“Am I not a man and a brother?”

In our day the one class of people who have no human rights are unborn babies.

This was the heart cry of the African American slave immortalised in campaign material produced by William Wilberforce’s gang of Christian political activists more than 200 years ago.

Fast-forward to last Saturday and I found myself in a throng of almost 5000 people marching down Brisbane’s George Street for the same principle.

In our day the one class of people who have no human rights are unborn babies.

A legal loophole means 14,000 are killed each year in Queensland but the practice remains in the Criminal Code.

That the law says abortion is wrong is deeply offensive to hard-line feminists and the Queensland Deputy Premier Jackie Trad wants it changed.

Her bill will legalise abortion right up to birth even for social reasons.

It allows for open slather killing of unborn babies up to 22 weeks and then on the say-so of two doctors.

The second doctor can be an abortionist who doesn’t even have to see the woman or view her medical file. The second opinion can be obtained over the phone.

The bill does not prohibit sex-selection abortion which means those ethnic communities which favour boys over girls can practice gendercide, no questions asked.

Under the 2008 Victorian abortion laws, upon which Trad has modelled her bill, Melbourne doctor Mark Hobart was sanctioned by the Medical Board for reporting an Asian couple who wanted to abort their baby girl.

Trad has been deaf to calls even for an anti-coercion provision to stop men from pressuring their girlfriends to kill their babies.

NRL “stars” Tim Simona and Bryce Cartwright both got away with doing this last year, leaving two grieving mothers and two dead babies.

Abortion allows unborn babies to be poisoned and dismembered on demand without pain relief.

This is so ironic given that in-utero surgery is now common and anaesthetic is always administered to the unborn patient.

Not so in the brutal world of abortion.

So we marched. Chanting “pro-life”, waving signs that said we cared for mum and bub.

Gone are the days when pro-abortion bills were brought forward by a private member.

The Trad bill is a Palaszczuk Labor government-sponsored bill but members will have a conscience vote.

It is understood a handful of pro-life Labor MPs may vote against the bill when it comes to the Queensland Parliament next month.

The Opposition Liberal National Party has not decided if it opposes the bill as a group, even though the party’s policy, as determined by its grassroots, is pro-life.

Several LNP members are known to favour abortion and it is possible that the bill may pass on the back of these LNP votes.

Abortion crept into Australia because of the lie that an unborn baby was just a blob of foetal tissue.

High resolution ultrasound now tells us something different.

The pain of women who bought this lie also tells us something different.

That is why we marched. We did it for the least of our brethren, just like the Wilberforce gang.

Lyle Shelton is the Queensland Senate candidate for the Conservative Party.