We’re getting ready for the annual Rally for Life. This year, the event falls on Saturday, January 25. We meet at the south gate of the state capitol, and we sing liturgical hymns until all the marchers arrive on the capitol grounds. St Elias parish, in downtown Austin, will also offer The Akathist for the Victims of Abortion just prior to the rally.
We’ve been doing this for seventeen years, but, each and every year, some folks ask what, exactly, we’re trying to accomplish. I always point out that the hymns we sing are prayers, and so we are praying for a number of things: that the rally will be peaceful, that everyone who has ever been participant in an abortion will find healing, and that folks will come to realize that abortion is not, primarily, about health care or reproductive rights—it is the taking of an innocent life.
Because we Americans are very practical and very political people, that conversation then just about always leads to a discussion of what should happen next: If the 1972 Supreme Court decision is eventually overturned, what kind of laws should then be put in place? Should abortion be outlawed completely? Should there be exceptions for special circumstances? Should the issue simply be transferred to the state level?
Those are all important questions which will, at some point, need to be addressed, but we don’t have to figure out those details right now. Of course, a lot of people are going to see that approach as wildly irresponsible—we want to bring about change, but we don’t have a clear vision of what that change should look like or how that change is even going to work. But that’s not irresponsibility; that’s humility.
Think about it like this: There has only been one other issue in American history as important as abortion; that was the issue of slavery. We had to fight a terrible war to abolish the evil of slavery; however, before the war started, and while the war was being fought, and for a good while after the war ended, no one had a clear idea of what life after slavery would look like. In fact, you can make a pretty good case that we still haven’t figured out all of those ramifications. But, one hundred and fifty years ago, enough people were convinced that slavery was wicked, and that something desperately needed to be done, and so we went ahead and made that change.
Thankfully, we aren’t going to war over the issue of abortion. But, one hundred and fifty years from now, we will most certainly still be working out all the social and medical and legal issues that this practice has generated. Our job right now is not to lay out a plan that will accurately describe what the future will look like without abortion; our job is to help folks understand exactly what abortion involves and exactly why unrestricted abortion is a terrible evil.
Of course, coming to grips with those kinds of facts is a tough process which requires delicate guidance. Delicate guidance is best provided with humility, and humility is the product of prayer. And that’s why we’re going to be singing our prayers at the gates of the state capitol on Saturday, January 25th. I hope that you will join us in that critically important work.