The March for Life

President Trump acknowledged the hosts of young Americans in the throng before him: “Young people are the heart of the March for Life. And it’s your generation that is making America the profamily, pro-life nation.” He also saluted pro-life’s countless women and girls, saying, “To all the women here today: Your devotion and your leadership uplift our entire nation, and we thank you for that.”

Mr Trump harbored no illusions about America’s anti-lifers: “They’re coming after me because I am fighting for you, and we are fighting for those who have no voice. And we will win, because we know how to win.”

The President then got to the heart of the matter—the baby girls and boys who are abortion’s true central characters—they are the ones who either die or survive, after all:

When we see the image of a baby in the womb, we glimpse the majesty of God’s creation. When we hold a newborn in our arms, we know the endless love that each child brings to a family. When we watch a child grow, we see the splendour that radiates from each human soul. One life changes the world.

Mr Trump also said, “All of us here today understand an eternal truth: Every child is a precious and sacred gift from God. Together we must protect, cherish and defend the dignity and the sanctity of every human life”.

President Trump concluded his remarkable pro-life address with these words: I want to thank you. This is a very special moment. It’s so great to represent you. I love you all.
And I say with a true passion, thank you, God bless you, and God bless America. Thank you all. Thank you. Media Bias Once Again

As they do every year, the news media did their best to downplay, distort or even ignore the March for Life. If they mention the gargantuan crowd size at all, they never say, “hundreds of thousands”, just “thousands”, as PBS and NPR did. They never quote the March’s theme, which this year was, “Life Empowers—Pro-Life Is Pro-Woman.” And they never accurately characterise the crowd’s always large youthful and female composition; for example, in a New York Times article about the March, the only attendee the reporters quoted, out of hundreds of thousands of people, was a 62-year-old man.

The mainstream TV networks should be ashamed to call themselves journalists. The TV watchdog group Newsbusters said CBS gave 13 seconds to the gigantic March, ABC gave it all of 15 seconds and NBC covered it not at all. CBS also “covered” the historic pro-life event by interviewing Alexis McGill Johnson, the acting CEO of the abortion giant Planned Parenthood.

Slogans at the March
Every year at the March, the pro-lifers of all ages wear their hearts on their sleeve, so to speak, with the inventive, often touching and always thought-provoking placards they carry. Because pro-life slogans are highly quotable and easy to remember, pro-lifers put them to use not just for placards but in all kinds of situations, private as well as public, in which hearts can be touched, minds changed, and lives and souls saved. What are some of your own?

This year’s slogans at the March were tremendous once again. Here are some: Let it not be said that I was silent when they needed me (Wm. Wilberforce)—Pray to End Abortion—Unique from Day One—Love Saves Life—Make Unborn Babies Great Again—Save the Baby Humans—Abortion Is Cringe—Abortion Is From the Dark Side—A Child, Not a Choice— Baby Yoda Is Pro-Life—The Mandalorian Saved a Baby. You Should Too.

16th Annual Walk for Life West Coast
This year’s annual pro-life Walk in downtown San Francisco, on January 25, attracted tens of thousands of marchers yet again. A touching feature was the return of four happy mothers, their babies now in their arms, who had stood onstage at last year’s Walk while letting the crowd hear their then-preborn infants’ heartbeats loud and clear.

Some but not all of the local news media tend to cover the Walk, and this year one radio station even admitted that the Walk attendees numbered in “the tens of thousands”.

Brilliant slogans were plentiful at this year’s Walk, as usual. As you will see, they are worth remembering and putting to use, whether in demonstrating or any situation, private as well as public, in which there is a chance of changing hearts. Here are some:

Sometimes the Smallest Things Take Up the Most Room in Your Heart—We Are Praying to End Abortion in This Country—Everybody That Is for Abortion Has Already Been Born—Denying Personhood Has Always Been a Tool of Oppression—Violence against Another Person is NEVER a Human Right—The Right to Murder Human Beings Is Not in the Constitution—Abortion Is Profoundly Anti-Woman—Smile—Your Mum Was Pro-Life—Black Lives Matter in the Womb Too!—Marching for 2—emember the Unborn Jer. 1:5—I Survived Roe v Wade.

Cardinal Cupich Demurs
On the day after President Trump gave his full support to the anti-abortion movement at the March for Life, Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago gave an address that was in stark contrast to that of the Chief Executive. As Christopher White reported, the cardinal keynoted this year’s Catholic Social Ministry Gathering in Washington, DC, an annual event that the US bishops’ Justice, Peace, and Human Development office organises.

The cardinal insisted that the Church needs “a consistent ethic as we promote human dignity and justice for all”. He said, “Such an approach…subverts any attempt to fragment our Catholic social teaching, pretending to offer so-called non-negotiables, which ends up reducing our moral tradition to a single set of issues.”

By putting the pejoratives “pretending” and “so-called” in front of “non-negotiables”, Cardinal Cupich was contradicting Pope Benedict XVI, as a look at this quote from that pontiff’s “Address to European Parliamentary Group, 30 March 2006”, shows:

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and She is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable. [emphasis added—B.G.] Among these the following clearly emerge today:

(a) protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death;

(b) recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family as a union between a man and a woman based on marriage, and its defence from attempts to make it juridically equivalent to radically different forms of union which in reality harm it and contribute to its destabilisation, obscuring its particular character and its irreplaceable social role;

(c) the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.

Cardinal Cupich knows that these non-negotiables do exist—and that the Democrat Party openly violates them. But he and other Catholics like him do not wish to admit it. As we mentioned back in Personal Update no. 171 last November, he complained to his fellow US bishops at their semiannual meeting earlier that month that they should “make sure we do not make one issue that a political party or group puts forward [emphasis added—B.G.] to the point where we’re going to ignore all the rest of them”.. He argued that they should not call the aborting of babies their “pre-eminent” issue. They voted him down.