King's Argument Against Abortion

Improved Essays
The loss of a child is excruciating. Most human beings feel empathy for the family. When a child is murdered, the sense of hope for humanity is lost. So why is murder different than abortion? Is a fetus not a form of living life? When a human kills another human, no matter the age, they are labeled as a murderer. It is injustice for women to have the choice to abort their child. If the woman chooses to put herself in a predicament that she knows there is a possibility of pregnancy, she should not be able to choose abortion. Abortion is not a form of birth control.
One individual that took fighting for injustice to a whole other level was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. King was a civil rights activist and minister. King’s niece, Alveda King, a dedicated pro-life advocate, notes that her uncle was strongly pro-life. Often people wonder what side King would fall on, pro-life or pro-choice. While Alveda King believes that her uncle would adamantly defend life, from conception to natural death. Many also believe he would be pro-choice because of him being a civil rights activist. “The negro cannot win if he is willing to sacrifice the future of his children for immediate personal comfort and safety,” said (King,
…show more content…
To express King’s views about the pro-life versus the pro-choice situation, his approach would be similar to that of the discriminatory Jim Crows laws protest in Birmingham. King would lead nonviolent protests to bring awareness to the problem. In the book “Letters from a Birmingham Jail,” King responds to the eight white clergymen, “Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches, and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better plan? Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension, that a community which constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue,” (King, M.

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    In the two great pieces of literature by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “I Have a Dream” and “Letter From Birmingham Jail”, he uses both logical and emotional appeal and executes them brilliantly. Although they are both strong points used by Dr. King he has a greater strength in using emotional appeal, or pathos, than logical appeal, or logos. As he refers to the Emancipation Proclamation and the Alabama Christian Movement for human rights there are some potent arguments about how the African Americans should be treated in their own countries, but it doesn’t get the feeling that you do with the metaphors, antithesis and rhetorical questions of emotional appeal in either story.…

    • 795 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Martin Luther King Jr. encountered a different opposition, which involved changing the entire country’s views. King peacefully protests racial oppression and segregation in the United States to assist a whole country rather than a single individual. He observes civil disobedience as a way of protest on unjust laws of the country, rather than protesting a law regarding a singular person’s unfair treatment. King backs his approach on civil disobedience by illustrating his four steps, which are “the collection of the facts to determine whether injustices are alive, negotiation, self-purification, and direct action” (King, 1). With every one of his beliefs and acts, King defends himself by indicating how unjust the laws have treated the African Americans of the nation.…

    • 922 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    He includes the steps for nonviolent campaigning, and then goes on to say that all of the steps have been taken and that the clergymen’s suggestion for negotiating circumstances were attempted, but botched on the white community’s part. This shows the Negroes’ willingness to cooperate with the white leadership on the part of fighting for desegregation, but that mainly the white leadership has not been cooperative. King also forces the clergymen to look at the causes of the demonstrations instead of just the effects. He even tells them, “I am sure that each of you would want to go beyond the superficial social analyst who looks merely at the effects, and does not grapple with underlying causes” (465).…

    • 1875 Words
    • 8 Pages
    • 1 Works Cited
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Prior to, and even during the African-American Civil Rights Movement of 1954-1968 , the United States of America saw a separation between their Blacks and Whites, as a result of the practice of the Jim Crow Laws which promoted the idea that the Blacks were lesser than the White . This saw the rise of two prominent African-American Civil Rights activists, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. Though the two activists had a common goal (which was racial equality), their ideas of equality and how they proposed to achieve it very much differed from one another, and as a result, the two leaders were portrayed as contrasting leaders during the African-American Civil Rights Movement. In this paper, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X’s…

    • 1045 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    As any social issue, abortions are one of the many topics that everyone seems to have an opinion on. According to the 2012 Merriam-Webster dictionary, an abortion is, “the termination of a pregnancy after, accompanied by, resulting in, or closely followed by the death of the embryo or fetus as a spontaneous expulsion of a human fetus during the first 12 weeks of gestation--miscarriage, the induced expulsion of a human fetus, or the expulsion of a fetus by a domestic animal often due to infection at any time before completion of pregnancy.” (Elliot) Abortions; like every controversial issue, will most likely never be agreed upon by the human race. In the midst of the controversy, two groups have arose.…

    • 1905 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Dr. King explains that direct action establishes a non-violent, creative tension to force negotiations, and thereby validates his pro-direct action position. In that same vein, the clergymen “deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham.” Ibid., 2. King states that it is unfortunate that these demonstrations are taking place, but that “it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.” Ibid., 2.…

    • 1001 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Letter from a Birmingham Jail Analysis Essay In this letter, King uses various tones to respond to a group of white clergymen who argue that his way of fighting social injustice is improper and to justify his means to try to achieve his purpose. King is a true civil rights activist and believes in only acting respectfully and nonviolently, but at the same time, the white clergymen, advocates of civil rights, condemn his nonviolent protest. King is “not unmindful of the difficulties involved” so he and his fellow activists have “decided to go through a process of self-purification” to be able to “accept blows” and to endure the “ordeals of jail” (King 1, 2). King uses his calm, explanatory tone to establish his creditability to his critics.…

    • 1063 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Dr. King is a prime example of working against oppression and finding a way to get justice for society. When discussing Dr. King, we looked at the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” that Dr. King had written when working on his non-violent resistance in Birmingham. In this letter he had laid out the four parts it takes to have a successful non-violent action. The first part is collecting facts, making sure that there actually harm or happening and you have evidence to back it up. This part is important as the first step because you do not want to jump into action without direct knowledge or without witnessing the oppression-taking place.…

    • 388 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Don Marquis’ argument is for the impermissibility of abortion as it is based on the idea that abortion is held to the same regard as “killing an adult human being” due to the fetus having a “future like ours”. Marquis starts off by questioning what makes killing any human being morally wrong? Then, Marquis claims that it is not the “effect on the murderer” or the “effect on the victim’s friends and relatives”, but rather the effect on the victim. He asserts the idea that the “loss of one’s life” is “one of the greatest losses one can suffer” and that the “loss of one’s life deprives one of all the experiences, activities, projects, and enjoyments which would otherwise have constituted one’s future”. This means that by being alive and having…

    • 1170 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” (King 113). Martin Luther King Jr. seeks to convince his fellow clergymen in “Letter from Birmingham Jail” that using a nonviolent campaign to end the injustice of segregation is politically, economically, sociologically correct, as well as morally right (117). He does this through a series of appeals. Some of his most effective and inspiring appeals are the logical appeals. He uses logic to convince the clergymen on a moral level that while a nonviolent campaign may include breaking the law or being labeled an extremist, it can peacefully bring justice.…

    • 1361 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Introduction: John Lewis once said “My parents told me in the very beginning as a young child when I raised the question about segregation and racial discrimination, they told me not to get in the way, not to get in trouble, not to make any noise.” MLK does exactly what John Lewis was told not to, he stands up for himself and the other black people who were being discriminated. Although acquiescent obedience make an individual follow a law, prudent integrity makes an individual realize that certain laws need revision. Therefore, King's call to action to the white moderates is that they realize what’s morally right and protest against what’s morally wrong. King uses Pathos to manipulate his audience's emotional reaction by creating allusions.…

    • 955 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In the 1960s, race relations were in horrible shape in America. There was still segregation and racism was very prominent. People had had enough of the inequality between black and whites, so they decided to take a stand. Thus began the Civil Rights Movement. Many people were involved in this revolutionary movement, but Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X were perhaps the most distinguished leaders at the time.…

    • 1131 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Social Justice Vs. Objectivism The human race is made up of all kinds of people. Humans come in all kinds of shapes, sizes, colors, national origins, religious backgrounds, their own set of opinions, etc. No two people are exactly the same.…

    • 1245 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Some people may think that legal abortion should never be allowed, because abortion is equal to murder. However, what they fail to notice is that how to define murder and how to define fetus. Compared with fetuses which will tend to…

    • 1819 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Abortion is murder. First, Abortion treats a baby as just a piece of tissue. A baby grows very fast. According to medical facts a baby starts forming organs around 22 days.…

    • 1607 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays