March for Life: Why Pro-Life and Pro-Woman go hand in hand

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On January 22, for the 43rd year running, pro-Life men, women and children will gather, hundreds of thousands strong, to March for Life and to protest the divisive abortion decree known as Roe v. Wade. This year’s theme is “Pro-Life and Pro-Woman Go Hand in Hand.” Why?

Planned Parenthood and other abortion proponents falsely claim they are for mothers while we at the March for Life are for babies. No. We are marching for the unbreakable bond of love between mothers and babies.

A pregnant woman and her baby are not radically separate individuals with isolated human rights “at war” with one another. A woman and her baby are a “unity of two persons” interconnected in love with everyone and everything. Whatever harms the baby harms the mother, whatever harms the mother harms the baby, and whatever harms either of them harms us all.

Roe v. Wade has enshrined into the law of our nation the false and damaging notion that you can snap the bond of love between a mother and her baby without consequences.

That’s simply untrue. You can gnaw at that bond of love through abortion. You can visibly and physically severe the mother’s life from the life of her baby.  But invisibly, in the human heart where the hidden truth lies, that silent bond of love remains unbroken and eternal.

We are all well aware of the false rhetorical slogan claiming that the prolife movement has declared a “war on women.” Nothing could be further from the truth. We in the prolife movement have never declared a war. We are defending the bond of love between a mother and her child.

Roe was never pro-woman. It was poorly conceived from the very beginning.

Nearly all of the historical, medical, and legal arguments Justice Harry Blackmun used to support the Roe holdings have been subjected to intense scholarly criticism.

Many of those arguments were devised by NARAL co-founder Lawrence Lader and NARAL attorney Cyril Chestnut Means, Jr. Lader was a master propagandist whose highly persuasive book Abortion was thick with half-truth, limited truth, and truth out of context.

Means literally invented his own abortion “facts,” observes Villanova University law-history professor Joseph Dellapenna in "Dispelling the Myths of Abortion History." Yet in Roe, Blackmun cited Lader’s "Abortion" book seven times and Means’ papers another seven times.

Women deserve so much more; at the very least they deserve the truth.

Even Blackmun himself told the Washington Post in February of 1974 that the Roe v. Wade ruling could one day be regarded as “as one of the worst mistakes in the court’s history, or one of its great decisions, a turning point.”

Sadly, as we consider the United States today, we now know how damaging the decision has been.

We have lost over 57 million Americans to abortion since Roe and many, many women regret choosing abortion. Some of these women who regret their abortions will be sharing their testimonies in front of the Supreme Court at the end of the March for Life.

When we, as Americans, pledge that we are “One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,” we are declaring the truth that we are all interconnected.

We believe in liberty and justice for all, even the smallest person in the womb. And we believe that we cannot pit one human’s “rights” against another human’s “rights.”

Human rights are not isolated, private, and “at war” with each other. Human rights are indivisible.

No woman in her right mind chooses an abortion. Abortion is nearly always a choice born of fear. As pro-Life feminist Frederica Mathewes-Green famously put it: "No one wants an abortion as she wants an ice-cream cone or a Porsche. She wants an abortion as an animal, caught in a trap, wants to gnaw off its own leg."

As the grassroots March for Life continues strong into its 43rd year, we work for the day when no pregnant mother feels compelled to choose an abortion.

We march toward that new day when all thoughtful Americans support the "unity of two"--both the mother and her baby--and when freedom for all at last reigns over our land.