would have liked in the wake of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade. Lamenting that not enough people have been forced to produce new humans, the attorneys general assert that this constitutes a “sovereign injury” to their states because their alottment of federal funding might diminish. As rePro-Truth noted at the time:

The Plaintiff States’ argument here is functionally a slaver’s argument: A caste of humans must perform unpaid, involuntary labor so that the Master can maintain power and reap financial benefits.

Additionally, in 2023, the Charlotte Lozier Institute (CLI) - the “research” arm of the lobbying group SBA Pro-Life America, a powerful group that opposes reproductive health, rights, and justice, and works to get like-minded Republicans elected to office - submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine., a case brought by anti-abortion groups with the goal of restricting women’s access to the medication abortion drug mifepristone.

In the amicus brief, CLI argues that forcing women to perform the risky, grueling labor of gestation and birth would be financially beneficial to the government. If the future laborer that a woman is forced to birth gets a full time job that pays “$1,070 per week or $55,640 per year,” CLI states in the brief, and “[a]ssuming a tax burden of 25%,” then this future laborer “would provide the government with $13,910 per year” in tax revenue.

“[I]t is also important to consider,” CLI adds in its brief, “the economic effect of parenting. The presence of a child may lead to an increased sense of responsibility, thus increasing economic productivity.”

CLI's argument is that involuntaey reproductive servitude is profitable for the State by replenishing the labor force as a source of tax revenue, and that forcing women to become parents will increase their economic activity, again benefitting the State.

This is involuntary servitude, “that control by which the personal service of [women] is disposed of or coerced for another's benefit which is the essence of involuntary servitude.” This is the subordination of women, based on a biological trait, into a biologically-determined servant caste— “a group which, by virtue of a status of birth, is” deprived of equality and “held subject to a special duty to serve others and not themselves.”⁶³

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Abortion Bans Constitute Involuntary Servitude

As the above examples illustrate, “[e]nslavers’ legal control over black women’s reproductive capacity and the law’s failure to afford black women any legal right to bodily autonomy cast an archetype for laws that compel [all] pregnant people to give birth.” ⁶⁴

Abortion bans constitute involuntary reproductive servitude and “perpetuate structures of slavery.”⁶⁵ “And like slave breeding, modern [anti-abortion] reproductive politics are shaped around systems where African American women are extended liminal personhood.”⁶⁶

The expropriation of one's body for others’ benefit is an injury to the core of one's personhood.

“[E]ach person is the morally rightful owner of himself.”⁶⁷ This “idea of self-ownership is inextricably linked with our society's ideals of individual worth and dignity.”⁶⁸

“If I am the moral owner of myself, and therefore of this right arm, then… no one is entitled, without my consent, to press it into… anybody else’s service, even when my failure to lend it voluntarily to others would be morally wrong.”⁶⁹

Professor Andrew Koppelman, in Forced Labor: A Thirteenth Amendment Defense of Abortion, explains, “To give control of even part of my body to someone else is to treat me as property, as a thing rather than a person” (emphasis added).⁷⁰ “Moreover, when such control has been exerted in the past, its object has typically been a caste of persons that the society regarded as inferior and unworthy. Involuntary servitude is an insult as well as an injury. The insult is even more flagrant when an already subordinated class (Black people, women) is singled out for such subjection. That is how slaves were treated before the Civil War.”⁷¹

“[W]hen a woman is forced against her will to carry a child to term, control over her body and its (re)productive capacities is seized from her and directed to a purpose not her own”; forced into a state of involuntary reproductive servitude by the state, she suffers the deprivation of liberty and equality.⁷²

While the injury inflicted on women by forced gestation and birth post-Dobbs “is lesser in degree than that inflicted [] by antebellum slavery… it is the same kind of injury.”⁷³ “In both cases” — chattel slavery and involuntary reproductive servitude — Koppelman explains, “the insult is the same: to the extent that either blacks or women are regarded as instruments for satisfying the needs of others rather than as autonomous agents, their dignity as free persons is violated. They are treated as things rather than as persons” (emphasis added).⁷⁴

There are legitimate uses of the strong arm of the law. Abortion bans are not one of them, because abortion bans create “that control by which the personal service of one [person] is disposed of or coerced for another’s benefit which is the essence of involuntary servitude.”⁷⁵

Abortion bans constitute ‘that control by which the personal service of one person is disposed of or coerced for another’s benefit which is the essence of involuntary servitude,’ and subordinate one group of people, based on a biological trait, to a biologically-determined servant caste— ‘a group which, by virtue of a status of birth, is held subject to a special duty to serve others and not themselves.’

In his book, Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America, litigator and writer Elie Mystal lays bare the illegitimacy of abortion bans:

“I do not call myself ‘pro-choice.’ I am against ‘forced birth.’ The choices I’d make, what with my complete inability to incubate cells-and given what my wife would call my ‘generous, minutes-long contribution of genetic material’ to my two children― my theoretical choices are entirely irrelevant. What I can say with some moral clarity is that the powers of the state cannot be legitimately used to force a person to perform nine months of labor, unpaid, against their will. It is barbaric to force a person who doesn’t proactively want to do it to go through the gestation and birthing process. It is unconscionable to force a person who didn’t want to get pregnant in the first place or whose pregnancy is the result of a violent crime to do this. No government should have the authority to do that; no government should even be able to muster the gall to ask. The argument that getting pregnant allows the government to commandeer a person’s internal organs is simply beyond the scope of just law. Any state that tries should be resisted to the last” (emphasis added).⁷⁶

There are effective, non-coercive ways to protect both unborn and born life that do not perpetuate structures of slavery and do not involve the deprivation of liberty and equality or the oppression of one group of people, based on a biological trait;⁷⁷ ways of protecting life that honor the personhood of women and acknowledge that “each person is the morally rightful owner of himself.”⁷⁸

It matters that forced-labor politicians, activists, and groups instead choose to oppress, choose to discriminate, and choose to treat one group of human beings as property owned by others by forcing them into involuntary servitude.

Those aren’t moral choices.

Those aren’t respectable choices.

Those are oppressors’ choices. Slavers’ choices. Rapists’ choices. Traffickers’ choices.

Abortion bans engender a biological caste system of involuntary reproductive servitude, a relic of hereditary chattel slavery.

• Abortion bans establish “the control of the labor and services of one [person] for the benefit of another, and the absence of a legal right to the disposal of [one’s] own person, property and services.”⁷⁹

• Abortion bans create “a condition of enforced compulsory service of one to another.”⁸⁰

• Abortion bans constitute “that control by which the personal service of one [person] is disposed of or coerced for another’s benefit which is the essence of involuntary servitude.”⁸¹

• Abortion bans subjugate one group of people, based on a biological trait, to a biologically-determined servant caste— “a group which, by virtue of a status of birth, is” deprived of equality and “held subject to a special duty to serve others and not themselves.”⁸²

Gestation is continuous, risky, laborious service to another, culminating in delivery— “work of the most intense and physical kind.”⁸³ No one should be forced to do it. Because “[w]omen are not some piece of collectively owned community property”⁸⁴ or procreative tools for others’ use.

“It is not for a legislator, a judge, or a Commander from The Handmaid’s Tale to tell [] women what to do with their bodies… any more so than society could -- or should -- force them to serve as a human tissue bank or to give up a kidney for the benefit of another.”⁸⁵ Nor can the State, interested in “protecting” life, legitimately compel one group of people, based on a biological trait, to do the State’s work of “protecting.” To do so would place that group of people who the State is forcing to do the State’s work against their will, based on a biological trait, into a biologically-determined servant caste.

Those who support restricting abortions can assert that they personally believe that their desire to “save” life justifies the imposition of “that control by which the personal service of one [person] is disposed of or coerced for another’s benefit which is the essence of involuntary servitude”⁸⁶ — but they can not deny that that's exactly what they're doing by banning abortion. The history of hereditary racial slavery and involuntary servitude bears this out. Make them own it.

Involuntary Reproductive Servitude and the Thirteenth Amendment

The existence of forced reproductive labor and “the absence of the right to bodily integrity for the formerly enslaved,” notes historian Jennifer Morgan, “should have been rectified in the aftermath of the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation,” as well as the enactment of the Thirteenth Amendment.⁸⁷

THIRTEENTH AMENDMENT

Section 1

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2

Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

As the Court has explained, “the word servitude is of larger meaning than slavery, as the latter is popularly understood in this country . . . . It was very well understood that . . . the purpose of the article might have been evaded, if only the word slavery had been used.’”⁸⁸

“Women differ from men in that the services they are capable of performing include the production of human beings. The Thirteenth Amendment, however, draws no distinction between the powers of a man’s back and arms and those of a woman’s uterus.”⁸⁹

“During debates over the Thirteenth Amendment and the 1866 Civil Rights Act implementing that amendment, members of the Reconstruction Congress often spoke of the denial of reproductive freedom as one of the worst aspects of slavery.”⁹⁰

Some members of the Reconstruction Congress opposed the Thirteenth Amendment. During Congressional debates, opponents fretted about the radical egalitarianism at the heart of the amendment.

Senator Howard, for example, worried that if the Thirteenth Amendment were adopted, “a woman would be equal to a man, would be as free as a man. A wife would be equal to her husband and as free as her husband before the law."⁹¹

Representative White also chafed at the idea that the amendment would free women from their subordinated status as mere property (of men). In a statement breathtakingly lacking in self-awareness, Rep. White said, “A husband has a right of property in the service of his wife; he has the right to the management of his household affairs. . . . All of these rights rest upon the same basis as a man's right of property in the service of slaves.”⁹²

These Reconstructionists were concerned with upholding their own patriarchal status that was threatened by the Thirteenth Amendment's radically egalitarian proposition that all persons, regardless of race or gender, be freed from “the badges or incidents of slavery” and involuntary servitude.⁹³ As Elie Mystal observes in his book, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution, “One of the clear failures of the Reconstructionists is that they remained unreconstructed sexists”;⁹⁴ after all, “once you start giving women equal protection of the laws, the whole damn patriarchy starts to crumble.”⁹⁵

Nevertheless, with full knowledge of the radically egalitarian implications of the amendment, the Thirteenth Amendment was passed by Congress and ratified by the states.

Section 2 of the amendment tasks Congress with passing legislation to bring the amendment into full effect. But historical gains are often followed by intense backlash⁹⁶⁹⁷ and the Reconstruction was ultimately overthrown.⁹⁸ And so, instead of abolishing the practice of forced reproductive labor and rectifying “the absence of the right to bodily integrity for the formerly enslaved,” we find “the erosion of [] claims to autonomy—rooted in the experience of the enslaved—expanding exponentially into the lives of [] Americans across the racial spectrum.”⁹⁹

Such policy violence - “a response by legal and political elites to the advancement of historically oppressed groups” - has long been “the primary vehicle utilized to strip marginalized groups of civil rights, including fundamental constitutional protections.”¹⁰⁰

[*Of historical note, it took nearly a century for the courts to begin to extend Fourteenth Amendment protections to women.¹⁰¹ The Dobbs decision reverses this progress.¹⁰²¹⁰³ Thirteenth Amendment protections were not extended to people with developmental disabilities until nearly a century after the passage” of the amendment.¹⁰⁴ The Supreme Court, in Roe v. Wade, did not respond to or address arguments submitted to the Court regarding reproductive slavery and involuntary servitude.¹⁰⁵ After Roe v. Wade, Congress never bothered to take the necessary steps to pass legislation securing reproductive autonomy or applying the Thirteenth Amendment to reproductive slavery. And marital rape remained legal until the mid-1990s.]

For decades, opponents of reproductive health and human rights have worked hard to keep the “ultramarathon” labor of pregnancy and birth out of both the public's consciousness and policy considerations.

Consider, for example, the amicus briefs submitted to the Supreme Court in landmark abortion cases, from Roe v. Wade through the Dobbs decision. An analysis found that amicus briefs submitted in support of forced reproductive labor consistently “isolated the womb as the entirety of the pregnant person, and [] eviscerated the relationship of the woman’s work and labor in pregnancy.”¹⁰⁶ As anti-abortion efforts to efface the effects of forced pregnancy upon pregnant people intensified over time, these briefs “increasingly referred to pregnant people by smaller, segmented, anatomical parts (e.g., womb) rather than in the whole (e.g., body)… effectively removing the woman and her labor from the discussion.”¹⁰⁷

Unfortunately, there is no chance that the current Republican supermajority on the Supreme Court or the Republican-controlled Legislative and Executive branches of the federal government will recognize or appreciate the risky, laborious labor required for producing new humans or finish the work of Reconstruction and abolish reproductive slavery - the backbone of American chattel slavery - and involuntary reproductive servitude under the Thirteenth Amendment.

However, that doesn't mean that we should just give up.

An act as simple as recognizing the intense, risky labor of gestation and birth, and talking about abortion bans for what they are - a biological caste system of involuntary reproductive servitude and a relic of hereditary chattel slavery - will prepare the way to the future we want. The more often we (each one of us individually) call abortion bans what they are, the more minds are opened to the forced labor at the heart of abortion restrictions and the more influence over the future we gain. So talk about it. As often as possible. Call abortion bans what they really are. This is our superpower.

There are different ways to protect both unborn and born life: There are non-coercive means that honor the personhood of pregnant people and acknowledge that “each person is the morally rightful owner of himself.” And then there are coercive means which perpetuate structures of slavery, involve the deprivation of liberty and equality, and oppress one group of people, based on a biological trait. I choose the former. Which do you choose? ■

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2. Motion for Leave to File Brief Amici Curiae on Behalf of Organizations [California Committee to Legalize Abortion, et al.] and Named Women in Support of Appellants in Each Case, and Brief Amici Curiae, Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973) (No. 70-18) at 23-24.

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Koppelman, Andrew, "Forced Labor, Revisited: The Thirteenth Amendment and Abortion" (2010). Faculty Working Papers. Paper 32. http://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/facultyworkingpapers/32

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10. Quote: Dawn Johnsen

Koppelman, Andrew, "Forced Labor, Revisited: The Thirteenth Amendment and Abortion" (2010). Faculty Working Papers. Paper 32. http://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/facultyworkingpapers/32

11. Quote: Dawn Johnsen

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14. Quote: Dawn Johnsen

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