Social justice

Every year, the Parliamentary Pro-life Caucus does a press conference in conjunction with the March for Life, which is today. I’d be interested in hearing what this year’s speaker, Alveda King, has to say. She’s the niece of Martin Luther King Jr. and brings the uncomfortable message that abortion is a civil rights issue. From the PPLC press release:

Dr. Alveda King, daughter of civil rights activist Rev. A. D. King, and niece of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is in Ottawa this week to take part in the 2008 March for Life events. She knows only too well the injustice of denying the most basic civil right, the right to life, to any innocent person and sees abortion as the civil rights issue of the 21st Century

Where we deny human rights, where we don’t support them for others, we become less human. Not good times, this message, not good times. Because we look elsewhere, to other tyrannical regimes–Mugabe, or Communist China–for human rights abuses. But then our own hands are not clean. Everyone has their cause–and I don’t aim to be like the boring environmentalist who pops up at conferences on the fiscal imbalance to ask politicians what they are doing about global warming. But human life, human rights–that’s my big issue, so in a way, I guess today is my day, all day, as my old camp director used to tell kids on their birthday.

If fighting abortion is not a social justice issue, then what possibly could be? The victims have no voice. The perpetrators have entrenched interests, deny others information and make money by it. Perpetuating abortion results in harmful physical and mental effects that are concealed from the vast majority. (Through a combination of sheer disinterest, deliberate coverups and a lack of freedom of speech.) Overturning it would result in greater freedom and the defence of the ultimate of all rights, the right without which all others are void.

Where we accept abortion we are apathetic, dispassionate and relentlessly cruel.

Being pro-choice means standing on the wrong side of history: A side that says it is just fine to use people, to have sex and leave, to deny a natural and normal result (pregnancy) of a natural and normal action (sex). To live in an empty shell, devoid of all logic and reason, where charity, love and compassion themselves become nothing more than choices.

This culture will be embarrassed in not too long for offering the barbarity of abortion. We will wonder how we excused it, ignored it, concealed it, sanitized it, normalized it.

If fighting abortion does not constitute social justice, then I don’t know what does.

Here ends the rant. Read about this “new trend,” here.

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Andrea adds, yes, to her own post: This from William Wilberforce’s great grandson:

There are great similarities between the status of the foetus and the status of African slaves two centuries ago. Slaves were considered a commodity to do with whatever the vested interests of the day decided. Today, in our desire to play God in our embryology experimentation, with all its’ unfulfilled promises of miracle cures, and our decision to abort unwanted children, we are no better that those slave traders who put their interests and world view higher than they placed the sanctity and value of human life.

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