Mar 20, 2022
As you point out, forcing enslaved women to carry children was at the heart of maintaining the system of slavery in the United States, especially after the international slave trade was (officially, at least) barred from the United States. Forcing a woman to carry and birth a child is a form “of compulsory labor akin to African slavery which in practical operation would tend to produce like undesirable results” which the Thirteenth Amendment was meant to address. Butler v. Perry, 240 U.S. 328, 332 (1916). I thus advocate using the Thirteenth Amendment to challenge laws interfering with a woman's right to choose.
