(Both excellent books, that I recommend highly)

Whilst these two books appear to deal with completely unrelated subjects, at their heart is the same subject. The freedoms and rights of the individual. In Amistad we look back on a time when slaves had few rights as individual human beings. Our mind is taken back to an era when a battle was being fought between those few who saw all people being equal in the sight of God and those with other interests clouding their judgment. A culture: that saw blacks as mere property to be owned, abused and traded at will. that had a President coming up for re-election who didn't want an international incident on his hands where slave owners and Cuba whose merchants didn't want its main trade, slavery, to be threatened. where Spain, who didn't want its Cuban colony to loose its main source of income which would threaten Spain's grip on its American colony.  The work of Wilberforce had already stopped much of the slave trade but not slavery itself. One individual in a powerful position had had an enormous affect on public opinion, on the issue of slavery, on both sides of the atlantic. Today, to treat one individual as a free person and another as property, is seen as repugnant.  In Roe vs Wade, the telescope is focused on the abortion trade, on manipulation of public opinion and on the manipulation of one individual, Norma McCorvey.

Norma McCorvey, the Roe in Roe vs Wade, works in an abortion clinic after the landmark judgment. Slowly the reality of the 'trade' becomes apparent as does the deception and manipulation of both pregnant women, the law and the media. As in Amistad, the real issue, the rights of the individual and the rights of the unborn child, come to the fore.

This is a book written before the 'Live Birth Abortion" legislation so didn't include the latest acts of US legislators. As 'Archbishop-Cranmer' puts it in his comments about the US election(1):

Senator Obama voted three times against a Bill which would have outlawed the evil of ‘live birth abortion'.

It is a termination process which involves the birth of a live baby, the issuing of a birth certificate, the purposeful abandoning of the baby to a slow and tortuous death, and the callous issuing of a death certificate.

Is this not infanticide?

By law, if an aborted baby is born alive, both birth and death certificates must be issued. Ironically, the cause of death often listed for live aborted babies is ‘extreme prematurity', which amount to a confession by doctors that they have caused this death. It is not uncommon for a live aborted baby to linger for an hour or two or even longer. One baby is reported to have lived for almost an entire eight-hour shift. Many of these babies are born completely healthy, for they are terminated at 40 weeks for the ‘health' of the mother, and also in cases of rape or incest. Ever since Doe v Bolton (the companion case to Roe v Wade) the United States Supreme Court has adopted the definition of the World Health Organisation for ‘health', defined as ‘any condition that might impact her physical, emotional, psychological or financial well being'.

So live birth abortion is permitted in many US states up to nine months for emotional (can't cope), psychological (don't want to cope) or financial (can't afford it) reasons, effectively extending abortion to on demand.

Isn't it about time that we saw abortion for what it really is, as we once saw slavery for what it is? It is murder of a human being. Isn't it time we had a 'Wilberforce' who championed the rights of the unborn child?

(1) Barack Obama and live birth abortion, http://archbishop-cranmer.blogspot.com/ Oct 29th, 2008