Lost Hope

Today I will attend Together for Life a rally and silent march for the unborn. This is one of the yearly cause awareness events that I attend. This year I am anxiously awaiting the keynote address which will be given by Dr. Alveda King, the niece of the late Dr. Martin Luther King. On the rally flyer, Dr. A. King was quoted as saying, “The right of life is a civil right that transcends political parties.” I’m sure this quote was used to draw the connection to King’s family and the Civil Rights Movement and to show her awareness of how polarized US political parties have become, especially in their rhetoric surrounding issues related to pregnancy and the unborn.

I was “delivered” from ethnocentricity or afrocentricity years ago, so I don’t intentionally allow race to guide my thoughts on all other issues. But it strikes me that not more of those who consider themselves Black or African-American first and above all are concerned about the health inequities related to abortion and African-Americans. The largest percent of women who seek abortions are African-American. That means the largest percent of babies who are aborted are black. People will explain that poverty and/or fatherlessness are correlated to those statistics, but there is a more significant factor which those statistics demonstrate. What those who seek abortion express is that they have lost hope; they've lost hope in their ability to succeed against all odds, and lost hope that Almighty God will not allow the righteous to be forsaken.

Since I have brought up Civil Rights, I’ll end with an analogy drawn from an even darker era of black history: slavery. Slavery was, in most cases, debilitating for Blacks, yet motherhood was not abandoned. Some would argue that slavery was grounds for abortion, a case which is made in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, but I do not share that opinion, nor did enough of the pregnant slaves. As African-Americans we have ourselves as evidence. The hope that is within me demands that I hold a different opinion--one that labors in hope even when my environment would influence me to give up. I hope this year, as I do every year, that more of my brothers and sister would adopt this hope when they are faced with unfavorable circumstances surrounding a pregnancy--when they are faced with the option of choosing life for their unborn.