The Face of the Future of the Pro-Life Movement By Anne Morse for CNS News
At the huge March for Life in Washington, D.C. last week, we often had to wait patiently for the mass of people to move forward as we headed for the U.S. Supreme Court—the origin point, in 1973, of an infamous decision that forced all 50 states to strip protections from babies still occupying their mothers’ womb.
Some of the marchers waited a bit less patiently. At every pause in the marching, a dozen balls went sailing high into the air as marchers began impromptu volleyball games along Constitution Avenue.
As I watched them zestfully bouncing the balls, I realized that I was seeing the face of the modern pro-life movement: Kids.
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There were kids everywhere, chanting, clapping, singing, and waving signs. Kristi Hamrick, a spokesperson for Students for Life, says that last week, her organization trained and mobilized more young people on a single day—some 3,000—than Planned Parenthood trained in a year, according to its annual report. These kids know that a quarter of their generation was lost to abortion—kids with whom they might have played video games, walked to school, or fallen in love.
Their enthusiasm should not surprise us. Polls consistently show that young people are more pro-life than their parents. Fifty-eight percent of 18- to 29-year olds believe that killing the unborn is morally wrong. This is a promising increase over the number of Baby Boomers—my generation (aged 45-64 in this poll)–who say abortion is wrong (51 percent). And the percentage is likely to go higher. This must surely dismay those who make their living executing fetuses and selling them for parts.
I am old enough to remember the early days of the pro-life movement. In the 1970s, the abortion lobby dismissed “anti-choicers” as a bunch of deranged Catholics who wanted to foist the Church’s “backward” teachings on all Americans. Their outdated opinions, or so abortion supporters thought, would soon be supplanted by the more sensible views of progressive, educated young people.
