Jesse Jackson Once Said Abortion is “Genocide.” He Was Right

The news of Rev. Jesse Jackson’s death lands hard today, because before he climbed the ranks of national politics, he spoke with rare moral clarity about the child in the womb. His early words cut straight to the truth about abortion and about the value of every human life.

In 1973, he told Jet magazine, “Abortion is genocide. Anything growing is living… If you got the thrill to set the baby in motion and you don’t have the will to protect it, you’re dishonest…” He saw abortion as an attack on his own community and on the future of children whose gifts the world would never see.

A few years later, he drew an even sharper line. In 1977, he compared abortion to the old defenses of slavery, warning that “the name has changed, but the game remains the same” when society strips the fetus, the embryo, and the baby of protection. He spoke of new life with reverence, insisting, “It takes three to make a baby: a man, a woman, and the Holy Spirit.” For a time, he stood squarely with the unborn.

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Then ambition met party power. As he moved toward a presidential run inside a Democratic Party that increasingly demanded loyalty to abortion, his public stance began to soften. By 1984, he described himself as “for freedom of choice, not pro-abortion,” and said that while he held a pro-life view, he did not want to “force” it on others through law. By 1988, he went further and argued that “it is not right to impose private, religious and moral positions on public policy.” The man who once called abortion genocide now treated his convictions as a private matter and adjusted his message to fit a party that pushed abortion as a right.

Nothing in science or reason justified that turn. What changed was the political cost of speaking on behalf of the child. To gain and keep favor inside a party that tied its future to abortion on demand, he laid aside the very arguments that had once anchored his witness. His early, stirring pro-life statements and his later pro-abortion alignment stand in painful contrast.

Yet even after he joined the pro-abortion line, something in him still stirred when he faced visible suffering.

I saw that in southwest Florida during the final days of Terri Schiavo’s life. Outside the hospice where courts had ordered the removal of Terri’s feeding tube, families and activists gathered in the heat. I remember watching Jesse Jackson arrive, suit dark against the bright Florida sun, and walk toward Terri’s parents, Bob and Mary Schindler.

He called the situation “one of the most profound moral and ethical issues of our time.” He prayed with the Schindlers. He told reporters that Terri had become the “singular person that brings clarity” to end-of-life questions. He reminded everyone listening that she did not depend on a breathing machine and did not suffer from a fatal illness. Her only “problem” stemmed from a court order denying her food and water.

Then he said the line that still echoes in my memory. “Unless we are anxious for her to die, we must not be this callous about human life.”

Those words sounded very much like the old Jesse Jackson, the one who called abortion genocide and refused to hide behind legalisms. That day, he warned that you cannot “hide behind the law and not have mercy. It takes the law and mercy.” He stood under that brutal sun and pleaded with lawmakers and judges to find a way to save her life.

Outside that hospice, I saw a man pulled between two worlds. The political figure who had embraced “choice” spoke into microphones, but behind his eyes I glimpsed the pastor and civil rights leader who once understood that every vulnerable life deserves protection. Terri Schiavo forced that conflict to the surface.

His life holds a lesson for every believer and every political leader. You cannot keep your deepest convictions in one box and your public positions in another. Sooner or later, those boxes collide. When they do, someone dies. In this case, millions of someones.

The Democratic Party that Jesse Jackson chose to serve went on to adopt abortion through all nine months of pregnancy as a defining creed. Its leaders celebrate the destruction of children as “health care” and push laws that strip even newborn survivors of protection. That radical project needed prominent voices to soften the edges. Jesse Jackson once resisted that role. In time, he accepted it.

Today, as we reflect on his death, we must not whitewash that legacy. His shift did real harm. It gave cover to policies that ended the lives of children he once defended with passion. It confused many who trusted him to stand strong for the smallest members of the human family.

Yet we also cannot ignore the courage of his early witness. He named truths that remain vital for the pro-life movement. He saw that abortion attacks the very people history already marks for exclusion. He knew that a culture that throws away its children repeats the logic of slavery and segregation. In those years he spoke as a prophet.

So we remember both voices.

We remember the young pastor who said, “Abortion is genocide,” who saw every unborn child as a gift who might hold “the cure for cancer” inside that small, God-given mind. We remember the man who declared that “the name has changed, but the game remains the same” when powerful people strip personhood from the fetus, the embryo, and the baby. We remember the believer who said, “It takes three to make a baby: a man, a woman, and the Holy Spirit.”

We also remember the candidate who learned to say “freedom of choice” and to keep his convictions in the private shadows. We remember the party man who no longer fought to bring law and morality together for the sake of the child.

Only God knows which Jesse Jackson stood before the Lord at the moment of death. I pray that when he met his Maker, the older arguments fell away and the younger truths came rushing back. I pray that the shepherd who once defended unborn children asked forgiveness for the years he spent defending their destruction. I pray that the Jesse Jackson who stood at judgment was the one who saw abortion as genocide and who feared what happens when a nation grows “callous about human life.”

For the rest of us, his life issues a warning and an invitation.

Do not trade moral clarity for political convenience. Do not let party loyalty silence your conscience. Do not call a child expendable today when you defended that same child yesterday. The unborn cannot afford our compromises.

Jesse Jackson’s strongest words on life still ring true. Let us honor the best of his legacy by living those words without retreat, without double talk, and without surrender. Let us speak for every child, of every color, in every womb, until our laws recognize what God already knows.

Every one of them matters. From the first spark of life to the final breath.

LifeNews.com Note: Raimundo Rojas is the Outreach Director for the National Right to Life Committee. He is a former president of Florida Right to Life and has presented the pro-life message to millions in Spanish-language media outlets. He represents NRLC at the United Nations as an NGO. Rojas was born in Santiago de las Vegas, Havana, Cuba and he and his family escaped to the United States in 1968.

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