[John M. Grondelski (Ph.D., Fordham) is former associate dean of the School of Theology, Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey. The following article was published by the National Catholic Register (www.ncregister.com) on January 20, 2025, and is reprinted with permission. All views expressed here are exclusively those of the author.]

From college campuses to the March for Life, young people (and young families) are giving new life to the pro-life cause.

I’ve gone to many Marches for Life since my first in 1975. Two things that have struck me positively: it’s more ecumenical and it’s growing younger.

That it’s growing younger is not just a reverse mirror of me getting older. There are more young people there. Nor is it “compulsory attendance on a field trip” from Catholic schools. Those young people are from colleges and universities: fresh voters. They’re also not just from the old Catholic colleges and universities that are March for Life standbys — schools like Franciscan University, Belmont Abbey and Christendom. A few years back I remember getting attached to a large group from Louisiana State University. A state university!

Georgetown hosts a student pro-life conference every year on the day after the March. I’ve attended it for the last few years, and it’s refreshing to see so many young collegians and grad students, serious about their subjects and serious about the issues, attending serious presentations about protecting and defending life.

Somebody today posted a picture online of JD Vance holding the young peoples’ trademark sign: “I am the pro-life generation.” I don’t know if the picture was real or a photoshop, but I do know that picture is worth a thousand words.

That picture will strike terror in the hearts of abortionists because Vance may be the future. Here is a 40-year-old man who, at his inauguration, had fidgety little kids in tow. Kids. Plural. Acting like kids. Americans don’t see that much. Marriage scholar and researcher Brad Wilcox has documented that the number of Americans living with a minor in their household and the amount of time they live together have both declined. That’s troublesome.

But Vance is not a lecture. He is a living person showing that it is neither “weird” nor even just a “choice” to have children. He reminds us of what Americans once took for granted: that normal human development generally meant there was a stage in adult life when one moved out of a parent’s basement, got married and had kids. Or, as a more authoritative source put it, “A man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh” (Matthew 19:5).

That terrifies the abortionists. That terrifies the septuagenarians and octogenarians like Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Hillary and Bill Clinton, Jerry Nadler and others who are still living in and fighting for the 1960s and Woodstock. It frightens them because it sends perhaps the visceral awareness that they are the past — and they are passé.

It doesn’t mean they’ll go gently into that good night (where they want to send everybody else). Diogenes needs to prowl the north wing of the Capitol because the fact that 60 Senators would not vote “yes” to pass a law on Jan. 22 banning medical abandonment and infanticide of post-abortion newborns is a national disgrace. The bill failed 52-47, because it needed a three-fifths (60) vote.

A few years ago, Jeanne Mancini told the March for Life that it was not just enough to make abortion illegal. We had to make it “unthinkable.” And I’ve been thinking about that.

“Unthinkable” is a big reach. It’s daunting, even intimidating. It demands cultural shifts and cultures don’t just change.

But we have to think about making abortion “unthinkable.” In the 1800s, it was “unthinkable” that slavery would disappear or that the South could survive without chattel servitude. The “unthinkable” happened: nobody today would entertain the idea slavery might have pros as well as cons.

Eighty years ago, America resolved that Nazism would be “unthinkable” and that postwar Germany had to be rehabilitated first by intellectual fumigation. No normal person today suggests we consider Nazism’s “good” side.

I’d argue the mistake we made after 1989 was in refusing the intellectual work of stigmatizing socialism and communism. Those systems killed on a magnitude that made Hitler look like an amateur. But we pretended that “history was over” and didn’t need to lustrate the post-communist world, which is why an ex-KGB colonel calls himself a democratically-elected president, the world’s most populous country remains under communist dictatorship, and some people still have heart flutters for Havana and Hanoi.

Yes, we can make abortion “unthinkable” and the people who are going to do that are “the pro-life generation.” Some will do it through their research, their scholarship, and their political activism. But many will do it by doing what our vice president showed by example: by marrying, by having babies, and by being (and looking) happy about it.