| Written by Deborah Gyapong, Canadian Catholic News,
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 Rev. Alveda D. King
“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 though 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.
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, Rev. Martin Luther King Sr., and told him she did not want to have the baby because she would miss going to college.
“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.”
Of the 50 million abortions that have taken place in the United States, 17 million have been black babies, she said.
“The days of abortion are numbered,” said Fr. 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 that she became pregnant at 15 after a date rape. She did not know that abortion would not solve the problem of feeling “ashamed, dirty and abandoned.”
She was never the 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. 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. She was not prepared for the self-loathing that followed. She knew she had crossed a line and broken a spiritual law that “thou shalt not kill.”
Her abortion and complications afterwards prevented her from ever having children.
About a dozen Liberal and Conservative Members of Parliament brought greetings to the marchers. Some had their children in tow.
Conservative MP Rod Bruinooge, said he was “proud to speak for aboriginal people throughout our country who believe in life.”
Liberal MP Paul Steckle noted that every year since abortion was decriminalized in Canada, “we have lost 100,000 citizens.”
“We have lost in 30 years the equivalence of the population of Saskatchewan three times over,” he said.
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