Although there is much of Jackson’s life worthy of discussion and debate, one point that CURE has previously noted is his pro-life position on abortion earlier in his career.
As CURE has documented in our policy report, “The Impact of Abortion on the Black Community,” Margaret Sanger, a founder of the American birth control movement and the organization that is now known as the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, was a leading spokesperson and activist in promoting control of the birth rate among blacks and others she considered undesirable. She made a speech to a branch of the Ku Klux Klan, endorsed a Supreme Court decision that allowed states to forcibly sterilize Americans (mostly blacks) without their consent, and even co-authored a report stating that the “[N]egroes present the great problem of the South.”
Jesse Jackson spoke out against the promotion of abortion to the black community. Even though he would later go on to join the broadening chorus of Democrats supporting abortion as a candidate for president in the 1980s, the enduring truth of what he said in a 1977 essay in National Right to Life News still remains:
“Politicians argue for abortion largely because they do not want to spend the necessary money to feed, clothe and educate more people. Here arguments for inconvenience and economic savings take precedence over arguments for human value and human life … Psychiatrists, social workers and doctors often argue for abortion on the basis that the child will grow up mentally and emotionally scarred. But who of us is complete? If incompleteness were the criteri(on) for taking life, we would all be dead. If you can justify abortion on the basis of emotional incompleteness, then your logic could also lead you to killing for other forms of incompleteness — blindness, crippleness, old age.”
As the landscape changes and the battle for the pro-life cause continues, CURE will continue to call attention to the impact of abortion on the black community and stand for the sanctity of unborn life, just as Jesse Jackson did earlier in his career.
Photo credit: United States Mission Geneva (Creative Commons) – Some rights reserved
