My First March for Life

There were multiple speakers at the March for Life before we marched through the streets of downtown Edmonton. They reaffirmed the value of human life, called for protection for mothers pushed to undergo an abortion, lambasted our healthcare system for compelling the elderly, disabled, and impoverished to seek assisted suicide, and highlighted the good work undertaken by numerous charities that support pregnant women, new mothers and their children, young families, and those at the end of their life. Notable in all of this is the notion that being pro-life doesn’t end at stopping abortion but ensuring, in the words of one speaker, that abortion becomes “unnecessary and ultimately unthinkable.”

As this was my first time at a March for Life, I wasn’t exactly sure what I was getting into. Some of my friends have attended previous marches, including the tense and provocative event last May, so I was preparing myself to be yelled at and potentially spat on, and to engage, with charity, someone who would be denigrating some of my most cherished beliefs. That didn’t happen. As speaker after speaker got up, the insults and chants from the protestors (all 14 of them) got quieter and quieter. Our witness and the meager opposition seemed appropriate given the event’s theme: “The Future is Pro-Life.” 

Before the speakers started, eight-year-olds were running around, evading their parents’ grasps; young adults played football as grandmothers using walkers looked on; and a baby gave witness from their mother’s womb as a young woman named Brittney held a stethoscope and microphone to her body so we could hear her child’s heartbeat.

As young people, we’re grown up in a culture inundated with the philosophy behind the “pro-choice” movement, and we’ve heard incessant critiques of what it means to be pro-life. Our culture tells us that by focusing on life issues, we’re not supporting those in need, we’re being judgmental of those in distress, and we’re destroying a liberated concept of the human person. But we know, and this March for Life reinforced, that being pro-life is about affirming the dignity of human life, which is part of living the Christian life of joy, kindness, and generosity. 

Our call to live out Christian charity is part of our universal vocation to holiness, and in pro-life issues, we exemplify this by our generosity to those in need, our kindness to those in distress, and our joy by affirming life in the face of opposition. If we continue to share these fruits of the Holy Spirit, our generation and the future will most definitely be pro-life.