By Jennifer Jacob Brown
Dr. Alveda King, the niece of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., visited Meridian this week to speak out against what she referred to as womb-lynching — or what most people know as abortion.
King was in Meridian to speak at the Pregnancy Choices of Meridian annual banquet as well as to a group of African-American pastors.
"I spoke to them about the importance of supporting life," she said. "A woman can choose what to do with her body, but the baby is not her body... and so that makes it a civil rights question."
King said she has had multiple abortions in the past, and it was those abortions — and even more so the life of one of her children that she had planned to abort — that shaped her pro-life beliefs.
Her first abortion, she said, was done before the passing of Roe vs. Wade, when abortion was still illegal. She later had another abortion, and was talked out of a third by two people — the father of the child and her grandfather, Martin Luther King, Sr.
It was after the baby that she would have aborted was born that she became pro-life.
"Really, I changed my mind when I saw my baby was a person, not just a lump of flesh," she said. "A baby is a person, and I can't understand when it became right to kill a person."
King said her pro-life views became even stronger in 1983 when she became a born-again Christian. More recently, she said she learned that her mother wanted to abort her, but was talked out of it by her grandfather — the same person who talked King out of aborting her own child.
King said the teachings of her uncle have also made her more firm in her pro-life stance.
"My uncle said, 'No law can make a man love me, but it can keep a man from lynching me,'" she said. "I say, no law can make a man want me, but it can keep a man from womb-lynching me."
However, King said her first objective is not to make abortion illegal.
"Abortion should be unthinkable, and once it's unthinkable, then you can make it illegal," she said. "But you have to make it unthinkable first."
To learn more about Dr. Alveda King and her work to make abortion unthinkable, visit www.priestsforlife.org/africanamerican, or look for her books, which include "How Can the Dream Survive if we Murder the Children?" and "I Don't Want Your Man, I Want My Own."
