Henry Hyde was a former United States House Representative for Illinois and was widely known as a very “vocal and outspoken" abortion opponent. He is the author of the Hyde Amendment, which prohibited American tax dollars being spent on elective abortions through the Medicaid system, and which President Joe Biden has recently repealed. (Minnesota, by the way, is one of the few states that, regardless of the Hyde Amendment, forces tax payers to fund abortions by a court ordered decision in the case of Doe v. Gomez.)

I recently listened to a podcast of Mr. Hyde giving a talk in the late nineties to Americans United for Life that was very good. He made many good references as to what pro-life people can do to to continue the fight against abortion, and to care for the women that find themselves pregnant unexpectedly. I thought all his points were quite salient, but one of the most profound was within his comparison of abortion to slavery and a reference to the very future of humanity through the Steven Spielberg film Amistad.

The movie is based on the true events of the uprising of fifty-three captured African men on the ship Amistad in the year 1839. The Mende men were initially kidnapped from Sierra Leone and intended to be sold as slaves in Cuba. The slaves broke out of their chains, killed most of the crew and ordered the ship to return to Africa. The remaining crew tricked the Africans and sailed north instead ending up in America. Through a series of events the slaves and the men who claimed to “own” them end up before the United States Supreme Court.

There is a moment in the film when John Quincy Adams (played by Anthony Hopkins), who is defending the slaves’ freedom, is trying to explain through an interpreter to the captured Joseph Cinque, (Djimon Hounsou) the gravity and arduousness of the task they have before them. Cinque, with great calm, responds that they won’t be going into the courtroom alone. The Hopkins character agrees that, no, indeed they will not be alone - they will have Right on their side along with many others. Cinque explains that that is not what he meant.

“I meant my ancestors. I will call into the past. Far back into the beginning of Time, and beg them to come and help at the time of judgement. I will reach back and draw them into me. And they must come. For at this moment, I am the whole reason they have existed at all.”

Hopkins (a master in the acting profession,) as John Quincy Adams, gives Cinque such a lingering look in the long pause after his comments that you cannot miss the admiration this character feels for the value of the person before him and for the ghosts of his long ago African ancestors.

But consider Cinque’s profound last sentence. “At this moment, I am the whole reason they have existed at all.” Cinque has the view that his great people that came before him existed for an exalted purpose; so that Cinque would be sitting where he is at that moment; so that he would be kidnapped, fight his captors, travel to America and join the fight before an American court for the freedom of himself and the men captured with him. His faith is in the spirits and departed souls of his ancestors, but with his statement he is also saying that humans have a purpose and a destiny. Christians do not believe that the dead can be a help to us in this life, but we most certainly believe that all human beings have a purpose; that there is a “Why” as to why we are here.

In the AUL podcast, Mr. Hyde makes the following observation with regard to the film and Cinque’s mention of his ancestors (not verbatim):

When an abortion occurs, when somebody dies in an abortion, that person has had ancestors going back to the Garden of Eden. The travail that those ancestors had to survive to reach this moment where a birth is about to occur boggles the mind. The wars, the natural disasters, the diseases, the pestilence, the plagues, all of the life-threatening factors that have required survival - endurance, and then here at this moment this little child is going to be born and is snuffed out. And not only is this child snuffed out, but the progeny of that child - the children and the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren to the end of time. It just seemed to me that theme required a great dramatist to explain to people what a real tragedy an abortion is. What a foreclosing of the future and what a waste of centuries of suffering and travail to end up being killed at the very moment you should have been born. Mr. Henry Hyde

When women — and I have to say here, when black women — make a choice to abort our own child we are despising our ancestors. We are shunning the people who have travailed and fought and endured the many difficulties of life so that we could be born ourselves. We are foreclosing our own futures. And of course this is true for all women, not just women of color. I mention black women because black women statistically have more abortions than any other group even though (in mostly white Minnesota and in other states) we are less of the overall population. This just shouldn’t be.

Women: don’t believe the euphemisms and untruths that the media and the abortion industry try to make you believe about it being your “right” to end your pregnancy and take your child’s life. There are many pregnancy help centers that can support you regardless of your circumstances. People who are pro-life are not only concerned with unborn children in the womb. We care very deeply about you, the mother; about the line of enduring men and women behind you that brought you to where you are now, and the many men, women and children who will come from you and after you far into the future.