It’s our collective duty to stand up against abortion

• Human sovereignty is important but it is subservient to human solidarity.
• Both men and women have a duty to protect unborn babies.

Whenever I meditate on the Barack Obama story, the following quotation from Jeremiah 1:5 seems to come to life in a rather dramatic way:

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,

And before you were born I consecrated you;

I have appointed you a prophet to the nations.”

This is especially so now that many pundits are seeing him as the fulfilment of the dream of a united, equal and peaceful America that the Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr dreamt of 45 years ago.

When at the National Democratic Convention he formally became the 2008 presidential candidate for the Democratic Party, his ground-breaking acceptance speech, not only laid out his inspiring vision of a changed and hopeful America, he consciously referred to his delicate origin thus: “Four years ago, I stood before you and told you my story – of the brief union between a young man from Kenya and a young woman from Kansas, who weren’t well-off or well-known...”

WHAT BARACK DIDN’T SAY WAS THAT he was a perfect candidate for abortion.

His mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, got pregnant as an unmarried teenager, and gave birth to him on August 4, 1961, at age 18, a few months after getting married to Barack Obama Sr on February 2, 1961.

This fact carries immense prophetic import for me: that the nature of our coming into this world is not as important as our being allowed to come into the world.

At a forum to discuss whether or not to legalise abortion on demand (abortion on medical grounds) a woman discussant wondered aloud why men were poking their noses into affairs that purely concern women.

To her the debate should be left to women. Basically what this women was positing was: which one between human solidarity and human sovereignty trumps the other?

The question was a remarkable invitation to investigate the wider subject of humanitarian intervention, a perennial issue in personal, national and international relations today, to express human solidarity with others.

The modern world’s ethical, and sometimes political, imperative to help other people stems from the fact that humanity is agreed largely that human solidarity trumps human sovereignty.

That thinking is what informs the existence of institutions like the UNO, the International Criminal Court and many others organisations, including the many doctrines that celebrate the solidarity of human beings. All peace-keeping and humanitarian efforts are anchored on our sense of solidarity as human beings.

At a more personal level society expects us to intervene in situations on the basis of our solidarity as human beings. And we applaud stories where individuals uphold the right to intervene and support the weak in conflicts purely on humanitarian grounds.