On a recent Sunday afternoon my family and I saw the new movie “Lincoln.” I couldn’t help but be struck by several things.

To begin with, of course, the movie is excellent and should be seen by everyone as well as their children old enough to handle the infrequent scenes of barbarity, death and dismemberment. Our 15-year-old daughter was old enough to see these things and to begin to understand the issues addressed by the movie.

How well the movie showed the trade-offs between blood to be spilled by the current generation and freedom to be lost for millions in future generations, and how well the mature audience seemed to appreciate this fact! In one quiet scene the housekeeper of the Lincolns, a black woman, impresses upon the president that the first and most important issue among all the imponderables that arise in consideration of the sacrifice necessary to liberate her people — who were a class of citizens widely defined as less than human — was, simply, freedom. Without freedom, how can other imponderables be addressed?

Today we face a different kind of choice and the necessary defense of a more basic freedom. As in Lincoln’s time, a class of citizens has been branded as less than human, but this class of citizens has their futures cut off not by inability to vote or to move about freely or other losses of freedom, but termination of life under the most extreme prejudice possible — through abortion. I wondered to myself how many of those attending grasped the obvious parallel to what they had just seen.

Our children and grandchildren are going to ask us, how was it possible that tens of millions of innocent human lives were lost in the pursuit of our personal “freedoms”? What answer will we give them?

— Charles Lovekin