Abortion activists criticized a Michigan pro-life lawmaker this week for comparing the evil of aborting unborn babies to that of slavery.
Michigan Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey, a pro-life Republican, recently spoke on a Hillsdale College radio program about defending unborn babies’ lives, the AP reports. In the interview, he compared abortion to “the scourge we endured when we still had slavery in this country.”
Both abortion and slavery are shameful evils that Americans allowed and some even embraced. Both dehumanize certain groups of human beings by treating them as less valuable and less worthy of rights and protections. Yet, Shirkey’s remark met with sharp criticism.
According to the report:
Democratic state Sen. Erika Geiss says Shirkey’s remarks were “incredibly insensitive.” Geiss, who is black, said Tuesday it is wrong to compare anything to the “atrocities of slavery” and what it did to black families.
Shirkey’s spokeswoman says he believes abortion is an issue where there is no middle ground and it has the potential to be as divisive for the country as slavery was. She says he was not referring to the abortion procedure itself as being analogous to abortion.
Responding to the controversy, Right to Life of Michigan pointed out that black Americans frequently are targeted by the abortion industry for destruction of their unborn children.
Planned Parenthood alone takes more black lives (about 90,000) than heart disease (75k) or cancer (70k) every year, making PP the number one cause of death. That doesn’t even count other abortion businesses,” the pro-life organization wrote on Twitter.
Dr. Alveda King, the director of the Civil Rights for the Unborn outreach through Priests for Life and the niece of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., estimates that 20 million unborn black babies have been aborted since Roe v. Wade forced states to legalize abortion on demand in 1973.
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Census data indicates that African Americans are about 13 percent of the U.S. population, but they have nearly 40 percent of all abortions. Research by Protecting Black Life also found that nearly 80 percent of Planned Parenthood’s surgical abortion facilities are located in minority neighborhoods.
“In New York City, more black babies are aborted than born,” King said in August. “It’s not racist to point out this truth. It is racist to perpetuate this genocide.”
Right now, pro-life leaders in Michigan are trying to protect unborn babies from one of the most brutal forms of abortion. Dismemberment abortions destroy second-trimester unborn babies by tearing them limb from limb while their hearts are still beating.
Shirkey and other pro-life lawmakers passed a dismemberment abortion ban earlier this year, but Democrat Gov. Gretchen Whitmer promised to veto it. Pro-life advocates currently are collecting signatures on a petition that would bypass the governor’s veto and allow the dismemberment ban to become law.
