By Dave Andrusko

I want to thank those who kindly wrote me in remembrance of Dr. Mildred Jefferson, the three-time President of National Right to Life, who passed away October 17. Her loss is a profound one on so many levels for so many of us.

Dr. Alveda King

Dr. Jefferson was, in every sense of the word, a pioneer. The first African-American woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School and the first female surgical intern at Boston City Hospital, she broke many barriers.

I thought of Dr. Jefferson when I read an angry pro-abortionist, exasperated that African-Americans are increasingly catching on to how apt is the analogy between what happened to blacks under slavery and what continues to happen to the unborn under the rule of Roe v. Wade.

This particular pro-abortion woman, Jessica Dweck, offered various illustrations of a growing consciousness and involvement. She concluded ominously that collectively they represent "part of a broader strategy of co-option of African-American history by the anti-abortion and conservative movements." Of course, it is nothing of the sort, which drives the Abortion Establishment crazy.

But Dweck is right, unintentionally, in a different sense. As people begin to reflect on what abortion is at its very core--lethal discrimination, in this case based on location--they see the "right" to abortion in a different light. Nobody's history is "co-opted." Rather they see abortion through the same lens they view the rest of their lives.

That is why I have long argued that opposition to abortion ought to be part and parcel of the "liberal" agenda, liberal in the best sense of the word. Because of the inconsistencies, the ironies can be enough to send you reeling.

For example, when I first came to National Right to Life, I was looking through some old files and I found the original copy of the article written for the January 1977 National Right to Life News by the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

In those days, before visions of presidential sugar-plums dancing in his head turned him into a pro-abortionist, Jackson understood perfectly (as the story was headlined), "How we respect life is over-riding moral issue."

Near the end of his essay, Jackson wrote, "Another area that concerns me greatly, namely because I know how it has been used with regard to race, is the psycholinguistics involved in this whole issue of abortion. If something can be dehumanized through the rhetoric used to describe it, then the major battle has been won. … Those advocates of taking life prior to birth do not call it killing or murder, they call it abortion. They further never talk about aborting a baby because that would imply something human. Rather they talk about aborting the fetus. Fetus sounds less than human and therefore can be justified."

What Dweck is really lamenting is that more and more African-Americans are catching up to where Jackson was almost 34 years ago. And that awakening cannot be thwarted.

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