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:
[T]he 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:
[T]he 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 me the nations who have legalized abortion, they are the poorest nations. They are afraid of the little one, they are afraid of the unborn child, and the child must die because they don’t want to feed one more child, to educate one more child, the child must die.
Legal abortion is not only a moral travesty, it’s a spiritual catastrophe on an almost unimaginable scale. What can wash away the stain of all that blood? What has the power to heal the soul of a nation so twisted by decades of such evil? How can there be hope in our hearts when the gift of life itself is treated as a disease to be avoided or a threat to be eradicated?
The answer to those questions was provided definitively by Jesus Christ two millennia ago. We Catholics know that there is no sin so great that the grace of God cannot overcome it. That is the source of all our hope. What other hope is there?
But we Catholics also know that the work of salvation accomplished by Christ finds expression across time and place through the work of the Church, especially in the Mass. And this, too, is in my mind as the March for Life approaches, because the spiritual harm of abortion demands a response. Christ has given the definitive response, but each of us can join our own meager efforts to his through penance and reparation, prayer and fasting, for the spiritual scars that so mar the soul of our beloved nation.
So this week, especially, March for Life! Pray to end abortion! Act to change hearts and minds and laws! Lift up those in need! And perhaps offer some penance, however meager, for the sake of our nation and join it to the sacrifice of God’s own Son in whom all our hope resides.
