Another year goes by, and again we celebrate the feast day of the civil rights hero and martyr, the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. While we still have a ways to go in assuring the equality of all races in practice (*ahem*), Dr. King helped win much of the battle in promoting the legal and practical equality of blacks and whites. For that, he should be commended, and his anniversary should be celebrated.

A week after his feast, thousands will march on Washington to continue the fight for human equality and the civil rights of all. I don’t mean the Women’s March, although many of its goals are also laudable. I mean the March for Life, which commemorates the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion in the United States.

Although I cannot attend the March this year due to academic commitments, I support (and will be praying for) its goals, since I am pro-life. That may sound hard to believe, because I’m a young woman at an elite university, but I am. As a proud practicing Catholic, I’m a “seamless garment” pro-life advocate, which combines “conservative” and “liberal” views. That means no abortion and no euthanasia, but also no neglecting those in poverty, no death penalty, and no war (unless the latter two would undoubtedly save more lives than they cost).

It means supporting the civil rights movement because if all life is sacred, black lives are included in that.

And the sanctity of black lives must be upheld because throughout American history they have disproportionately been taken by those in power. Before 1865, slavery ran rampant, confirmed by a Supreme Court decision declaring that blacks were not “persons” and had no constitutional rights. Between the end of the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement, blacks were lynched and otherwise terrorized by white supremacists, especially the Ku Klux Klan, and the government officials in league with them. Today, they are shot by police officers, sometimes in truly life-threatening situations but often out of irrational, subconsciously racist panic.

Today they are also snuffed out in the womb in disproportionate numbers -- 30% of black pregnancies end in abortion, whereas only 11% of white pregnancies do. Just like police shootings, only a minority of abortions were justified by threats to the mother’s life -- less than one-tenth of 1% in the state of Florida, for example. Just like lynchings, many government officials turn a blind eye to abortions. Just like slavery, abortions are justified by a Supreme Court decision declaring that fetuses are not “persons” with rights.

Just like every abuse against black Americans, abuses against unborn Americans are perpetrated by those with power against those without, and oppression of the weak always cries out to heaven for vengeance. As his niece Dr. Alveda King cries out, “Oh, God, what would Martin Luther King, Jr., who dreamed of having his children judged by the content of their characters, do if he’d lived to see the contents of thousands of children’s skulls emptied into the bottomless caverns of the abortionists’ pits?”

What would he do? What would he do about this scourge that is not a cure to black oppression, but a symptom and expression of it? By Planned Parenthood’s own statistics, more than half of all women who abort do so due to poverty or another source of inability to raise a child. But abortion is only a band-aid “fix” that distracts from (and fails to find a real solution for) the real problems of poverty and familial instability which disproportionately affect the black community. Worse, it lowers the black population, which reduces their political power and therefore their ability to enact solutions to problems that affect them.

And all this, of course, is on top of it being an intrinsically evil act, a grave injustice to all those extremely young black men and women.

King, who spent his whole life fighting for rights for the oppressed in the Kingdom of God, would not have put up with it.

He who proclaimed that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” would not have allowed the privilege of already having been born to make him complacent. He who proclaimed that “right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant” because “unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in the end” would not let the fact that abortion is currently legal by Supreme Court fiat to stop his activism for the oppressed of the world today. He who proclaimed that “the true neighbor will risk his position, his prestige and even his life for the welfare of others” would not be cowed by the hostility against pro-life people or the threat of prosecution for protesting outside clinics/exposing the abortionists’ misdeeds. So let’s honor him this week by remaining silent no longer about this grave injustice. We may not win overnight, but according to King himself, “we must never allow ourselves to become satisfied with unattained goals. We must always maintain a kind of divine discontent.” Black lives matter because all life is sacred.