Introduction

Good afternoon! I am so glad to be here with you all today. It is a special joy to be back on this campus, which was my professional home up until about a year ago, when the March for Life came calling.

Thank you to my long-time friend Elizabeth Kirk and the Center for Law and the Human Person, as well as the Human Life Foundation for organizing today’s conference and inviting me to join you. You might not know that this conference has been over two years in the making, since Maria first had this wonderful idea of bringing together faith-based ministries and programs, and I am so happy to see it come to fruition in such a beautiful way. Thank you, Maria, for your visionary idea.

I also want to thank each one of you for making the time to be here today. It is so important in our work in the pro-life movement—which is intense—that we take time occasionally to step away, to be refreshed and to be re-energized to go back into the fray. My hope for all of you who work in the pro-life space is that your time here today renews your hope and motivates you anew for our shared mission to support moms, save unborn babies, and foster a true appreciation of life.

I know we’re all looking forward to the afternoon session and the opportunity to hear directly from some folks on the front lines of serving moms. Before we get to that, in our time together, I will take you behind the scenes of CUA’s own Guadalupe Project, a concrete example of a community of faith taking seriously the call to accompany moms in its midst. We’ll discuss the post-Dobbs landscape and how its complexities and challenges should inspire us to work even harder and more strategically for the cause of life. We’ll take a look at the incredible work done by the pregnancy-care sector, with a special emphasis on faith-based ministries and programs, our particular theme today. And finally, I’ll leave you all with some reflections on leading with love, and on reasons for hope.

Those latter two are linked, of course. Because hope gives us the strength to keep on loving.

And love is what all of you gathered here and so many pro-life Americans around the country do, day in and day out: Pour out your love for expectant mothers, first-time fathers, babies, and growing families.

We are all here because we’re constantly asking ourselves, how can we love even more and better? How can we create ever more of a revolution of love (to borrow a phrase from Pope Francis)?

Christ started this revolution of love, of course, but it’s up to each of us in our particular time and place—I think of it as the particular vineyard to which the Lord has assigned us—to carry it forward to meet the particular challenges of our age. And caring for unborn babies and their mothers is one of the most urgent challenges of our time.

Three decades ago, Pope Saint John Paul II wrote a beautiful encyclical entitled Evangelium vitae, in which he calls us to “serve the Gospel of Life,” as he puts it. There, the Holy Father specifically calls each one of us individually to serve through “personal witness, various forms of volunteer work, social activity, and political commitment.” (87)

“This is a particularly pressing need at the present time,” he says, “when the ‘culture of death’ so forcefully opposes the ‘culture of life’ and often seems to have the upper hand.” This was in March 1995, but it sounds to me like it could have been written today.

In addition to this individual call issued to each one of us, the Pope also speaks of a communal call. The Pope exhorts us that “every Christian community . . . must continue to write the history” of the Church’s charitable work, through, among other things, “appropriate and effective programs of support for new life . . . with special closeness to mothers.”

And this is what we are doing today, we’re talking about how Christian communities can continue to write the history of the Church’s charitable work by supporting new life. We have a number of different programs, ministries, and organizations represented here today, all with different charisms and different approaches to answering this call. I’m going to begin by sharing with you about one such program with which I am intimately familiar.

Guadalupe Project

You’ve already heard it referenced: This is the Guadalupe project, Catholic University’s flagship pro-life initiative, which is a beautiful reason for hope, right here on this campus, because it’s a story of a faith-based community really taking seriously this call to serve moms.

In June 2022, in the days leading up to the Supreme Court issuing its decision in Dobbs, I was talking with then-President John Garvey in the waning days of his tenure here about how the university might respond to the decision once it was officially released (and remember that we all had a head-start on this because of the leak of the decision in May of that year, so everyone knew what the decision would say—which was not ideal in a lot of ways but gave us the gift of having some time to prepare).

As we thought through our response, and what would be appropriate for Catholic University to both say and then to do to meet the moment, we were mindful that a university is not a social services provider—it’s not primarily a social services provider at least—we don’t run a maternity home (we would love to do that someday here I think but we can’t run a maternity home—that’s not our charism); it’s not our task to lobby extensively for changes in the law. But we also knew that several thousand people make their home here at Catholic University. In some cases, literally, like the undergrads who live on or near campus. And for many, many more people, figuratively; the staff and faculty whose lives, and whose family’s lives, are intricately connected with and supported by the university.

So we decided that what we could do here, what was proper to us as a university community, and the best way for Catholic University to meet the moment, was to just go all-in on making this university the best possible place to have a baby. To make sure that our people were fully supported as they built and cared for their families, no matter their circumstances. And we chose to entrust this work to Our Lady of Guadalupe, patroness of the unborn, who was depicted as pregnant in her apparition to St. Juan Diego.

This project was and is full-scope; it’s meant to support all parents on campus, not just students, and not just mothers in unexpected or challenging circumstances.

And we chose this approach, this wide-ranging approach, because we wanted to do more than support crisis pregnancies, although that’s very important of course. We wanted to foster a culture on this campus where each life is celebrated, knowing that a positive, vibrant, and joyful culture of life is truly life-giving in so many ways. It encourages openness to life among everyone in the University community. It contributes to the human formation of the students at a critical moment in their lives, when they are beginning to discern their own vocations—which, for many of them, will involve marriage and family life. And, of course, such a culture would wrap around women, including students, facing challenging or unplanned pregnancies and would support them and empower them to choose life.

I told campus leadership when we launched, one measure of the success of the Guadalupe Project will probably be more pregnant students on this campus. That might feel uncomfortable, but a community in which young people don’t feel confident that they’ll be met with love and support is a community in which abortion culture will run rampant, especially in a place like Washington, D.C. where the D.C. Planned Parenthood is something like 7 minutes away on the Metro line that runs right outside this campus.

I’m grateful to President Kilpatrick that when he arrived and was sort of handed this fledgling new project, he very wholeheartedly embraced it and has made it a priority of his time at the university too; which is a big part of what has allowed the Guadalupe Project to grow and thrive.

So, with President Kilpatrick’s support and with a small team of university leaders including Professor Elizabeth Kirk working with me, we set out to make Catholic University a model of radical hospitality. That was our watch word, radical hospitality for mothers, inspired by Catholic teaching and the example of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

To that end, we extended paid parental leave for staff and made it more widely accessible. Previously, for example, parental leave had traveled with the baby rather than the parent, such that if two married staff people had a baby, they would be splitting one parental leave between them. We got rid of that and other barriers to access. We introduced designated maternity parking spots around campus. We started putting diapers and wipes in Cardinal Cupboard, the campus food pantry, making them available free of charge to anyone who needed them. We ran a maternity clothing drive; we started sending gift boxes to new parents, affirming the goodness of family life and that new babies are a moment to celebrate. And this, again, came from a really insightful contribution by one of our initial Guadalupe Project commit-tee members, this is a very Evangelium vitae insight actually, which was that we talk a lot about supporting moms, supporting moms, supporting moms—and that is what we are doing, but we need to be thinking more broadly than that, because life is something to be celebrated, it’s not a burden for which someone needs support, or not solely that. It is really a cause for celebration. We also revamped all of the University’s pregnancy resource materials for students; in other words, we expanded and updated our outreach about unplanned pregnancy, we basically ran a whole new campus campaign about pregnancy. We designed a poster campaign, including one design specifically for the men’s dorms, and, borrowing a great idea from Georgetown University, our neighbors here in Washington, we put stickers in every women’s restroom stall on campus with a QR code leading to these pregnancy mate-rials. The goal was to make sure that every woman on campus knows that these resources exist, and knows exactly how to find them, so that there isn’t an information gap at a critical moment in the middle of the night, driving them to CVS to get Plan B or down the Metro’s red line to the D.C. Planned Parenthood the next morning.

In the early stages of building Guadalupe, I had an opportunity to speak several times with a few wonderful Sisters of Life. They told me how crucial it is to close that information gap for our demographic in particular, our demographic here at this university, because young women in this demo-graphic, women of this age enrolled in school, tend to make their decision very quickly whether to end or keep a pregnancy. They told me that the best thing we could do would be to make our pregnancy resource materials “part of the wallpaper” on our campus. We took that as literally as we possibly could, with the posters and the stickers.

Over time, we kept building Guadalupe in response to the community’s requests and needs, which has been the watchword of this project from the beginning, being responsive to the concrete needs of our particular com-munity. We started adding more changing tables across campus—I was delighted to see one in the restroom just around the corner here in Caldwell Hall—including in men’s restrooms, which was a specific request from our community. I worked with the undergraduate pro-life group who wanted to set up a babysitting service to provide childcare for parents on campus. We bought a comfortable nursing chair for the Law School Parents’ Association at their request. We coordinated a baby shower in the early days for a pregnant undergraduate. And so on. And so on and so on.

I was so encouraged, when we launched this project, to see the willingness of colleagues all around campus to aid our efforts. I’ll give you one small ex-ample out of many, but a wonderful colleague who works in campus services took it upon himself to go over to the campus bookstore, and used his own money to buy out every pair of infant socks they had in the bookstore—this kind of CUA brand of infant socks—and brought them to me in a plastic bag and said: “This is for the Guadalupe project.” It was just the sweetest and most thoughtful thing, and it sort of shows how this campus and so many people on it really bought into this project which is part of what made it so successful.

I was also deeply encouraged by the positive response that Guadalupe received on campus and even beyond. Our undergraduate intern for the project in those early days told me after we announced our initial suite of actions and initial deliverables that she’d been keeping her ear to the ground among her fellow students and that the students were really excited about this, even though most of them would never benefit from it directly. She was hearing a lot of feedback like, “this place has always said that it’s pro-life . . . and now I see that the University really means it.”

Again, the Guadalupe Project was undertaken with the goal of serving our particular community, but its approach, I would submit, is a prototype for other faith-based organizations and communities and workplaces as well. In fact, groups from two other Catholic universities reached out to me after we launched Guadalupe and asked to talk about our efforts, as they were inspired to consider something similar at their schools. I was just at Notre Dame a week ago to give a speech there, and the students at Notre Dame Right-to-Life were so excited and proud to tell me about their Be Not Afraid Project, which was inspired by the Guadalupe Project. I actually have a call scheduled in a few days with a diocesan pro-life director out in the Midwest who wants to hear about Guadalupe and think about how the diocese might emulate it for their particular context. I hope that many similar efforts continue to grow and flourish in communities, churches, and workplaces around the country. Just as Guadalupe continues to grow and flourish here in the last year thanks to the wonderful caretaking of the campus ministry team that inherited it.

So many of you here today I know are already doing work like this. The Guadalupe Project is just one shining light in the nationwide network of re-sources for women.

Post-Dobbs, Pro-Life Orgs Are More Important Than Ever

For decades, countless faith-based organizations and faithful people have quietly worked to foster a culture of life and walk with mothers in need. I suspect that for many of those organizations, just as it was for us here at CUA, June 2022 and the Dobbs decision served as an inflection point and a moment to reflect.

The Dobbs decision that consigned Roe v. Wade to the dustbin of history, where it belonged, put a renewed emphasis on what we’re discussing today: How do we ensure that pregnant women have what they need to confidently choose life?

Taking down the Roe regime of nationwide abortion on demand was the long-term legal and policy goal around which the pro-life movement was initially built. And achieving that goal in 2022 occurred thanks in no small part to the unflagging witness of the pro-life movement itself, including and especially through the visible annual witness of the March for Life, I would say, which made it very clear over the course of many decades that this issue was not settled.

But of course, as the people gathered here know very well, Dobbs didn’t mark the end of our work. The initial goal was achieved but it didn’t mark the end of our work. Far from it.

A number of states have enacted strong pro-life laws since Dobbs. In these states, some women, who under the pre-Dobbs regime perhaps would have chosen abortion, are now carrying their pregnancies to term and having their babies. Many of these women are in need of pregnancy support.

In other states, voters have enshrined a so-called right to abortion. Meanwhile, Planned Parenthood facilities are closing around the country—over 40, at last count—but the widespread availability of chemical abortion drugs has filled that vacuum, meaning that overall, it is arguably easier than ever to end unborn life in this country, leaving countless women endangered. Chemical abortion drugs have a close to 11 percent rate of serious adverse effects for women.

And here’s another part of the post-Dobbs story, a hard part of the story. Immediately following the Court’s decision—actually, following the leak of the Court’s decision in early May—we saw a dramatic uptick in physical violence towards pregnancy resource centers and other pro-life organizations. One count found that over 100 PRCs, pro-life organizations, and churches were attacked across the country in just six months after that Dobbs opinion leaked. This included fire-bombing, vandalization, ransacking. Sometimes accompanied by threatening pro-abortion graffiti like “if abortions aren’t safe, neither are you.” Many of these centers had to hire additional security or even close their doors until conditions allowed them to reopen safely.

While this spate of physical violence and intimidation has died down, thanks be to God, pregnancy resource centers still face ongoing threats of a different kind. Some state and local government actors continue to target PRCs, seeking to limit their ability to provide life-affirming care to moms and their babies. In states like New Jersey, Vermont, Delaware, California, New York, Arizona, Massachusetts, Colorado, and beyond, in all of those places, politically-motivated politicians are trying to punish PRCs for their pro-life missions. For example in New Jersey, pending legislation would allow the state attorney general to bring consumer protection lawsuits against PRCs for misleading women. The attorney general of New York is suing PRCs that educate women about the abortion pill reversal regime; that litigation is still ongoing. Vermont attempted to limit the ability of PRCs to offer options counseling to women, among other unfair and illegal limitations on their advertising and their programs. After a lawsuit was brought by ADF, Vermont amended its law earlier this year. And so on, and so on across the country.

These political attacks on pregnancy resource centers will be in the spot-light more than ever this fall, as the Supreme Court is set to hear a case stemming from the New Jersey attorney general’s unceasing harassment of faith-based pregnancy centers. Claiming that a network of PRCs called First Choice Women’s Resource Centers were misleading women and even mis-leading their own donors, by not referring people for abortion, the AG at-tempted to subpoena information about First Choice’s donors. First Choice resisted, saying that this would chill its First Amendment free speech and as-sociation rights, and, to make a long and frankly very dry legal story short, they are now at the Supreme Court arguing about the proper way to challenge such a subpoena. We won’t go any further into the legal weeds, but the under-lying facts of the case are yet another example of politically motivated, actors motivated by pro-abortion ideology who are looking for any possible foothold to disrupt or even end the life-affirming work of pregnancy resource centers.

The good news is that with excellent legal representation from ADF, the Becket Fund, led by CUA’s own Professor Mark Rienzi, and others, PRCs are prevailing in many of these attempts at silencing or intimidating them. And I do believe that First Choice will ultimately prevail at the Supreme Court in this. That hopefully will help to stem the tide of intimidating and harassing actions across the country.

But litigating is time-intensive and it’s stressful, even when your lawyers are great, even when they aren’t charging legal fees, even when you ultimately win. And these ministries should not have to go to court in the first place to defend their right to offer authentic, holistic care and support to women.

I am personally so grateful to the many organizations and ministries who persist in accompanying women and moving the needle towards life every single day, undeterred by this challenging landscape, carrying out their missions with boldness and courage. Because yes, those of us who work in pro-life policy legal and legislative advocacy have a very long post-Dobbs to do list. But if our work as a movement stops at the door of the courthouse or the state house, we are really missing something. Because what will bring the abortion rate down, save babies and transform women’s lives, even in jurisdictions with bad laws?

Helping and empowering individual pregnant women to choose life. That’s the name of the game because it’s the right thing to do and because it’s the best way to save little lives.

I think all of us are here today because we believe that we as a movement and we as a Church are called to discern how we can do even more to ac-company pregnant women. In this post-Dobbs season, with more women carrying babies to term in some pro-life states, permissive pro-abortion laws newly on the books in other states, easily-accessible chemical abortions on the rise all over the place, we are here to learn from each other about how we can do more.

Abortion Stats

Here’s a devastating statistic that’s a call to action if I ever heard one:

Six out of ten women who have chosen abortion would have preferred to choose life if they had the emotional and financial support they felt necessary. (That’s from a peer-reviewed study by the Charlotte Lozier Institute.) This has haunted me since I first heard it. It’s very, very convicting.

We in the pro-life movement have work to do if more than half of women who chose abortion would not have done so, would have preferred not to do so, but didn’t feel they had the support they needed to choose life.

Of those women who’ve chosen abortion, just one-third described their abortions as “wanted,” which means a good two-thirds of women have been pressured, bullied, scared, or forced into an abortion.

Just think about that for a minute. Most women who choose abortion don’t want it. They’re being fed the devastating lie that they’re not strong enough to be moms, or at least not right now. That no one will help them. That no-body loves them. That nobody will take them seriously if they have another baby as a single mom. That they’re on their own. That their mistakes or their poor judgment will haunt them forever.

We need to make sure that pregnant women never reach the point of despair that drives them into the arms of the abortion clinics. We need to meet that moment of loneliness or fear or emptiness with encouragement and empowerment, reminding these women of their courage, their strength, and their ability to mother—it is what God made them for. We need to make sure that support and resources are available for moms in need, and we need to make sure that women know exactly where to find them. We need to give women information about their pregnancies—that is so empowering— and let them see and hear their baby, through ultrasound and fetal heartbeat. Abortion clinics often don’t do that, by the way.

So this is where pregnancy support programs and their tireless work come into play.

Work of PRCs, Etc.

I often say in my new role that the March for Life is the heart of the pro-life movement. But, if that is true, pregnancy resource centers and other life-affirming organizations and initiatives are the hands and feet of the movement that go out and do the front-line work, embracing and accompanying moms. There are nearly 3,000 pregnancy resource centers and nearly 500 maternity homes nationwide.¹ Their incredible staff and volunteers are providing support and comfort to women in unexpected or challenging pregnancies across the country, 365 days a year.

The services they provide are numerous, and you all know this of course. From pregnancy tests and ultrasounds that let women hear their baby’s heartbeat, to abortion-pill reversals and post-abortion counseling, to parenting classes and material support and much, much, more, pregnancy resource centers play a critical role in supporting expecting moms.

A 2022 report gives us some figures about just how much this network, this nation-wide web of supports, does every year. This report counted over 700,000 pregnancy tests, over 540,000 ultrasounds, over 400,000 parents educated through prenatal and parenting classes, and nearly 21,000 men and women accompanied through post-abortion counseling.²

And the pregnancy resource movement does this work well. A recent study reported an exceedingly high rate of client satisfaction at just over 97 percent.³ Another study found that when compared to abortion clinics, PRCs were almost twice as likely to offer same-day appointments and six times as likely to offer free pregnancy testing.⁴ In the anxious, uncertain hours when a woman is not sure she is pregnant, that matters, every minute matters.

I’m happy to share that our fellow Americans, by and large, affirm the good work done by PRCs. A Marist poll from the beginning of this year found that 83 percent of Americans support or strongly support pregnancy resource centers. And that includes 80 percent of people who self-identify as pro-choice!

So this is a really key point of commonality among our fellow Americans, that I hope we can find ways to talk about more and to lean into more and more. . . . One of the best things about my new role at the March for Life is that I have had the opportunity this year to see the work of pregnancy care organizations firsthand. In my travels as the president of the March, I have committed to visiting a pregnancy resource center, maternity home, or other similar organization in every city that I visit.

From Denver to Dallas to Des Moines, Phoenix to Harrisburg to Trenton and beyond, these have been incredibly inspiring visits. I have been so moved by the faith and the joy of the people behind these initiatives, and I’ve walked away from each visit with my hope renewed knowing that they are giving hope to countless women facing an unexpected or challenging pregnancy.

Since I know most people don’t have the opportunity to see this kind of work firsthand, let alone to visit a number of different organizations across the country, I am trying my best to use our platform at the March for Life to shine a light on this beautiful work. We want to do our part to make people aware of the incredible resources that are available to pregnant moms all across this country. I’d love to tell you a little bit about some of the places I’ve visited as a microcosm of that enormous web of resources across the country.

• In My Shoes maternity home in Dallas is an amazing place doing the Lord’s work as they offer expectant and new mothers a safe and stable home while they work towards living on their own. The staff (including some young live-in staff) not only provide 24/7 support and companionship, but they also walk with the women through whatever challenges they’re navigating as they prepare for motherhood—escaping abusive partners, finding steady work, whatever they have going on. The staff and residents do Bible study and pray together regularly. They share meals. And the building and grounds are really lovely. In My Shoes emphasizes truly creating a dignified home for these women, tangibly manifesting God’s love for them and their babies, helping them build community, and reaffirming them in their choice of life.

• Alternatives in Denver has prioritized creating very peaceful, calming spaces—it feels very zen—that help the women who come through their doors feel comfortable and put at ease. I loved that they have a growing program for dads as well.

• At FirstWay in Phoenix, the space is bright and colorful, like you would imagine in the Southwest. And if moms participate in parenting and other classes they will earn credits, that they can use for diapers, wipes, baby clothes, toys, and more, from an overflowing little store. I was also glad to see another program to support dads, a peer counseling program. If we want to see more women choosing life, we need to also support the men in their lives who are part of their journey to the extent that that’s possible. Of course, it is not always possible for a complicated number or reasons, but programs for dads are a key part of this landscape as well.

• MorningStar in Harrisburg similarly allows women participating in their programs to select sweet little baby clothes and other items. They have set up what truly looks like a high-end baby boutique for the moms to browse (I even took some photos because it was just so adorable) and in addition, once their moms reach third trimester they’re gifted a full layette, a laundry basket full, complete with hand-knitted baby blankets and big bundle of clothes, and bibs, and other items.

• InnerVisions HealthCare in Des Moines, Iowa is primarily a health clinic. They are a little bit different than a number of other pregnancy re-source centers I have been with. Their particular aim is to reach women who are seeking out, actively seeking out abortions, and they do a lot of strategic advertising in pursuit of this goal. Once they have connected a client with an obstetrician or midwife for their ongoing prenatal care,

InnerVisions stays in touch with them throughout their pregnancy, continuing to offer support, and often ultimately getting to meet the baby, once he or she is safely in the mother’s arms.

• Most recently, I was in Trenton, New Jersey for the New Jersey March for Life a few days ago and was blown away by what they have been able to accomplish in a hard, very hard environment in NJ in a lot of ways. Chris (Bell’s) home environment too, thank you for your work there. Options for Her in Trenton, through their four mobile ultrasound units, have saved 2,700 little lives and counting! It’s amazing: They park right outside abortion clinics, and they offer ultrasounds to moms, so that moms can see and hear their babies, which is so often a trans-formative experience that these women are typically not getting in the abortion clinics, and often just what a mom needs to understand that she is carrying a precious life, a life that’s worth saving.

I have been so heartened by all of these visits. Seeing the power, the reach, the generosity, and the joy of the pro-life warriors at these places has renewed my hope in our ability to turn the tides of our culture to embrace, rather than to destroy, life.

Faith-Based Ministries

Now, not all of these places I’ve mentioned are explicitly branded as Chris-tian, but every single one of them is truly rooted in faith, whether they say so explicitly or not. One center I visited does not market itself as Christian in any way—but is nonetheless staffed entirely by people of faith. I was so moved to see that in the back area, their staff-only section, they have a very small chapel. The Director told me, “this work can be so heavy. We’re all here because of our faith, and we all turn to our faith in the harder moments as well as the in the moments of joy. So it’s important for us to have a place where we can slip away to spend a few minutes with the Lord, to pray for our clients and to find refreshment and renewal.” They do offer to pray with their clients there once a client has mentioned that she is a person of faith.

So here I am going to just linger for a moment and try to articulate the particular contributions of faith-based pregnancy care ministries. (Again, understanding here that there is a range of ways in which a ministry can be faith-based.) Faith-based pregnancy ministries undertake this work knowing that they are the hands of Christ to the women, babies, and men they’re serving and seeing Christ in those that they serve. This allows them to carry out their work with authentic love and joy at the gift of life. Second, faith-based ministries are singularly mission driven as they are responding to a call from the Lord. They are in it for the long haul. They don’t flinch. And finally, crucially, I think maybe most crucially, these organizations go beyond simply addressing material needs. They also care for the spiritual wellbeing of those they serve and in doing so care for the whole person.

Again, some places are doing this implicitly and with a lighter touch, some are much more explicitly evangelistic, but faith-based ministries are in the business of seeing and caring for the whole person.

The importance of this point has become clear to me, as I’ve met the people and heard the stories of a number of faith-based ministries. Part of the mission and part of the results at these places is to help the clients dis-cover their identity as beloved daughters of God. These ministries offer a full range of support and resources, they offer a lot of stuff, they offer counseling and education, and all of that is super important, but they are also offering mothers an invitation to uncover their dignity and their worthiness in the eyes of the Lord. To know that they are deeply, extravagantly loved, and that God’s love can set them free from whatever burdens and wounds they are carrying. It helps the women to know that because they are loved so profoundly, they do have love to offer to the little person they are carrying. Whether that looks like raising their baby, or making the sacrificial act of letting another family raise their baby through adoption. Sometimes this is conveyed to the moms more or less explicitly. One place I have been runs a bible study as part of their PRC ministry; it’s not a required thing for the moms to participate in but it’s very evident that that’s it’s part of their mod-el. Sometimes it’s implicit, just in the love extended to these women by the PRC staff and volunteers, and by the way in which they dignify the mothers by entrusting them with information about their pregnancies, helping them prepare to step in to their God-given call to be good mothers, allowing them to select the clothing and baby items that they want to give to their children, kind of creating their own aesthetic, if you will. All these things are really powerful at a human level.

Abortion is a crisis of human rights, absolutely, but it’s also truly a crisis of the human heart. Too often abortion is the result of fear, shame, loneliness, emptiness. It’s a wound that springs from existing wounds. The love of Jesus will bind up those wounds, given the opportunity, and that is the particular contribution that faith-based pregnancy care organizations can make.

A similar dynamic, I think, obtains for the organizations that have men’s programs, too. This is complicated in our space because the dads are some-times not available, sometimes the dads are the problem, there is a lot going on there, but trying to have a program for dads is so important because using God Our Father as a reference point, faith-based ministries can help fathers understand real masculinity and encourage them to be the selfless, strong, loving leaders that their new little family needs. That is a stark contrast to what these young men are often hearing from the world, with its prioritiza-tion of a form of masculinity that too often degrades women, shirks responsibility, and leads to the destruction of the family.

Leading with Love

Now let’s talk about leading with love, the beautiful theme that Maria and Elizabeth chose.

Love is the best way to draw people in. It’s the best way to make moms feel comfortable approaching a pro-life pregnancy resource center or other organization. And it’s the best way to invite people into our movement who have perhaps been on the peripheries, or who haven’t been sure that they want to call themselves “pro-life.” Because of the impression that they have of the pro-life movement about who is in it, how it engages, etc.

We in the pro-life movement need to be ready to engage at the level of the head; with our persuasive arguments and our key facts at the ready, about fetal development, about the dangers of the chemical abortion pill, about how abortion hurts women. We also need to engage at the level of the heart. We have to let the love, the hope, and the joy of the pro-life movement shine through and lead the way.

Speaking clearly about hard issues is important to me. I almost feel funny talking in this way because I am a former philosophy major, and I’m a lawyer. I believe to my very core in the power of strong arguments and the importance of making our arguments airtight. I don’t want to minimize that. But human nature being what it is, people don’t always change their minds because of a great set of bullet points. Often, people are moved to change their minds because of their encounter with the transcendentals—the permanent things—truth, beauty, and goodness.

This seems to me to be often true of conversions to the faith and certainly often true I think of conversions to the pro-life movement, the pro-life cause, or even to conversions to being open to keep a pregnancy that initially seemed like a burden.

I’m sure we’re all aware of other social movements, events, demonstrations, maybe even other marches that burned hot for a time and then petered out. The March for Life (the marquee event of the pro-life movement, the March is a stand-in for the movement in many ways) is still going strong after over 50 years—despite being held at the absolute worst time of year weather-wise—yes, we’re aware of that! But people still come. I believe it’s because events built on anger don’t have staying power. They can’t. That is an emotion or a state of being that is not sustainable long-term. It is not natural for human beings. The March for Life continues to flourish, the pro-life movement continues to flourish, people continue to come, year after year, and to engage the movement, to renew our movement with more and more young people every year, because our movement is rooted in things that are timeless and that are universally compelling. Truth, beauty, and goodness speak to the heart of every person and they cut through the noise. The good news for us is that the transcendentals are on our side in this work. Life is true, and it’s good, and it’s beautiful. Life is a Gift. These are core human truths that have immense staying power. They speak to people and move people, in and out of season.

If you’ve ever been to the March for Life, and I hope you all have and I hope you will come this January too—you know that the most re-markable thing about it is the effervescent joy of the pro-life movement on full display. There is incredible energy at the March for Life. It is a day—I’m describing it like it’s Woodstock!—about love. The love for babies and their moms. Countless young people, as far as the eye can see, singing and chanting and holding their signs, totally on fire for life. That joy is the natural outgrowth—it’s the overspilling if you will—of truth, beauty, and goodness. It’s just an outpouring of love. It’s infectious, and it’s contagious.

I’m delighted to share that the theme of the 2026 National March for Life, which I just announced last week at a press event here in Washing-ton, will be Life is a Gift. For all of the reasons I just laid out, we’re embracing this theme as a way to invite people into the pro-life movement at the level of the heart. We are inviting the pro-life movement to lean into our joy, the sheer joy of life, and the joy of being together to celebrate it and to work for it, which is really one of our most persuasive arguments. We are inviting the pro-life movement to lead with love. That will tell the truth about what it means to be pro-life more powerfully than any slogan ever could.

So I am very happy to share with you the theme video for the 2026 March for Life which we just started sharing last week, and which encapsulates this theme, Life is a Gift (video; applause).

Our team really poured our hearts into that video, because we were all so convicted that is the message that the movement needs to both hear and share right now in our particular moment; to speak to the level of the heart, and to invite people into our movement and to show that the face of the pro-life movement is the face of love. I love seeing all the archival footage we have, so many decades of archival footage of the March for Life, because I think it makes that really so clear. Love is what gives the pro-life movement so much staying power. It’s what moves people to our side. It’s what allows our wonderful life-giving faith-based ministries to save lives and change hearts. When we lead with love, meaning we are leading with Christ’s love, allowing him to love through us, we will change the world.

Closing

And now, a final word about hope in our current pro-life moment. Monsignor James Shea, the President of the University of Mary, and a Catholic University alumnus as well, gave a beautiful talk on hope at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast earlier this year. I encourage everyone to look it up and read or watch it in full if you haven’t. He said there, “human beings cannot live without hope.” And further—I’ll quote at length now—“This question of hope is so central for us as [Christians] because we know that Jesus Christ speaks about hope in the course of his Revelation in the Gospels and that the New Testament insists again and again that hope is essential to the way in which we navigate our lives, that Jesus came to give us a kind of hope which is a bedrock, which gives us the perspective necessary to navigate all the vicissitudes of life, the disappointments and the heartbreak and the triumphs and the joys as well, placing everything in its proper order and its place. We need to have a hope which is deep Hope, with a capital H, a bedrock foundational hope.”

Msgr. Shea identifies what he calls “proximal hopes,” which are hopes for good things on this earth: we hope for good weather on the weekend, we hope our travels will go smoothly, that kind of thing. We also of course hope for more significant things, like to meet and marry a Godly person, or for a parent’s illness to be cured. But none of those things, even the really good things cannot be our foundational or bedrock source of hope. Quoting again now from Msgr Shea: “We are immortal beings with eternal destinies. We were not made for this world. Our citizenship is in heaven. And so as a result, when we found our hopes upon things of this Earth, our hearts will always be broken, we’ll always find disappointment.”

There are so many reasons for hope in the pro-life movement. The in-credible organization I am privileged to lead gives me hope. The tens of thousands of Americans who come to Washington on a January day gives me hope. The energy and momentum among young people for the cause of life. The tireless work done by so many people of faith for decades, to support women, fills me with hope. But truly those are all proximal hopes.

Our Bedrock Hope, of Course, Ultimately Lies in Jesus Christ and His Literal Victory over Death.

That is so important to hold on tight to because the cultural and political landscape in our country can at times seem very hard. I jokingly said to some folks last year although it wasn’t entirely a joke—I’m not sure it’s really the right time to become a full-time professional pro-life activist. The landscape looked hard last summer and it still looks hard in many ways. The number of abortions still occurring in our country is devastating. The number of post-abortive women who would have preferred to choose life is deeply convicting. At times it can feel like perhaps we’re moving in the wrong di-rection. Initial reports after Dobbs about abortion numbers seemed in some ways to be going up rather than down. I believe that is reversed now, but the numbers didn’t look great coming right out of the gate. I often think of my predecessor, Nellie Gray, the founder of the March for Life—who answered the call to stand up for life and who fearlessly and tirelessly led the March for almost 40 years, until the day that she died. Nellie passed away in 2012, ten years too early to see the fall of Roe, for which she had poured herself out and launched an event, and a movement, that has made history and changed history. But guess what. The Dobbs decision was released on the eve of Nel-lie Gray’s birthday, in 2022. God has a way of winking at us, and letting us know us that He sees and blesses our efforts.

So what I want to leave you with is: Don’t ever give in to discouragement. There will be ups and downs. There will be some losses along the way. The post-Dobbs landscape is challenging. But there is no room for discouragement in our line of work. We should have the peace and confidence that comes from knowing that we are working for a truly just and righteous cause. And we should have the peace and confidence that comes from knowing how the story ends. We know that Life wins, in the end.

Life wins, thanks to Jesus, our Lord and Savior.

This is what ultimately gives us the hope—the foundational, bedrock capital H Hope—to carry on in this fight to build a nation where every unborn baby is protected and every mother is supported and empowered to confidently choose life.

And I know that we will get there, thanks largely to the tireless work of all of you gathered here and so many others across this nation who, day in and day out, are leading with love.

Thank you very much for your work.

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Original Bio:

Jennie Bradley Lichter assumed the office of President of the March for Life Education and Defense Fund in February, 2025. Jennie formerly served as the Deputy General Counsel at the Catholic University of America. In addition to her legal work at the Catholic University of America, Jennie also founded and directed The Guadalupe Project, the University’s campus-wide initiative to support and lift up pregnant and parenting students, staff, and faculty. The speech here was the keynote given at the Leading with Love Conference at the Catholic University of America on October 8, 2025.