‘Freedom is national; slavery only is local and sectional.” That was the slogan popularized by Salmon P. Chase, the anti-slavery lawyer and one of the founders of the Republican Party. Chase would go on to serve as Abraham Lincoln’s wartime treasury secretary and, after that, as the nation’s chief justice. When Chase died in 1873, the New York Tribune wrote: “That slavery was sectional and freedom national is a phrase afterward so familiar to our ears that we hardly appreciate the courage it needed in a young lawyer to enunciate such a doctrine thirty-five years ago.”
Chase’s strategic thinking on slavery should inform pro-life approaches to the post-Dobbs landscape on abortion. As Chase and Lincoln did, pro-lifers must strike a workable balance that allows them to pursue incremental progress within our federal system without renouncing their core principle. They must know when to compromise, when to bide their time, and even when to stage a tactical retreat. Yet they must never flag in stating clearly that the thing they seek to ultimately abolish is evil and inconsistent with a liberal democracy founded on inalienable rights to life and liberty.
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