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On this, the twenty-sixth annual March for Life, the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property (TFP) commends you for your presence and your perseverance. We are here today to join you in a loud cry of protest on behalf of the innocent life of the unborn child — life that has no voice but ours. At the foot of Capitol Hill, our cry will echo the silent scream of millions of defenseless babies murdered in their mothers’ wombs — victims of parental abandonment, abortionist greed, medical betrayal, and political expediency.
Many innocent babies have been saved through heroic efforts. But so much remains to be done. To win the fight for the unborn, we must attack the Culture of Death at its roots. To defend life, we must combat:
1. Sexual Immorality
The fornication and adultery that fill today’s headlines break the sacred bonds that bind human sexuality to its divinely ordained purpose — procreation. Abortion is the ultimate guarantee of the sterility of sexual license — devoid of life and love, and liberated from the responsibility and commitment of marital fidelity.
As Pope Pius XII declared, “Marriage alone safeguards the dignity of husband and wife and their good estate, and is of its nature the only guarantee of the children’s well-being.” To defend life we must uphold the sacred covenant of marriage.
2. Contraception
Contraception violates the nature of marriage because it denies its primary purpose — procreation. Rejection of God’s gift of children logically leads to abortion, and those who practice contraception are far more likely to resort to abortion. Indeed, abortion is the ultimate post-conception birth control. Many of today’s contraceptives — such as the pill and I.U.D. — act as abortifacients that kill unborn children. As Pope Paul VI proclaimed, in the encyclical Humanae Vitae, “Each and every marriage act must remain open to the transmission of life.” To defend life we must oppose contraception.
3. Homosexual Vice
Like contraception, the homosexual act is an unnatural practice that assaults the sanctity of marriage and rejects the life to which marital love gives birth. As the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith warns:
At the present time there are those who, basing themselves on observations in the psychological order, have begun to judge indulgently, and even to excuse completely, homosexual relations between certain people. This they do in opposition to the constant teaching of the Magisterium and to the moral sense of the Christian people. (…) But no pastoral method can be employed which would give moral justification to these acts on the grounds that they would be consonant with the condition of such people. For according to the objective moral order, homosexual relations are acts which lack an essential and indispensable finality. In Sacred Scripture they are condemned as a serious depravity and even presented as the sad consequence of rejecting God [Cf. Rom 1, 24-27; 1 Cor. 6, 10 and 1Tim 1, 10].
It is not surprising that Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, who condemned the marriage bed as “the most degenerating influence in the social order,” advocated “voluntary association” between sexual partners and taught that homosexual relations could be highly beneficial to society — for nothing can be more diametrically opposed to the fertility of life then the sterility of unnatural vice. Homosexuality mocks life, the family its protector, and God its Creator. To defend life we must oppose homosexual vice and the shameful effort to elevate this barren degeneracy to the status of life-giving marriage.
4. Euthanasia
The same secular humanist platform that calls for the legalization of abortion and sodomy calls for the legalization of euthanasia. As long as America does not defend all innocent human life as sacred and inviolable, no man’s life is safe. Just as the defenseless baby in his mother’s womb is sacrificed to our self-indulgence, the lives of our infirm, impaired, and aged fall victims to the same selfishness.
As Pope John Paul II warns, “Further delays and negligence could result in the suppression of an incalculable number of human lives and in a further serious degradation of all society to still more inhuman levels.”
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To be consistent, we must combat all sexual immorality, contraception, homosexual vice, and euthanasia with the same consistent and constant vigilance with which we should oppose all abortion.
As the Holy Father reminds us, “Faithfulness in consistency to live in accordance with what one believes; to adapt one’s own life to the object of one’s adherence. To accept misunderstanding, persecution, rather than a break between what one practices and what one believes: this is consistency.”
May Our Blessed Mother, the living example of faithfulness to Christ, help us bear consistent witness to God's gift of life in all we do!
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