Martin Luther King’s niece

The public would hear more about the advocacy work of Dr. Alveda King if it included “abortion rights.” But King upholds the most fundamental truth at the core of all civil rights, the right to life.

“The babies need us,” Alveda King told a packed state House chamber. “You know, they’re like a slave in the womb of a mom. The mom’s deciding whether they will live or die. It’s civil rights.”

If rights were really at the center of this national battle over abortion, you’d think that point would at least provide grounds for debate.

King said supporting abortion rights contradicted her uncle’s dedication to nonviolence.

The violence of abortion is mostly out of sight, so it’s easier for abortion supporters to spin into something they just call “choice.” Dr. Alvea King knows this, and she keeps trying to engage that debate by appealing to the minds and hearts of those who believe in…other civil rights.

She cited a speech in which King, the civil rights leader who was shot dead in 1968, said, “The Negro cannot win if he is willing to sacrifice the lives of his children for personal comfort and safety.”

Planned Parenthood, which praised King with an award in 1966 for fighting bigotry and his dedication to the advancement of social justice and human dignity, did not return a phone call seeking comment.

They prefer to argue, but they can’t argue about social justice while supporting the procedure that takes human life at its most vulnerable. Alveda King knows this.

King, 56, had two abortions herself. She says one was administered involuntarily by doctors two years before Roe vs. Wade and the second occurred after abortion was legalized.

She planned to have a third abortion when she said she was urged by two African American men, her grandfather, the father of Martin Luther King, Jr., and her boyfriend, not to.

“A woman has a right to choose what she does with her body, of course she does. But I had to admit right then that baby was not my body,” she said. “I did not have the right to kill another person, and so I admitted that, and as soon as I admitted that things began to change for me.”

Look at the sheer logic of that revelation King had. Although a baby is in the womb of a mother’s body, that new life is a separate human being, and not the woman’s body. This truth is at the foundation of the South Dakota protection of life law. When they got it, as Dr. King did, things began to change there, too. And there’s no going back.