At 72 years old, Alveda King has devoted more than half of her life to protecting babies in the womb.
“Rescued” from abortion by her grandfather Martin Luther King Sr., who encouraged her engaged parents to go through with their surprise pregnancy, Alveda King was given the opportunity to live and, subsequently, do great things.
King, born in 1951, has been a professor, a politician, an author, a speaker, and an activist for the unborn. She is also blessed with children and grandchildren, and she told me she hopes her recently married grandson will gift her great-grandchildren soon.
That list of achievements might sound like a recipe for retirement, but for King, her work is just beginning.
“I was born into a Christian family,” King told The Federalist. “And all these years later, after I’ve had two abortions, a miscarriage, I’ve been a Democrat, an independent, and a Republican — today I’m a Frederick Douglass Republican — I believe everything that happened in my life was leading me to a time when my voice would be part of a message that human life is sacred, from the womb to the tomb into eternity.”
Divine Intervention
King is no stranger to fighting for the voiceless. After all, she grew up as the daughter of the late civil rights activist Rev. A.D. King and the niece of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Activism may be in King’s blood, but it wasn’t until the 1980s that she took up the mantle to fight for the protection of unborn babies.
“I began to self-examine. Even though I had been brought up in a Christian family, I had not made a commitment to Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior. I was very aware of it in ’83, ’84. Somewhere in that time period, I confessed Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. During that same time, I confessed my own sins and I realized that abortion was mixed up in that.”
King had just become a college professor, so questioning the ways of the world wasn’t out of the ordinary. That curious instinct paired with her new faith revealed just how twisted the debate over life in the womb had truly become.
“I began to ask this question: ‘A woman has a right to choose what she does with her body. The baby is not her body. Where’s the lawyer for the baby? How can the dream survive if we murder our children?’” King said.
That’s when she started to speak out about her own experience of having two abortions.
“Abortion really does hurt the bodies of the mothers and the babies quite often. The spirit, soul, and body in some cases. So I began to talk about that, and my whole life changed as a result,” King said.
‘But It’s a Baby’
After working with Priests for Life for 16 years and launching the Civil Rights for the Unborn ministry, King decided to take her activism further with the foundation of Speak for Life, a pro-life organization dedicated to “mobilizing generations of Pro-Life advocates to boldly speak for life!”
“I want to help these children know how to stand and not be punished for their convictions or their perspectives,” King said.
That’s why she’s working on a curriculum designed to “help children talk about life and to know when their liberties are being suppressed by worldviews that differ from theirs.”
“It’s not so hard to talk to children about life,” King said, noting that many of the students she’s talked to about abortion are bewildered that anyone would end a life in the womb.
“Even little children, when I would go to speak to the elementary schools and middle schools, high schools, and colleges, the little tiny children were like ‘But it’s a baby. It’s a baby,’” King recalled.
Adults, on the other hand, are easily misled by abortion activists, Democrats, and the corporate media, which are all willing to lie about the harsh realities of abortion. King says that “lying to folks” must always be combated with the truth that abortion hurts everyone.
“I believe that we need to ask people to talk to women like me,” King said, recalling that she and thousands of other women who “had abortions and suffered because not just the loss of our children but our own spirit, souls, and bodies” signed amicus briefs sharing their stories.
“It’s time for the conversation to be balanced. And with that balanced conversation, it should not be hostile or wanting to punish the women,” King said. “We need to even leave opportunities for some people who used to provide abortions, and they stopped, and they realized that they needed to change. So we need to leave that redemptive opportunity for people, and we need to hear those testimonies.”
That’s why King thinks Sen. Lindsey Graham’s 15-week abortion ban bill is a step in the right direction.
“This federal proposed ban, it will maybe set a little framework for the states, governors, and elected officials in the states and the counties in the cities and et cetera, to remember that all the points that we have made successfully — that that 15-week-old baby can feel pain, has a heartbeat, is a person,” King said.
King said that doesn’t mean a baby’s life doesn’t begin at conception, because she and science say it absolutely does. But King said this proposed legislation “can stand as a marker and a reminder” that abortion harms and kills the most precious, vulnerable form of human life.
“Is it kind to kill a baby on its birthday?” King asked. “If abortion is legal, every day that baby is in the womb up until nine months and one second, we have to kindly ask ‘is it kind to kill a human being on its first birthday?’”
