This weekend, Ben Carson did what he does best. He clearly and plainly stated a mainstream conservative view that most Republican politicians dare not utter — in this case, that the debate over abortion is comparable to the debate over slavery. Speaking to NBC’s Chuck Todd, Carson said: “During slavery — and I know that’s one of those words you’re not supposed to say, but I’m saying it — during slavery, a lot of slave owners thought they had the right to do whatever they wanted to that slave, anything that they chose. And what if the abolitionists had said, ‘I don’t believe in slavery, but you guys do whatever you want’? Where would we be?”

Carson’s statement is an entirely mainstream, pro-life view. As my National Review colleague Ian Tuttle wrote in July, the debate over abortion is “every bit as urgent a question of justice, of fidelity to our fundamental tenets” as the debate over slavery. He continued: “In the Civil War, we fought to vindicate every man’s right to liberty. What is at stake in the current conflict is the only right more fundamental: that of life.”

Throughout my entire career, pro-life Americans have made the argument that the moral dimensions of the case for life are similar to the moral dimensions of the case against slavery. In both instances, the abhorrent practice rested on dehumanization: the declaration that black Africans were somehow innately inferior to whites, and the declaration that unborn children are somehow less than fully and completely human.

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Source: David French, http://www.nationalreview.com