"Pro-Life"

On Wednesday of this past week, Washington DC was flooded with hundreds of thousands of people in the annual March for Life. If you have watched the main news outlets you probably didn’t hear much about it, even though it is one of the largest attended annual marches, or you were shown a small group of counter protesters.

The annual March for Life is expected to have well over half-a-million people come to march peacefully, and it is a wide spectrum of people, including many thousand young people going to support the life of those who do not have a voice. It is pretty common knowledge that the Catholic Church is a strong leader in the Pro-Life movement, which goes well beyond the work to end abortions. It is one of the primary missions of the Pro-Life group, but not the only one. Each year, over 900,000 children are aborted in the U.S. alone, that is a staggering number and sadly in Washington DC, 38% of pregnancies end in abortion. It is estimated that one out of four women have had an abortion and we need to respond to them with mercy, forgiveness, and love. Jesus calls us to respond not with anger and bitterness, but with care and love.

I have had a number of women who have had an abortion come to me to talk or to confess it, as well as a number of men come to me as well to talk about their role in the support of an abortion. These are always challenging conversations because if they are coming to me, they feel regret and sorrow, and my role is not to judge, but to show the mercy of God to them. When we talk about being pro-life in our Church it is more than just being anti-abortion, it is about supporting life from conception to natural death. This means that we should strive for the dignity of life from the time that the child is conceived in the womb to the time that we naturally die.

We sometimes separate social justice and pro-life as two different groups, but they must be intertwined. If we profess to be a people who support life, then we also need to support those who are living, no matter what state of life they are in, if we support social justice of any kind, then we need to have the first rule which is life. Jesus calls us to love our neighbors as ourselves and then explained who are our neighbors and he states, that all people are our neighbors, even those we do not agree with, from the child conceived with a disability, to the child conceived on a hook-up, to the immigrant, to the prisoner on death row, to the elderly person in a nursing home, to someone who is very sick, or someone who is on their death bed. This is what it means to be Pro-Life. Pray for those who have been affected by abortion as well as for an end to it.

Fr. Ken Halbur