Alveda King: How Can MLK’s Dream Survive if the Unborn are not Protected?
Today is the 48th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The civil rights leader was in Memphis to support a sanitation workers’ strike when he was shot in the neck by a sniper as he stood on the second floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel. He was 39 years old.
Evangelist Alveda King is Martin Luther King’s niece and has devoted her life to an often overlooked aspect of the civil rights movement. As director of Civil Rights for the Unborn, the African-American outreach of Priests for Life, she advocates for the lives of the most defenseless victims, children in the womb.
“Today I feel very close to my uncle’s dream and vision for the 21st century,” she said. “However, in order to give genuine honor to the dream we must recognize an underrepresented group: The unborn. A woman has a right to choose what she does with her body. The baby is not her body. Where is the lawyer for the baby? How can the dream of Martin Luther King survive if we murder our children and desecrate the wombs of their mothers?”
Father Frank Pavone, National Director of Priests for Life, said that just as Martin Luther King gave his life for the civil rights movement, pro-lifers have to be willing to do the same for the one million babies lost every year to abortion in the U.S.
“As I wrote in my book Abolishing Abortion, we have to be ready to lay down our lives to end the violent segregation and prejudice of abortion,” Father Pavone said. “Martin Luther King and his brother, Rev. AD King, stopped at nothing to build the Beloved Community, and so must we. Let’s do what needs to be done.”
