Thank God for Students for Life and their petition to the U.S. Supreme Court to “redress and correct the grave injustice and the crime against humanity” perpetrated by Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton, and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
If every church got behind this petition, we would have no problem getting many times the 250,000 people who have already signed this petition. That would indeed be a worthy goal to undertake between now and the March for Life in January.
Unfortunately, a big part of the problem is that abortion as an issue is out of sight and out of mind for most of the year for most of us. And yet the slaughter continues. New Jersey is one of the top six states in the country with over 2.5 million abortions since 1968. That’s nearly 9 times the population of Newark, and yet, except for 40 Days for Life and a few other pro-life events, we only pray about it during Respect Life Month or around the March for Life.
The least we should do to remedy this and raise our consciousness of this ongoing holocaust is to include the following in the prayers of the faithful at every Sunday Mass:
“For all the women and babies at risk for abortion this week in the United States and throughout the world, let us pray to the Lord.”
Prayers can’t bring back the millions of lost babies, but certainly we can pray for the women and babies who are at risk for abortion this week – over 17,000 every week throughout the U.S. Only God knows how many women might be inspired to change their minds.
At Movement for a Better America, we have firsthand experience with the power of prayer in this connection. Some time ago a young man called us, desperate for guidance on how to get his girlfriend to change her decision to abort their unborn child. We gave him all the helpful guidance we could, but a week later she decided to go ahead with the abortion anyway. He went with her, still trying to change her mind, but not succeeding.
His next phone call was frantic. It came after she had gone across the street into the abortion mill. He wanted to go in after her, but we cautioned him to be careful or he might get arrested. At this point, I told him, “All you can do at this point is to pray for her and your child.” We said the Lord’s Prayer together, and he seemed to be at peace.
Then suddenly he said, “I’m going in anyway!” and headed across the street to the clinic. I promptly said another Lord’s Prayer, this time for him, so that he wouldn’t do anything that would get him arrested.
Two hours later he called back. He had gone into the clinic and talked to her quietly. I don’t know what he promised her—his undying love, I suppose—but she changed her mind and they left the clinic together.
Two weeks later, he called me again with the news that they were getting married.
So prayer works. Not always in the way we expect, but it works. If including this prayer in the Prayers of the Faithful does nothing more than gently wake up a lot of Catholics who are asleep on this issue, it will be well worth it.
I can’t think of a gentler reminder of our need to end abortion, but if we don’t earnestly pray for an end to it, abortion as we know it could go on for another 150 years at current rates of decline. America will never survive that.
We all need to understand the lasting effect of current abortions on our future. It’s called “the echo effect.” These are the births that will never occur because of the nearly 32 million baby girls we have already aborted. They are no longer around to have babies in this generation, and that will continue to echo through succeeding generations.
Fewer women, fewer births, fewer abortions. That’s no way to end abortion.
Right now, America is on the verge of a precipitous population decline. It took Europe 250 years to recover from the Black Death—a one-time event. My educated guess is that it could take us at least 500 years to recover from this holocaust, even if all abortions stopped tomorrow.
If that prospect doesn’t get us on our knees to pray, our future inability to survive as a great and powerful nation eventually will. God will not be mocked.
Dennis Howard is president of Movement for a Better America.