“The next phase now begins.” So said House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) while speaking to attendees at the March for Life (MfL), which took place on Friday in Washington, D.C. Instituted in 1974 to protest prenatal infanticide after the ’73 Roe v. Wade opinion, this year’s event was the first held since that unconstitutional decision was overturned last June. The MfL reflected this new climate, too, in theme and spirit. As USA Today reports:
This year the annual March for Life celebrates the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which led to the overturn of Roe, as a major victory for the anti-abortion movement.
“I’m grateful that Roe was overturned, but very aware that the work to build a culture of life is not yet done,” Jeanne Mancini, president of March for Life, told USA TODAY. “We are in a new season, where the people enjoy more freedom to enact laws to protect life, so our work to change hearts and minds is all the more important.”
The march had the air of a pep rally, with drummers, and people chanting slogans. Many carried banners and waved flags, some adorned with the names of states, colleges and churches.
… Eight months after the Supreme Court delivered abortion opponents’ long-sought goal of reversing Roe, anti-abortion advocates conducted their annual march with a new objective: Lobbying lawmakers to stop abortions.
… The theme of this year’s march is “Next Steps: Marching into a Post-Roe America.”
As for those next steps, they’ve been taken on both sides. While more conservative places such as Missouri have protected unborn life except in cases of medical emergency, left-wing states have moved in the opposite direction. The New York State Legislature, for example, “passed a constitutional amendment that, if fully enacted, would enshrine the right to an abortion and contraception access in the state constitution,” reported CNN last summer.
This is, of course, how our countrymen are supposed to operate legally: Our Constitution’s silence on prenatal infanticide makes it a state matter.
But New York’s actions don’t reflect how our countrymen are supposed to operate morally. This gets at a more fundamental issue, however, one addressed by some MfL figures and attendees.
MfL president Jeanne Mancini, for instance, vowed on Friday that we “will march until abortion” — like slavery, which was once ubiquitous worldwide — “is unthinkable.”
Then there’s Veronica De La Cruz, 29, who has been attending the MfL for the past 10 years. This time, she was “chaperoning a group of middle schoolers from a Catholic group, the Institute of the Incarnate Word,” The New York Times informs.
“She hopes that the overturning of Roe will change the mind-set of the next generation of Catholics so that young people opt to reject abortion, regardless of the legal status of the procedure,” the paper continues.
“We would love for laws to change, but mainly people’s perspective needs to change,” the Times quotes her as saying. “It’s about a moral law, our youth don’t have this knowledge.”
For sure. “Politics is downstream from culture,” as Andrew Breitbart famously observed. While trying to craft good legislation is important, representative government presents us with a certain reality: There won’t be enlightened law with a benighted people; there won’t be respect for life amid a culture of death.
So what’s the most fundamental issue here? Prenatal infanticide defenders have argued that “we don’t know when life begins” or that a baby in his early stages “isn’t human.” Pro-lifers then sometimes mount intellectual arguments in response, as I’ve done, and this is all well and good. In reality, however, these pro-abortion arguments are often a dodge. People embracing them may do so to avoid revealing their true feelings (and they are generally just feelings) to others or, more frequently, to themselves (i.e., they’re rationalizing).
Apropos to this is a story from my high-school days. I don’t remember how the matter arose, but one day a very interesting English teacher posed a moral question to our class: If you could press a button and get a million dollars, but a little old man in China — with no family or attachments whatsoever — would die, would you press it?
Approximately a third of the students responded affirmatively.
The point: It may not matter to people when life begins or if it’s human if they don’t believe man is sacred to begin with.
Some pro-abortion people (perhaps an increasing number) are honest about this now, too. A good example is author Maggie Nelson. “Feminists may never make a bumper sticker that says IT’S A CHOICE AND A CHILD, but of course that’s what it is, and we know it,” she wrote in The Argonauts in 2015. We “understand the stakes,” she later added. “Sometimes we choose death.”
By the way, the preceding was related, approvingly, by writer Sophie Lewis in a 2022 article titled “Abortion Involves Killing — and That’s OK!”
We can be aghast, and should be. Realize, though, that the above is a logical outgrowth of atheism, which is rampant today. For man cannot be “sacred,” defined as “connected with God,” if there is no God. Believing people are mere cosmic accidents is to say they’re just organic robots, some pounds of chemicals and water — or, as barrel-of-laughs botanist Lawrence Trevanion put it, “objects that perceive.” And, of course, objects will be objectified, and inconvenient robots’ operations can be terminated.
Pro-life appeals must continue and seek to change minds and hearts, to reach people not just intellectually but also emotionally. But the moral of this story is simple: A civilization that discards God will be unlikely to treasure His children — either inside the womb or beyond it.
