venerdì 5 febbraio 2010

 

March for Life

 

“Abortion opponents.” “Anti-abortion movement.” “Speeches and prayers blasted over loudspeakers.” “Conservative causes such as theirs.” These were the phrases with which a Washington Post story characterized the Jan. 22 March for Life in the next day’s newspaper.

 

The story appeared in the Metro section, not the national news section. An Internet version of the story contained a slideshow in which three out of seven photographs featured pro-choice counterdemonstrators, who numbered fewer than 100 in contrast to the tens of thousands of pro-life marchers. The New York Times, ABC, CBS, NBC and NPR said nary a word about the march. Behind all of these journalistic treatments lies a tired and familiar view of the prolife movement as an insular, angry religious enclave that is marching backward against history’s inexorable march towards maximal autonomy and individual rights.

 

Here are some alternative phrases to describe the marchers. How about “civil rights activists”? Or “human rights protesters”? Or even a “peace movement”? These terms, I venture, portray the march more accurately as a cousin of Vaclav Havel and the Czechoslovak Velvet Revolution of 1989, of Mahatma Gandhi and his nonviolent marches of the 1920s and 1930s and of the American Civil Rights movement. I predict that the pro-life movement, like these other causes, will one day be viewed by a broad consensus of people as a bright segment of what Dr. Martin Luther King called the long moral arc of the universe that bends towards justice.

 

Skeptics will bristle at these comparisons, but in three essentials the pro-life movement belongs in this great tradition.

 

First, it is a movement for human rights. Like all human beings, the fetus possesses inalienable human rights, just as do slaves in America, Bosnian Muslims, Rwandan Tutsis and global victims of sex trafficking. Today, unborn persons amount to an entire class of human beings who are excluded from the most basic of all human rights, the right to live. In America more than a million of these humans — the most weak, vulnerable, and voiceless of humans — are killed every year, some 50 million since 1973. Two million are killed every year in India, seven million in China, and more than 42 million worldwide.

 

Though leading human rights organizations rarely mention the unborn, their human rights are violated in numbers that far exceed those of the greatest human rights calamities of the post Cold War era, including the genocide in Rwanda and wars in Yugoslavia, Sudan or the Congo. In pleading for the legal protection of the human rights of the unborn, the marchers advocate for nothing other than what is prescribed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, international legal covenants and the Declaration of Independence.

 

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