This is a short post to encourage you to go to see the recently-released movie Sound of Freedom. The story recounts the work of Tim Ballard, who heads up Operation Underground Railroad, an organization that rescues children sold into sex slavery and brings the perpetrators to justice. The movie is worth seeing in its own right. But it is also important for the pro-life movement.

Let me begin with a short story from the Old Testament, 2 Samuel 11-12. King David, Israel’s greatest king, committed adultery with Bathsheba and, as a coverup, had her husband murdered. Yet despite his brazen sin, David didn’t lose his sense of justice. The Lord sent the prophet Nathan to him, who told David a story about a rich man who, when visited by a traveler, served the beloved and only lamb of an impoverished neighbor rather than his own. David’s wrath was kindled: “As the LORD lives the man who has done this deserves to die . . . because he did this thing, and because he had no pity.” (2 Sam 12:6). Nathan responds: “You are the man!” And David’s eyes were opened. He was awakened to his own sin by hearing of the sin of another.

Like many true stories retold in movies, Sound of Freedom takes some artistic license. But not much. Ballard paid careful attention to ensure that not only his story, but the nature and scope of the injustice, were depicted accurately. The scenes are not graphic, but dark. The message of the movie is given when Ballard (played by Jim Caviezel) is asked why he seeks to rescue the children. He answers, “God’s children are not for sale.” The scope of the crime is driven home by the simple observation that child sex-trafficking has become the fastest-growing international crime network in the history of the world because, unlike a bag of cocaine, which can be sold only once, a child can be sold five to ten times each day—for years.

Sex-trafficking must stop. And so must its bedfellow, abortion. While there isn’t yet a big movement to end human trafficking, there is no national confusion concerning its evil, no pro-choice position on sex slavery. Those who have spoken the oft-used line, “Don’t believe in abortion, don’t have one” would dare not speak its corollary: “Don’t believe in raping children, don’t rape one.”

The parallels between sex-trafficking and abortion are legion. Sex-trafficking relies on abortion—perverted men, and some women, who sell girls to be raped have no compunction about forcing abortion on them when they get pregnant. In the movie, I found it telling that the young girls are called “chickens,” a common move when one wants to deny what one is actually doing. First, dehumanize by calling human beings something else—“cockroaches” in Rwanda, “swine” in Nazi Germany, “fetuses” in the United States—and then do what you please to them. Presumably it is easier to rape a “chicken” than a little girl.

Not surprisingly, the United States is the world’s number one consumer of child pornography (the recorded rape of children), one of the top three destinations for “sex tourism,” and among a handful of countries that permit children to be killed throughout all nine months of pregnancy. Human depredation is a lucrative business. Traffickers are paid handsomely. As are the contract killers we call abortionists. Furthermore, as David Daleiden demonstrated in his undercover interviews with Planned Parenthood employees in 2015, body parts from aborted children are illegally (and widely) trafficked.

Sex trafficking needs to be stopped in its own right. But as in the case of King David, perhaps awakening to the urgency and evil of sex trafficking will also awaken many to the urgency and evil of abortion. For as hardened as our culture has become to killing the unborn, many of our fellow citizens still have a sense of justice; they know that God’s children are not property—and that they are not for sale.