Kresta Comments: The Power of Prayer in the Abortion Fight

It looks as though the fight for the protection of the unborn is now ready to commence with an intensity we haven’t seen for fifty years. At long last, the U.S. Supreme Court seems on the verge of admitting that there is no constitutional right to an abortion. Each state will now decide for itself. Some states will permit abortion. Others will not and still others will permit some and not others. Overturning Roe v. Wade was necessary and a real victory. Passage of state laws outlawing abortion will be necessary and will also be political and legal victories. But America needs more than a change in law. America needs an inner awakening to the fact that unborn children are truly our kind, persons who deserve protection like the rest of us. Until then, the fate of unborn child will remain subject to the fickleness of periodic elections.
It was nearly fifty years ago, back in January of 1973, when seven unelected, mostly white, mostly privileged, mostly Protestant men, educated largely at Harvard and Yale, vainly imagined that they could abort America’s debate over abortion. Don’t forget, at the time of Roe, about a third of the states had liberalized their abortion laws but 30 states still prohibited abortion at all stages. Then the curtain dropped on the abortion debate. Roe v. Wade abruptly ended the democratic political process and imposed a one size fits all rule. Roe struck down the abortion laws of every single state. In his dissent, Justice Byron White was fierce. Roe v. Wade, he wrote, was nothing more than the ‘exercise of raw judicial power’.
So here we are nearly fifty years and sixty million deaths later and it looks like five or six unelected men and women, still mostly white, still mostly privileged, still mostly from Harvard and Yale but now mostly Catholic will finally reopen the debate not to a mere few but to all citizens of every class, race, ethnicity and religion.
Much is at stake. What are the limits of personal choice? What is the moral status of the preborn child? What is our obligation to the next generation? Who should be counted and protected as “We the people.”
In his book Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality? Thomas Sowell notes that great nations rarely acknowledge their mistakes and repent of mistreating their own people.
But it has happened in America. In 1954, the Supreme Court, in Brown vs. Board of Education repented of its error in the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson. That 1896 opinion approved the dehumanizing policy of separate but equal and established the constitutionality of racial segregation. After Plessy, states and municipalities could now enforce separation of the races in schools, restaurants, businesses, public restrooms, water fountains, railroad cars, busses and other public venues. Black schools were clearly separate but they weren’t equal and, though it took nearly sixty years, Brown v. Board of Education finally said “enough is enough.” America began to repent of racial in justice and discrimination.
Race was the morally defining issue of the last generation just as abortion is the morally defining issue of this generation. 1954 saw the Supreme Court remove a major legal barrier to racial justice. But there was still a long way to go. America had to change its heart and mind, not just its laws. For the next ten years after Brown v. Board of Education the civil rights battle stormed on through the murder of Emmet Till, the integration of Little Rock’s Central High, the Montgomery bus boycott, the Greensboro sit-ins, six year old Ruby Bridges integrating her elementary school, the Freedom Riders, the murders of 3 civil rights workers in Mississippi, the March on Washington, the bombing of 16th street Baptist Church in Birmingham killing four girls, the march from Selma to Montgomery, the Civil and Voting Rights Acts, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. And, sadly, decades later, we are still negotiating the racial divide.
Obtaining civil rights protections for the unborn will be far more difficult than civil rights for black Americans.
First, it will be more difficult because the preborn are silent, invisible and don’t vote. They don’t engage in sit-ins or march from Selma to Montgomery. The principal victim of abortion is rarely seen and never heard.
Second, the defenders of the abortion status quo have blood on their hands. By keeping abortion legal they avoid confronting their own moral guilt and public shame.
Third, it will be more difficult because the press, the entertainment industry, the academic world and corporate America will not be on our side. After World War II, the nation’s elite thinkers, corporate leaders, entertainers and the news media generally favored the civil rights cause and saw segregation as unworthy of a free people. The cultural elite largely came to despise segregation. Today, however, they love abortion and will muster all their money, talent, prestige and intelligence, to keep abortion legal.
Changing the mind of the Supreme Court will seem like child’s play compared with changing the hearts and minds of America. The good news is that protecting the weak and vulnerable is not alien to America’s history or its soul. Through our history, America has, with difficulty, continued to broaden the circle around those worthy of our protection. In that sense, we are a progressive nation, regularly broadening our sympathies to embrace the Jews, Blacks, Catholics, the immigrants of Ireland, Italy, Germany and Eastern Europe. Isn’t now the time for the land of liberty to draw the preborn close to her breast and whisper “We, the People”?
This will take more than human ingenuity and tenacity. The pro-life movement like the civil rights movement must remember St. Paul who wrote: “[T]he weapons of our warfare are not carnal”, i.e., not fleshly, not relying on human strength alone. No, “The weapons of our warfare are mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God and bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ.” Victory will transcend mere human effort.
Prayer and spiritual exertion were vital to the civil rights cause. In 1957, on the 3 year anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, civil rights activists joined the Prayer Pilgrimage to Washington. A recent academic study explored prayer among the civil rights activists. It found that during the eleven years between 1960 and 1970, civil rights activists regularly used prayer to understand their political challenge, to strengthen one another and to create and maintain a lively sense of crisis and opportunity. A recent study, Never to Leave Us Alone examines Martin Luther King, Jr’s prayer life and many memoirs of early civil rights workers like Fannie Lou Hamer testify to the power of prayer in strengthening and guiding the movement.
Victory for the preborn will require more than human strength.
Our prayer must be in union with that large cloud of witnesses who surround us and who have laid aside every hindrance and sins that hampers our prayer. The mantle of the blessed Mother falls over us and joins us with the saints and blessed in heaven who are especially focused on this critical moment of decision for the preborn child. Remember the champions of the culture of life like Mother Teresa of Calcutta, John Paul II, and St. Gianna Molla. But there are plenty more but less familiar pro-life intercessors in the heavenlies right now like
- Servant of God Jérôme Lejeune (1926-1994) the brilliant geneticist who discovered the cause of Down syndrome. He likely lost the Nobel Prize in Medicine when it was learned that he counsel parents of Down syndrome children not to abort.
- Servant of God, Dorothy Day, a single mother who aborted her first child, converted to the Catholic Faith and started the Catholic Worker movement to show solidarity with the poor and the weak among us.
- The attorney, Bl. Luis Belda Soriano de Montoya, father of six who was martyred during the Spanish Civil War.
- Ven. Annie Zelikova who at 14, overheard her distraught mother admonishing a relative over the phone, “That’s a sin against heaven and against the infant—you can’t kill it!” Annie’s spiritual director tells us that Annie understand that God was asking her to make reparation for abortion. Within six weeks, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis and given three years to live. She died at 17 and joined the heavenly company.
- Bl. Marianna Biernacka, was a Polish farm wife during World War II. When her son and his pregnant wife were captured and slated for execution, Marianna begged to take the place of her daughter-in-law so that the baby might live. Marianna died clutching her rosary. The daughter in law whose life she saved lived to be 98.
- St. Margaret of Cortona (1247-1297) was the mistress of a rich man. When she became pregnant, she knew she and her child would be discarded by her lover. She decided to keep the child and raised him as a scorned single mother. After her conversion, she became a midwife, devoting her life to women in need.
We face a daunting task. We must remember who we are. The history of God’s people is a story of the improbable becoming the invincible.
- We see Moses before Pharaoh, David before Goliath, Elijah before the prophets of Baal,
- Jesus before Caiaphas and Pilate, Peter and John and Paul before the Sanhedrin,
- We see our Lady of the Rosary at the battle of Lepanto, our Lady of the Holy Name at the battle of Vienna, Our Lady Help of Christians at the battle of Leipzig, at Fatima and later with John Paul II during the collapse of the atheistic Soviet Union.
Prayer is not just to warm our hearts, prayer is to shake the heavens and the earth. We pray, but the principal actor in our prayers is God Almighty. Yes, our prayers count.
The Catholic thinker Blaise Pascal motivated himself to pray by remembering that “prayer gives us the dignity of supernatural causality.” More simply, “your prayer changes things.”
America is engaged once again in a great contest. The struggle on behalf of the unborn is every bit as consequential and difficult as the earlier civil rights struggle.
The only way we can be sustained in faith, hope and love, the only way we will witness a national change of heart on the preciousness and protection of preborn human life, the only way we can pull down strongholds and cast down arguments that exalt themselves against God is to make sure we have callouses on our knees.
We are not merely in a political dispute over abortion. We are in spiritual darkness. Americans are confused about the nature of freedom and ordered liberty. They tend to see faith as something you had best keep to yourself. They have lost confidence in God’s design for marriage and sexual union. A U.S. Supreme Court nominee wouldn’t risk trying to define the word, “woman” for fear of generating opposition. Our concern is not merely about a change in law; it is about a once great nation remembering who she is and awakening to the preciousness of all human life. May we be found faithful in this moment for which we have been born.