Have you heard about the Online Underground-high-speed Railroad System or OURS and the Fugitive Non-Human Commodity Act?

If so, you've been reading the Isthmus forum discussion that began with Jason Joyce asking what Rick Santorum could have meant by the "grave moral wrong" of birth control. Kenneth Burns responded with the conventional snark: "It's that every sperm is sacred." Meade said:

How do you define "birth control", Jason? Does abortion qualify as birth control? How about late-term abortion? (You can google "late term abortion" and watch a video of one if you don't know what that is.)

That was inflammatory and distracting, but it highlighted the limit built into the term "contraception" that's missing from "birth control."

Attacks on Meade follow, including some weird sexism. Somebody calls him "Lawrence Elizabeth Meade." That commenter drags me in — even though I've never commented at Isthmus: "What's Mrs. Althouse's medical history on the subject?" (Note the sexism of using "Mrs." on a woman who has kept her maiden name.)

It's really hard to get people to focus on the question, which demands that people who don't agree with Santorum put themselves inside his head and understand how he experiences the idea that birth control is gravely wrong. It's especially hard when you introduce the actual policy question of whether people who believe it's a grave moral wrong should pay into an insurance fund that reimburses people who use it. Does the involvement in moral wrong carry over to that indirect connection to it? I would have said no, but Meade made the analogy to slavery:

Suppose Congress, in 1850, passed a law mandating every American citizen purchase group insurance to cover the loss of cargo ships. Including slave ships. Would you have been down with that?

Of course, people rankled at the analogy to slavery. Meade invited people to point out the flaws in the analogy, which they hadn't done, and said, "it's actually a very good analogy""

In fact, working with my slavery analogy, here is a hypothetical that might help. Jason with his struggle to understand why some people consider some acts to be "grave moral wrongs" while others do not:

Let's say that sometime in the future, northern states pass laws removing all restrictions on abortion while southern states strictly limit legal abortion to the first 15 weeks of pregnancy. Technological innovations and advances have made it possible to save the lives of aborted fetuses - 20 weeks and older - and to bring them to term.

There develops a covert system of collecting the aborted fetuses from the northern states' clinics and safely transporting them to the south where pro-life activists in southern states then incubate, "birth", and raise those children to then have pro-life values. The network becomes known as the Online Underground-high-speed Railroad System or OURS. Pro-life activists who covertly rescue the fetuses from northern clinics become known as COWs, short for "Catchers Of the Wry".

It turns out that, in northern states, the biological parents of the fetuses learn of OURS and object to what they consider to be an infringement on their constitutional property rights and they want their property/progeny returned. With their political power, the northern states pass through Congress, as part of what is known as the Compromise of 2050, an act requiring the southern states to return the aborted (now) free-born children, declaring that all rescued fetuses be brought back to their masters... I mean, parents... I mean, pro-choice proprietary DNA-owning provider owners.

The act is called the Fugitive Non-Human Commodity Act.

Which side are you on? The North? Or the South?