Reminders of Past Treacheries -- Part One of Two

Part Two

When I first arrived at National Right to Life in late August 1981, my first order of business was to quickly put together the September issue. Once that mission was successfully completed, among the very first things I did was spent an awful lot of time going through the extensive files my predecessors had accumulated in the years since the paper began in 1973.

I remember like it was yesterday pulling out a musty file. One of the items I found tucked way carried that unmistakably pungent smell that xeroxed copies had in those days. Lo and behold I found what turned out to be a copy of an article Jesse Jackson had sent to be published in the January 1977 issue of National Right to Life News.

This all came rushing back to me when I read Nat Hentoff's column published in Monday's Washington Times. Its title says it all--"The devaluing of human life; Why did Jesse Jackson change his stance on abortion?"

Probably only grizzled pro-life veterans remember that Jackson was a powerfully passionate, dazzlingly articulate pro-lifer in those days. (I'm attaching the bulk of the 1977 article he wrote as Part Two.)

I remember the following passage as if I read it an hour ago:

"… I was born out of wedlock (and against the advice that my mother received from her doctor) and therefore abortion is a personal issue for me. From my perspective, human life is the highest good, the summum bonum. Human life itself is the highest human good and God is the supreme good because He is the giver of life. That is my philosophy. Everything I do proceeds from that religious and philosophical premise. "Life is the highest good and therefore you fight for life, using means consistent with that end. Life is the highest human good not on its own naturalistic merits, but because life is supernatural, a gift from God. Therefore, life is the highest human good because life is sacred."

His NRL News essay was no isolated incident. He wrote an "Open Letter to Congress" in which he said "as a matter of conscience I must oppose the use of federal funds for a policy of killing infants.'' Speaking at the 1977 March for Life, Jackson asked, ''What happens . . . to the moral fabric of a nation that accepts the aborting of the life of a baby without a pang of conscience.''

Hentoff begins his column with an incident that happened recently. A nine-year-old boy overheard his parents talking about abortion and asked, "What is an abortion?"

"His mother tried carefully to describe it in simple terms," Hentoff writes. "But," said her son, "that means killing the baby." The mother tries again, leading her son to believe there are time restraints (there aren't). "The 9-year-old shook his head," Hentoff writes. "'But,' he said, 'it doesn't matter what month. It still means killing the babies.'"

Pretty impressive: a nine-year-old who refused to be dissuaded by the usual justifications/rationalizations for abortion, even when they came from his mother, who performs abortions.

"The boy's spontaneous insistence on the primacy of life," Hentoff writes, "also reminded me of a powerful pro-life speaker and writer who, many years ago, helped me become a pro-lifer. He was a preacher, a black preacher." He was Jesse Jackson.

The latter third of Hentoff's column explains how abortion has paved the way for "other controversies involving euthanasia, assisted suicide and the 'futility doctrine' by certain hospital ethics committees." The middle section includes some informed speculation about why Jackson changed his mind--at least publicly.  That transformation occurred in 1988 when Jackson decided to run for the presidency as a Democrat. Naturally, he was applauded by the media for his "growth."

Hentoff says the last time he saw Jackson was on a train years later.

"On that train, I also told Mr. Jackson that I'd been quoting in articles and in talks with various groups from his compelling pro-life statements. I asked him if he'd had any second thoughts on his reversal of those views.

"Usually quick to respond to any challenge that he is not consistent in his positions, Mr. Jackson paused, and seemed somewhat disquieted at my question. Then he said to me, 'I'll get back to you on that.' I still patiently await what he has to say."

Jackson is hardly the only politician ever to trade principle for promises of political gain. Two other candidates running for the Democratic Party's 1988 nomination had pro-life histories before they, too, jumped ship.

But Jackson's turnabout is particularly poignant, even startling. His critique of abortion is informed and in-depth, his comparisons of abortion to slavery scintillating, his own near-death (by abortion) experience an uncomfortable reminder that he could have been a statistic, and his challenge prophetic, rooted as it is in his role as a "minister of Jesus Christ."

Colman McCarthy was another liberal Democrat who embraced the cause of life. In 1988 he wrote a blistering column for the Washington Post denouncing Jackson.

"No other candidate this season, fallen or still standing, has shifted positions as radically as Jackson on abortion," he wrote. "If Jesse Jackson of the 1970s were to debate the Jesse Jackson of 1988 on abortion,"

McCarthy added, clearly infuriated, "the old would flatten the new and leave him mumbling pro-choice slogans."

McCarthy concluded by noting that "none of Jackson's six Democratic opponents made an issue of his desertions. Perhaps they saw him 'maturing,' which is said of Jackson's '88 campaign.

"A pro-abortion party can embrace Jackson, but it is getting a defective product," McCarthy wrote.

"Jackson has become the kind of politician he warned about a decade ago, one whose pro-abortion arguments 'take precedence over human value and human life.'''

Please read Part Two. If you have any comments or questions, please send them to Dave Andrusko at dandrusko@nrlc.org.

Part Two