Abortion and the 13th Amendment
https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1031&context=facultyworkingpapers
2010
Forced Labor, Revisited: The Thirteenth Amendment and Abortion
Andrew Koppelman
Northwestern University School of Law, akoppelman@law.northwestern.edu
I. The basic argument
The Thirteenth Amendment reads as follows:
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.
2. Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
My claim is that the amendment is violated by laws that prohibit abortion.
When women are compelled to carry and bear children, they are subjected to "involuntary servitude" in violation of the amendment. Abortion prohibitions violate the Amendment's guarantee of personal liberty, because forced pregnancy and childbirth, by compelling the woman to serve the fetus, creates "that control by which the personal service of one man [sic] is disposed of or coerced for another's benefit which is the essence of involuntary servitude."6
Such laws violate the amendment's guarantee of equality, because
forcing women to be mothers makes them into a 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.
Parents can't be compelled to donate their organs to their child, even to save the child's life. Why does a fetus have more claim on a woman's organs than her child who has been born? Because it's about control of the woman, not the life of the fetus.
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