By Patrick Lee, Public Discourse - What’s at stake in the abortion debate is precisely what was at stake during the nineteenth-century debate about slavery: Where do we draw the line between beings we can simply use for our own purposes and discard when inconvenient, on the one hand, and beings who have fundamental rights, who deserve our respect and protection, on the other? Abraham Lincoln expressed the central point in the slavery debate: “If the Negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that ‘all men are created equal;’ and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another.”