Washington Republican Softens Stance After Repeatedly Comparing Abortion to Slavery
Joe Kent — the far-right Republican congressional candidate who lost his race in a shocking upset two years ago — has some thoughts about abortion. Kent thinks that years from now we, as a society, will look back on the current debate over access to reproductive care in this country in horror and disbelief.
And it’s hard to argue with that when there are women in Texas who, instead of being provided routine care, have been forced to give birth to stillborn children; when the state of Idaho is fighting for the right to deny health-preserving medical care to pregnant women; when lawmakers in South Carolina, Alabama, and Texas are floating the possibility of the death penalty for people who seek abortions.
None of that, however, is what Kent meant. “I am totally against abortion. I think it’s a stain on our humanity that it’s legal right now,” Kent told 21 Studios podcast, in an interview on the floor at CPAC in 2021.
From there, he went on to compare legal abortion to American slavery: “I remember learning about slavery and learning about segregation and being amazed that there was a time in my parents’ life, who aren’t that much older, that segregation was a very real thing. I was like, ‘Man, that’s crazy that that happened in their lifetime.’ And then looking back two lifetimes from that, we had slavery. And I’m like, ‘Man, that’s insane — that my grandparents, their great grandparents, they grew up then.’ I think there’s going to be a time in our lives when we’re in our 60s or 70s where our kids come up to us, and they’re gonna be like, ‘So, it was OK with everybody that you could just go kill babies?’ I think that that’s coming very soon. I think abortion is absolutely evil in the way that it’s gone on.”
During his last campaign for Congress, Kent made the slavery analogy more than once. In 2022, his opponent, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, shared a screenshot in which a high school student DMed her to say that Kent had made a similar argument when visiting their school. The student wrote: “Joe Kent came to my high school and a student was curious and asked him about his thoughts on reproductive rights. He then compared it to slavery and segregation. My peers and I were wondering what the correlation was and how such heinous acts could be compared with rights for women. He told this to a room full of high school students and essentially sent the message [was] that we (girls and women), should not have rights to our own bodies.”
As he began campaigning for election earlier this year, Kent sought to soften his position on abortion, posting on X, “Post Dobbs decision [abortion is] a state issue,” adding that he no longer supports a federal ban on abortion. Kent’s campaign manager, Flo Rossmiller, reiterated that stance in response to an email to Rolling Stone. “The Supreme Court has ruled that this is a state issue, and Joe Kent supports keeping it that way,” Rossmiller wrote.
It’s worth noting that there are legal scholars who see a connection between state restrictions on women’s bodily autonomy and slavery of the past. Michele Goodwin, a Georgetown University law professor and author of the book Policing the Womb, has written, “When states coerce and force women, girls and people with the capacity for pregnancy to remain pregnant against their will, they create human chattel and incubators of them. By doing so, state lawmakers force their bodies into the service of state interests.”
Speaking recently to Rolling Stone, Goodwin noted that the most onerous abortion restrictions in this country exist in states that fought to preserve slavery. “Some would say, ‘Well, OK, how is that relevant?’ Slavery itself was explicitly about denying personal autonomy, denying the humanity of Black people,” Goodwin said. “Now, clearly, these laws affect women of all ethnicities. But the point is: If you’re in a constitutional democracy and you found a way to avoid recognizing the constitutional humanity of a particular group of people, it’s something that’s not lost in the muscle memory of those who legislate and of the courts in that state.”
In those states, Goodwin continued, there was never an internal reckoning around that denial of rights for black people and women; instead, federal interventions — the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and Roe v. Wade — forced those states to change their practices, at least temporarily.
Meanwhile, in Washington state — where Joe Kent is running for Congress — abortion is easily accessible up to the point of viability, the former federal limit for abortion. (The race is currently rated a toss-up by the Cook Political Report.) In the past, Kent has said he’d like to see that change, declaring his support for banning abortion in Washington in addition to support for a federal ban on abortion.
His recently softened position is more aligned with public opinion in Washington: 63 percent of voters opposed the Dobbs decision ending a federal right to abortion, and just 26 percent supported it, according to a poll released shortly after the ruling. But it’s hard to say Kent would put much stock in polls on this issue, though.
As he told an interviewer in 2022, “Until we come up with the technology to poll the unborn to see if they want the chance to live or not there’s no consent there … This idea that we can just take the kid’s life and that’s the woman’s choice? That just doesn’t make any sense.”
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