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Lianna Karlin
Right to Life of Montana Rally Capitol
Rotunda, Helena, Montana January 15, 2007
People sometimes wonder why we schedule our Right to Life Rally for Martin Luther King Day. One reason is that the right to life is a civil rights issue. The Supreme Court that ruled on Roe Versus Wade in 1973 was unable to find for the rights of the unborn because they could not justify their humanity or find any basis to call them persons under the law. Since this is the same reasoning, or lack of it, that has been applied to the minorities who have been discriminated against in the United States and other places throughout history, then the unborn have a great deal in common with those other minorities. Martin Luther King had a way of illuminating the humanity of the minority races. We could take virtually any speech that he gave and substitute the unborn as the subject. The right to life is not an issue of privacy, choice, or of a woman’s own control over her body. All of these are really only irrational arguments for an irrational act against a fellow human being. Attempts to justify abortion on these bases are built on sand. We do not have the right to dehumanize an entire class of human beings and then say that it is because of our own rights. We dehumanize others because we know that is the only way to achieve our own selfish goals. Hitler tried to justify his own madness in attempting to eradicate an entire segment of the human race by claiming that they were not human. The slave traders and the slave owners in the Pre-Civil War United States claimed that men of other races were inferior to the white man. Men in history attempted to subjugate women on the basis that they were somehow subhuman. It was never right then, and it isn’t right now. Unborn babies are every bit as human as you and I, and they have an intrinsic right to life. No man, woman or court has the right to take that away because they are able to tell a convincing lie about it. The biggest lie of all is in calling the baby a fetus. This was nothing more than an attempt to convince us that the unborn human isn’t human at all and therefore is not entitled to any rights, least of all the most basic one of all, the right to Life. The unborn baby has his or her own DNA. No other human being has ever had the same unique combination of genetic material, and no other human being ever will. The baby is an individual in every sense of the word. He can be a different sex than his mother, have a different blood type, hair color, and fingerprints. He recognizes voices that he hears in the womb, and he responds to them. The newest technology shows him in the womb and he looks like a human being.
I wasn’t even married, yet, when Roe versus Wade was decided. It’s been 34 years. I now have 4 grown children and 7 grandchildren. It’s hard to believe that we have been legally killing our own babies for 3 generations. It is even harder to believe that some of the same people who marched for Civil rights for the Black man are the ones who demand a right to abortion. I remember the marches. I couldn’t see how our country had ever come to the point where people had to take to the streets to demand what should have been obvious - equal rights. Even more unbelievable is that in January 1973 abortion on demand became the law of the land. In March 1973, we brought our troops home from Viet Nam. How many of you remember? I remember it well. 3 of my cousins served our country fighting for the rights of a minority race in a foreign country. They came home to be spit upon and condemned as baby killers. At the same time we had legalized baby killing with impunity for those same individuals who treated our returning soldiers with such contempt. People who marched shoulder to shoulder with Martin Luther King and the black man, were now condemning our own young soldiers for putting their words into action. Those soldiers laid their lives on the line to secure life liberty and the pursuit of happiness for the people of another race in another country. They came home to be called baby killers by the biggest generation of baby killers of all. To date, legalized abortion has taken the lives of more babies than all the soldiers of all the wars of the world combined. Where have all of those idealistic supporters of civil rights gone? Where are the sit-ins, the marches, the demonstrations for the civil rights of the unborn? What do we have to do to make a change in our country for this minority? Do you remember the solidarity that we saw in the 60’s when Martin Luther King and thousands of others took to the streets to demand equality for all people? We saw them singing, “We shall overcome.” Many of us were moved to join them. Who speaks now for the unborn members of the human race? Who will sing a song for them?
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