By Stephen P. White
One of the advantages of living in the suburbs of Washington DC – and, yes, there are some advantages – is that I am able to attend the March for Life almost every year. This year, while many would-be Marchers are wondering if their return flights are going to be cancelled by a massive winter storm, I have no such worries. I'll be there again this year, marching and praying and taking solace in the tens of thousands of smiling young faces, families, and not a few friends.
The March provides an opportunity to reflect on what has been accomplished in the defense of life, as well as a chance to reflect on what remains to be done. Often this work is understood in the context of our politics: pro-life politicians elected, laws changed, court cases decided, policies that are praiseworthy or blameworthy.
The pro-life movement, which sprang up in the wake of Roe v. Wade and which has persisted in this country for more than half a century, is a remarkable accomplishment of citizen activism. Few countries can boast such a broad-based and durable coalition in defense of the unborn as we have here in the United States.
Pope Leo recently underscored the importance of this work, both for the sake of the lives involved but also for the well-being of society as a whole:
The protection of the right to life constitutes the indispensable foundation of every other human right. A society is healthy and truly progresses only when it safeguards the sanctity of human life and works actively to promote it.
Of course, the pro-life movement is more than political activism, as important as that is. Think, for example, of the enormous networks of crisis pregnancy centers that have done, and continue to do, such noble work for mothers and children across the country. Think of the Sisters of Life, who embody in a particular way the Catholic commitment to serving the very least among us. Think of the countless parish pro-life ministries where thousands upon thousands of rosaries are said every week for mothers in need and for the protection of their children.
These immense, broad-based efforts in defense of life are bolstered by the Church's witness to the dignity of human life in other arenas, too: in her defense of the elderly and terminally ill; her solicitude for the poor, the homeless, the incarcerated, and the stranger; her care for sinners.
Each of us is loved by God, a God who, though we were sinners, loved us first. To acknowledge this fundamental reality, this basic realization of the Christian life, is to know the twin consolations of gratitude and humility. From such grace flows the imperative to love in imitation of Christ.
The imperative to love – which ought to inform the whole of the pro-life movement and is certainly on display every January at the March – also leads us to reflect on the enormity of what abortion has wrought in this country. The cost in lives is almost incalculable – almost, but not quite: somewhere between 60 and 70 million abortions in the United States since 1973.
The cost to the relationships between men and women, the desolation of families, the pain of regret and loss, the poisoning of our politics, the coarsening of the soul of our nation. All of these are real costs to the sin of abortion. These are spiritual costs which affect all of us (even those never directly touched by abortion) because they profoundly shape and affect the families, communities, and even the Church to which we belong.
Mother Teresa, in her 1979 Nobel Prize speech, famously spoke in defense of the unborn. But her words were not just a lament for abortion or a call to defend the most vulnerable among us (though she did both). She also identified the poverty – the greatest poverty – of those nations which embraced the abortion license:
The greatest destroyer of peace today is the cry of the innocent unborn child. For if a mother can murder her own child in her own womb, what is left for you and for me to kill each other? To...
