WASHINGTON, D.C., January 24, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) — U.S. secretary of education Betsy DeVos is taking heat from her left-wing detractors this week over remarks comparing modern-day defenses of abortion to nineteenth-century defenses of slavery.
DeVos was speaking Wednesday evening to a group of students from Colorado Christian University, the Washington Times reports, who were at the nation’s capital to attend the 47th annual March for Life.
“I’m reminded of President Abraham Lincoln. He, too, contended with the ‘pro-choice’ arguments of his day,” DeVos said. “They suggested that a state’s ‘choice’ to be slave or to be free had no moral question in it. Well, President Lincoln reminded those pro-choicers that ‘there is a vast portion of the American people that do not look upon that matter as being this very little thing. They look upon it as a vast moral evil.’”
State and national Democrat leaders pounced on the statement as “woefully uneducated” and an “insult” to the descendants of slaves, while Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), who is black, dared the education secretary to “say this to my face.”
“What an insult to the generations of Americans who still live with the scars of slavery and Jim Crow. What an insult to those who have fought valiantly to make abortion safe and legal in all 50 states,” Democratic National Committee CEO Seema Nanda and DNC Vice Chair and Louisiana Democrat Party chair Karen Carter Peterson said. “The secretary of education remains woefully uneducated on the history of our country. Her ignorance would be laughable if it weren’t so disturbing. As with so many issues she’s commented on before, Secretary Devos has once again failed a simple test of competence and character.”
the rhetoric & policies of anti choice zealots like DeVos put the lives & bodily autonomy of far too many people at risk. That’s why we need to pass EACH & #repealhyde TAKE ACTION > https://t.co/JFvhEwSJvG
— Ayanna Pressley (@AyannaPressley) January 24, 2020
In fact, the parallels between abortion and slavery extend well beyond the obvious. Both denied the equality and humanity of a certain class of people in order to violate their fundamental rights; both were sustained by intensely controversial Supreme Court rulings (Roe v. Wade; Dred Scott v. Sandford); and both even rested on similar arguments about personal freedom, America’s founding principles, and human progress.