Abortion is today’s civil rights movement

Activist Alveda King says unborn child has rights

- CCN photo by Deborah Gyapong Alveda King, niece of Sr. Martin Luther King Jr. says, “We now treat unborn babies like blacks were treated.”

By DEBORAH GYAPONG
Canadian Catholic News
Ottawa

The pro-life movement is the civil rights movement of today. That was the message of the 11th annual National March for Life that drew 7,800 to Parliament Hill May 8.

"We now treat unborn babies like blacks were treated," Alveda King, the daughter of civil rights activist Rev. A.D. King and niece of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., told a news conference sponsored by the parliamentary pro-life caucus.

Even thought DNA and ultrasound tell us that unborn babies are people, they are treated as if they are not. It is discrimination to get inconvenient people out of our lives by calling them subhuman, or a mere clump of cells, she said.

Sex selection

She decried the growing practice of sex selection abortion that has created skewed populations in countries like China. People want a boy, but they "hide their discriminatory attitudes towards females behind the discrimination of abortion. Blacks and the disabled are also targeted this way.

King also spoke from the steps of Parliament Hill to the marchers.

"Abortion hurts women," she said. She had two abortions, the first performed without her permission.

She also suffered a miscarriage as a result of her previous abortions, as well as psychological and relationship problems.

Her own mother wanted to abort her, she said. She went to her father, the Rev. Martin Luther King Sr. and told him she did not want to have the baby because she would miss going to college.

- CCN photo by Deborah Gyapong Young people dominated the National March for Life in Ottawa.

"You have that baby. I have seen her in my dreams," he told her.

"Daddy King saw this little baby girl in his dreams three years before I was conceived in my mother's womb," King said.

"I have a dream. It's in my genes," she said, a play on the famous I Have a Dream, speech by Martin Luther King, Jr.

Of the 50 million abortions that have taken place in the United States, 17 million have been black babies, she said.

Redeeming love

"I aborted the civil rights of this person with 46 chromosomes," she said. "If it had not been for the redeeming love of my Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, I would not be able to stand here."

"The days of abortion are numbered," said Father Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life in the United States. The lies that abortion does not kill a baby and that it helps women are crumbling. The third lie, that "we can take protection from the unborn and keep it for yourself," is also crumbling, he said, noting protection cannot be taken from one segment of the human family without jeopardizing all of it.

Angelina Steenstra of Silent No More Canada told the crowd she became pregnant at 15 after a date rape. She did not know abortion would not solve the problem of feeling "ashamed, dirty and abandoned."

She was never told the consequences of the procedure. She recalled being awake and feeling herself "revolting inside, but she was afraid to tell the people at the clinic she wanted to change her mind.

Abortion nightmare

She felt the icy cold instruments rip apart the unborn baby in her womb and saw the bloody remains of her baby accumulated in a glass container near her feet.

Steenstra was not prepared for the self-loathing that followed. She knew she had crossed a line and broken a spiritual law "Thou shalt not kill."

Her abortion and complications afterwards prevented her from ever having children.

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