Reflection on Martin Luther King Jr's Birthday Part Two

There is no telling what King would have thought of a consistent life ethic (CLE). But the feminist CLE is (dare I say) borne of the same impulse to embrace all, nonviolently.

In addition to expressing frank racism against him, some antiabortionists deride King as a "liar" and a womanizer who had extramarital affairs, even for hiring white prostitutes and beating them. Snopes.com does a good job of sifting through such criticisms and pointing out the high level of scurrilous urban legend in them. Especially the myth about hiring and beating white prostitutes--that sounds like a white segregationist's fantasy towards black women flipped around for the purpose of discrediting a black man!

Such antiabortionists, like P. Leslie Riley in his "Myths of Martin Luther King", excoriate the civil rights martyr for receiving the 1966 Margaret Sanger Award from Planned Parenthood. Riley overlooks certain facts here.

--In his acceptance speech, King advocated family planning. Voluntary family planning is quite distinct from abortion and in fact is an actual human right and a nifty tool for preventing abortion. He said nothing here about advocating abortion.

--In 1966, Planned Parenthood itself was divided on abortion and still held an official public stance against abortion. It did so until the early 1970s.

--As documented in the book ProLife Feminism Yesterday and Today, Second Expanded Edition, Margaret Sanger was not exactly the all-out babykiller of antiabortionist stereotype. She regarded abortion as a taking of unborn life caused by such atrocities as the denial of sex education and contraception to women. She want to prevent, not promote abortions, and therein lay her passion for family planning.

--Of course she--like many privileged or social-climbing whites of her day--held deplorable racist, ableist, and classist prejudices that contaminated her good work for family planning. King may not have known about these; in 1966 these were, as far as I know, were not a matter yet of widescale public knowedlege and scrutiny. And an article from the Fall 2001 issue of the Margaret Sanger Papers Projects Newsletter presents the complex and not entirely Sanger-damning evidence regarding the charge that she was out to exterminate the black race.

Fortunately prolifers, those inclined to expand their concern beyond the fetus, regard King as an ever-fresh source of inspiration and wish to build on his legacy. Even a group like Priests for Life, which is not keen on contraception, reprints his Letter From Birmingham Jail. Although King took an assiduously interfaith, inclusive perspective, the Letter recalls the example of Christians in early Rome who challenged the powers that be and "by their effort and example...brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contests."

Clearly King can be termed prolife on the matters of infanticide and killing for public entertainment, just as he was obviously prolife on so much else. His position on family planning was, I believe, prolife, too. But he is not here any more to ask "What precisely did you mean by infanticide? Did you mean taking the lives of children before birth, too?" The term "infanticide" once had that double meaning, and in ancient Rome, Christians--like Jews, incidentally--were quite countercultural in rejecting abortion as well, as I discuss in the new anthology book Consistently Opposing Killing.

Aside from this, we have no evidence today of what King might have thought about abortion. But I feel it is a respectful building upon his legacy to affirm all lives, including the lives of vulnerable unborn children--and of course their mothers.

Planned Parenthood Controversy in Aurora, Illinois

Controversy and protest have accompanied Planned Parenthood's efforts to open a large new clinic in the far Chicago suburb of Aurora, Illinois. Again, I have impertinent questions and reflections that will likely make no "side" happy (and I am recuperated enough from six weeks of multiple disability flareup hell to offer them here, for whatever it is/isn't worth).

• Why did Planned Parenthood (apparently) try to "sneak" this clinic past a community it undoubtedly knew would, on a substantial scale, not be pleased at least with the abortion part of its offerings? Why couldn't it have instead gone with only its sex education, voluntary family planning, and other nonabortion/abortion-reducing services here--services which enjoy a far broader base of support? Especially since this move evidently compounds the perception in some quarters of Planned Parenthood and its abortion rights advocacy as racist, classist, "do-gooder" impositions...The Aurora area in recent years has grown increasingly less Caucasian, and now this attempt to bring an abortion-performing facility into the community against the wishes of many community members...
• Now, for decades I have personally known, and keep discovering, avowed prolifers--even those who engage in (nonviolent) protest against clinics, and even those who define themselves as politically and/or theologically conservative--who adopt "hard-to-place" children, take pregnant women into their own homes, and engage in many other actions that show they really mean it when they say they're prolife. But I happen to know that at least some of the antiabortion individuals and groups involved in the Aurora protests are not only protesting the clinic's attempt to offer abortions. They are lumping in the abortions with the genuine reproductive health services--same mistake as Planned Parenthood itself! And they are going beyond their right to their own personal religious beliefs, say, against contraception or nonmarital sex to denying the freedom of conscience and nonviolent action of anyone who happens to disagree with the convictions on these matters...and in the process, I think, they are undercutting their aspiration towards abortion abolition, especially in a pluralistic society.
• So far the protests have been described as peaceful. Wonderful if that means no homicides of clinic workers, supporters, patients. May that continue to be the case, whatever turns the fate of this clinic and the uproar about it take in the future. As necessary as this nonkilling is...nonviolence must also extend to the speech and intentions of all protestors towards women seeking abortions. It is decidedly NOT "prolife" to scream at women in tough situations that they are "harlots," "babykillers," et al while brandishing gorey fetus photos at them.... It is eminently prolife, I believe, to stand there calmly, nonjudgmentally, quietly but powerfully offering alternatives...offering to pay rent, give free child care or shelter or legal help with winning child support, even to adopt the very child endangered by abortion if it comes to that...whatever women may need.

Another thought: Although Planned Parenthood offers sliding scale contraception, and is certainly to be commended for that...low-income people in the US and elsewhere often do have other options for affordable family planning access, options that do not confuse a general "right" to abortion with genuine reproductive health care.