It is not surprising or at all unusual that Angela Davis said some of the things that she said in her harangue on Saturday, but the reaction to many of the things which she said was unnerving to say the least.
Rather than point out the many inflammatory remarks that were made and think about the positive reactions given by the audience, let us examine another issue that is problematic and deserving of attention.
This is an issue that is unpopular to discuss, but is increasingly a non-issue on campus and within this country. Yet, as Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., said, "Cowardice asks the question, 'is it safe?' Expediency asks the question, 'is it politic?' Vanity asks the question, 'is it popular?' But conscience asks the question 'is it right?,' and there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but -- because conscience tells, one it is right."
The issue is abortion.
Angela Davis accused the pro-life movement of not caring for the woman, which is completely and utterly false. According to the Pro-Life Resource Directory, there are almost 3,000 service providers who operate nationwide to help women seeking alternatives to abortion.
Together, they provide a variety of services, including prenatal care, medical assistance for both the mother and the newborn, referral services, professional counseling and adoption placement. More than 400 of these centers now provide professional counseling to help women suffering from post-abortion trauma.
If Angela Davis is so concerned with what she euphemistically terms "reproductive rights," how can she ignore the violence that abortion inflicts on a woman? In pushing for these "reproductive rights," Davis is passing on a message that is especially detrimental to women and minorities.
Minority preborn children are being aborted at more than twice the rate of white preborns; the number of minority babies killed by abortion from 1973 to 1991 corresponded to approximately 21 percent of the total minority population in 1991.
However, there are responsible voices taking a stand and letting their voices be heard. Dolores Grier, for example, declined to accept the New York city branch of the NAACP's Women's History Month Award for 1993 because of the NAACP's pro-abortion position. Grier stated that abortion is "the taking of the future of black America, and also the taking of the future of white America ... this is genocide, black or white, it's genocide -- we're killing ourselves."
Abortion is anti-woman as well. According to the group Feminists for Life, there are three main reasons why abortion liberates men, not women.
First, efforts to establish abortion as a legitimate solution to the problems of being a woman in a male-dominated society surrender women to pregnancy discrimination. Secondly, abortion allows men to escape from responsibility for their own sexual behavior. And lastly, pro-abortion feminists have corrupted feminism by embracing male standards, which hold that it is permissible to treat "unequals" unequally and for the powerful to oppress the weak.
Some of the things that Angela Davis said on Saturday evening made sense.
The idea of scapegoating different groups because of our failures as a society and the suggestion that "the enemy within is the most dangerous of all" seem to apply most of all to the unborn child.
When we will stop blaming the child for the mistakes of its parents? How has our society come to the point that a child within the womb is the mother's enemy and needs to be destroyed?
