I have long been aware of the parallels that exist among the holocaust, slavery, and abortion. It is obvious to me, and I can't understand why it isn't to everyone, that all of these horrors have existed because of the failure of large groups of people to realize and acknowledge the humanity and person-hood of others.

President Barack Obama appeared to emulate two of our nation’s finest presidents: Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. I hoped that this was true, and that he would follow their lead in the area of civil rights. Both of these men were willing to change their course once they realized that they were wrong. Abraham Lincoln was not opposed to slavery when he went into the White House. He found it necessary to become anti-slavery to preserve the Union.

In 1935 attempts were made to persuade Roosevelt to support the Costigan-Wagner Bill, which was, in fact, a bill making lynching illegal. However, Roosevelt refused to speak out in favor of the bill. He argued that the white voters in the South would never forgive him if he supported the bill and he would, therefore, lose the next election. Largely because of Eleanor’s deeply felt and strongly fought battles for racial justice (for which she was often reviled), FDR is today perceived as a champion of the rights of African Americans.

Both of these men, to their credit, and notable in their legacies, had a change of heart. I prayed that Barack Obama would have a similar change of heart regarding legalized abortion on demand, and become a champion for the cause of this most helpless and most persecuted minority in history. It would put him in the history books alongside Lincoln as both the most despised president for some, such as NARAL, NOW, and Planned Parenthood, and the most heroic for others: those of us who see the Unborn not only as living human beings, but persons in their own right.

I am astonished that while Barack Obama celebrated his personal triumph of civil rights, by becoming the first American President who is a member of a racial minority, he promised to intensify his discrimination against another minority. He has sworn to continue the persecution of the Unborn and to deny them the rights that he so proudly enjoys. Among these, and the one upon which all others rest, is the basic Right to Life. The Unborn will continue to be killed without laws to protect them, in the same wanton manner that blacks were treated as non-persons and were enslaved and lynched in the past and in the same way that Hitler determined who were persons with the right to live and who were not. God help us all if we are too blind to recognize their humanity. God help us all if we don’t understand that the right to be born - the Right to Life - is the original Civil Right. To continue to violate it by legalized abortion is equivalent to lynching or exterminating another minority.

Just as the Nation had a compelling interest in defending the Negro, and just as the World had a compelling interest in defending the Jew, the State has a compelling interest in defending the Unborn.