A View From the Pro-Life Left

“Not too long ago, he was a pro-lifer. He wrote and spoke about the right to life and attacked advocates of abortion rights. “There are those who argue that the right to privacy is of a higher order than the right to life,” he would say. “That was the premise to slavery. You could not protest the existence or treatment of slaves on the plantation, because that was private and therefore outside of your right to be concerned.” He told the story of how he himself had almost been aborted. A physician had advised his mother to let him go, but she wouldn’t. Don’t let the pro-choicers convince you that a fetus isn’t a human being, he warned: “That’s how the whites dehumanized us, by calling us niggers. The first step was to distort the image of us as human beings in order to justify that which they wanted to do–and not even feel like they’d done anything wrong.”

But as Jesse Jackson decided to run for president in 1984, his fiery pro-life rhetoric suddenly subsided. If being black was a political obstacle, being black and pro-life would raise the odds much too high. Jackson understood that it is hard to be a pro-lifer if you want the support of the left–or just have friends on the left. The lockstep liberal orthodoxy on abortion is pro-choice, as Bill Clinton’s election showed and his presidency will reinforce. Dissenters are not tolerated….

Go here to read the rest of this wonderful article written by Nat Hentoff, a Jewish, Atheist, left-wing, pro-lifer who writes for the Village Voice (yes, you heard me correctly).

It was written in 1992, but it’s just as timely and true now as it was then.