More than 2,000 people marched around a new Planned Parenthood Clinic in Denver tonight instead of following the Democratic National Convention.
Alveda King, a niece of the late Martin Luther King Jr., and Archbishop of Denver Charles Chaput spoke to the crowd before they lit candles and circled the gated clinic.
Alveda King’s mother conceived her daughter when she was a freshman in college. She had wanted to get an abortion, but Martin Luther King Sr. told her mother she could not abort her baby.
“This little baby human girl was allowed to live,” she said to the cheering crowd.
King later aborted two of her children.
“People say, ?Aren’t you embarrassed and ashamed to stand up and say you had abortions?” King said. “I’d be more embarrassed if I didn’t tell you, because it is wrong, and without the grace and mercy of Jesus Christ, I would not have been forgiven. Jesus Christ said, ?Go and sin no more.'”
She then praised Bishop Charles Blake’s pro-life message at the interfaith gathering yesterday.
“He delivered some very startling and surprising words. They expected the rhetoric that always proceeds. But he began to tell the audience, ?I am a pro-life Democrat.’ We want to commend those men and women and say that life is a civil right, life is precious, and that it transcends politics.”
King wrote a guest column last week for the Denver Post, calling abortion an “industry of racism. She does not plan to vote for Sen. Barack Obama unless he changes his stance on abortion.
“People in every party should say, ?We’re for life,'” she told Christianity Today. “They should not be held captive by politics in the battle and the struggle.”