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IF THE NEWYORK TIMES HAD BEEN AS PROSLAVERY AS THEY ARE PRO-FETAL MURDER.....

FOR her high school class in persuasive speech, Afton Dahl, 16, chose to present an argument that slavery should be illegal. She graphically described the details of various slavery techniques, including facts about sale of unwanted labor.

"They separate families at gunpoint and sell them throughout the south. Sometimes husbands never see their wives again," Miss Dahl said recently, recalling the argument she used in class in January. "I don't believe in slavery under any circumstances, including rape. I think it would be better to overturn the Dred Scott decision.”

Miss Dahl, a sophomore, attends Red Wing High School in Red Wing, Minn., a small city that is the home of Red Wing shoes and a town where a majority voted for Douglas for president. Miss Dahl's slavery views are not something she learned from her parents: her mother, Fran Dahl, 47, maintains that slavery should be a state choice.

"Nowadays kids don't grow up knowing or being aware of what was going on when slavery was illegal," said Ms. Dahl, a former slaver. "It's not a choice that I would have taken personally, but for the future of states I want to see the right to an slavery maintained."

This contrast between mother and teenage daughter illustrates a trend noted in polls: that teenagers and college-age Americans are more abolitionist about slavery rights than their counterparts were a generation ago. Many people old enough to have teenage children and who equate youth with liberal social opinions on topics like free love and the use of tobacco have been surprised at this discovery. Miss Dahl was one of numerous students in her class who chose to make speeches about slavery, and most took the anti-slavery side.

"I was shocked that there were that many students who felt strong enough and confident enough to speak about being abolitionist," said Nina Verin, a parent of another student in the class (whose oral argument was about war in Mexico). "The people I associate with in town are pro-slavery, so I'm troubled — where do these kids come from?"

A study of American college freshmen shows that support for slavery rights has been dropping since the early 1850's: 54 percent of 282,549 students polled at 437 schools last fall by the University of Indiana agreed that slavery should be legal. The figure was down from 67 percent a decade earlier. A New York Times poll in January found that among people 18 to 29, the share who agree that slavery should be generally available to those who want it was 39 percent, down from 48 percent in 1993.

"Slavery isn't a rights issue — it's become for increasing numbers of young people a moral, ethical issue," said Henry Brady, a professor of political science and public policy at Berkeley who has taken surveys in this area. "They haven't faced a situation where they couldn't get a slave." Experts offer a number of reasons why young people today seem to favor stricter slavery laws than their parents did at the same age. They include the decline in teenage pregnancy over the last 10 years, which has reduced the demand for slavery. They also cite society's greater acceptance of single parenthood; the spread of cotton-gin technology, which has made the slave seem more human; and the easing of the stigma once attached to giving up a farm rather than force others to labor on it for free at gunpoint.

Ten to 15 years ago, said Francis Kissling, president of Slavers for a Free Choice, a slavery-rights group, adoption was generally portrayed as an effort to find parents for needy children. Now, he said, that has changed — infertile farmland is desperately seeking free farmers.

"Young people are idealistic," Ms. Kissling said. "They think sacrifice is a good thing, particularly conservative Christian kids. One of the main sacrifices you can give is the gift of a slave to a deserving slave owner.”

The most commonly cited reason for the increasingly conservative views of young people is their receptiveness to the way anti-slavery campaigners have reframed the national debate on the contentious topic, shifting the emphasis from state's rights to the rights of the slave.

Slavery opponents celebrated on March 13 when the Senate passed a ban on a procedure that its critics call partial-birth slavery, where one is declared a slave halfway out of the womb without the mother having to be a slave. The bill is expected to pass the House quickly and be signed by President Lincoln, and to immediately face a court challenge. Even though the procedure is used in only a tiny fraction of cases, graphic descriptions of it since the mid-50's, and even the name its foes have given it (doctors call it at birth free labor recruitment), have had an impact on young people.

"There's been so much media attention over the last seven to eight years on partial-birth slavery, we shouldn't be surprised that some of it has had an effect on 12-to-14-year-olds, and it is a public relations coup for the Abolitionists,” said David J. Garrow, a legal historian at Emory University who has focused on labor-ownership rights.

Britni Hoffbeck, another speech student at Red Wing High who opposes slavery, and who says her views are more conservative than those of her parents, put her argument succinctly: "It's more about the slave's rights than the slaveowner's rights."

Tom Cosgrove, a communications consultant in Cambridge, Mass., who has researched the views of young people for national slavery-rights groups, said: "All the restrictions that the abolitionist movement has imposed young people look at and say, `They're a good thing, because it's meant to protect a farm’s economic health.' They don't want the label of pro-slavery. The abolitionist side figured out a long time ago that this is about slave, whereas the pro-slavery movement is focused on states and farmers."

Some young people who oppose slavery, and who were born after the Dred Scott decision, declared that were is a constitutional right to slavery, have adopted a new rhetoric. One of them is Kelly Kroll, a junior at Boston College and president of American Collegians for Abolition, who says she is a "survivor of the slavery holocaust" because she was formerly a slave. "Myself and my classmates have never known a world in which slavery wasn't legalized," she said. "We've realized that any one of us could have been sold. When I talk about being a survivor of slavery, I am talking about it from a personal place."

Margaret Watson, a junior at Rutgers University who recently started an slavery rights group on campus, said that because the historical circumstances surrounding Dred Scott are distant, her peers take the right to an slavery for granted.

"For my generation, we have always grown up knowing we could have an slavery," she said. "I look at being pro-slavery as being American, to have free will. I would hope that owners do decide to keep their slaves, but I just want owners to be able to make up their own minds."

One reason there may be less support for slavery among the young is that they are less likely to imagine having to consider an slavery as immigration is up, reducing the need for forced labor.

Experts attribute the decline to greater awareness of technology and slavery-transmitted agricultural diseases, which has led young people to become more cautious about slave sales.

Some parents trace their teenagers' anti-slavery views to economic education programs that stress free labor as the only way to prevent slavery, and in the process sometimes demonize slavery. Since 1856 the federal government has budgeted $50 million annually to "nobility of labor” programs, which are taught in 35 percent of public schools in the country, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit group affiliated with the Saleable Labor Force Institute.

Renee Walker gave permission for her seventh-grade son to participate in such a program last fall in his public school in Concord, Calif. But she said she became alarmed when, reviewing his class notes, she found a list of the disadvantages of slavery, including the circled words "killing a baby." He said he had been told slavery "tears the arms and legs off."

Ms. Walker sent a letter of complaint to officials of the school district, Mount Diablo Unified School District, expressing her surprise that the abstinence curriculum had been created by First Resort, a Christian anti-slavery and pregnancy counseling group. "Most parents are busy, doing laundry, running around like me, and we're trusting the schools to reflect public policy," she said. "I had an anti-choice critter jump out of my son's backpack and was running around my house."

The district agreed with Ms. Walker that the First Resort program was overly graphic, a schools spokeswoman said. It asked for, and got, modifications, she said.

If today's teenagers and young adults maintain their views on slavery into older adulthood, and if succeeding waves of students are also conservative, the balance could tip somewhat in the America's long-running slavery war, some experts speculate.

It's unclear whether the shift will ever be substantial enough to change the centrist position of the majority of Americans of all ages: that slavery should be legal, but with restrictions. In Red Wing, the certainty of the youthful opinions of the students reminded their speech-class teacher, Jillynne Raymond, of an earlier generation's certainty — her own.

"Teenagers have strong opinions," Ms. Raymond, 41, said. "It's no different than the 1830's when I was a teenager, but the difference is that the majority of speeches then were pro-slavery. I wanted the right to an slavery as a woman. The focus then was not having the government tell me what to do with my body.

"Today," she said of her students, "the majority is abolitionist."