As I write, we are making final preparations for OneLife LA, our annual procession and family festival celebrating the joy and beauty of human life.
This year’s procession will take place Jan. 24 at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, with the day’s events concluding with our annual Requiem Mass for the Unborn.
We established OneLife LA to mark the dark day in our nation’s history when the Supreme Court legalized abortion in its Roe v. Wade decision of Jan. 22, 1973.
With OneLife LA, we want to inspire a new cultural movement that believes every human being is sacred, created in God’s image and endowed with dignity and rights that society must protect and promote, from the moment a person is conceived in the womb until the moment that person’s life reaches its natural end.
Over the years, we have shared this beautiful vision with thousands of our neighbors, helping them to see that the defense of life is a continuum — beginning with the innocent child in the womb and extending to every person, especially the most vulnerable in society: the prisoner, the immigrant, the elderly and ill, the disabled and the dying, the poor.
In the 12 years since we launched OneLife LA, the challenges of building a culture of life have only increased, despite the Supreme Court finally repealing Roe in its 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson decision.
Since Dobbs, we are starting to realize it will take a generation or more to undo the moral damage done by 50 years of legal abortion, which confused people’s consciences and compromised our country’s leading institutions and medical establishment.
Roe normalized the taking of innocent human life. Nearly everyone alive today has grown up with the expectation that abortion will be widely available and the assumption that the child in the womb has no inherent worth or rights.
This mindset continues to drive troubling developments that threaten new injustices to the unborn and even call into question what it means to be human.
These developments include the growing use of in vitro fertilization, which results in thousands of embryos either being frozen for indefinite periods or discarded and killed because they are not needed or wanted by the parents.
We are also witnessing a new eugenics, a new push to “perfect” the human species. Soon parents will be able to create “designer babies” using IVF and embryos whose genes have been “edited” and “optimized” to reduce the child’s chances of being prone to disabilities, diseases, or physical traits the parents don’t like.
IVF has also fostered a global fertility industry in which babies are produced and brokered to buyers just like any other commodity or service.
Surrogate motherhood, legal in many American states, is deplored by the popes as a form of human trafficking with prospective parents “buying” the wombs of poor women to bear their children.
In light of these developments, we need to reaffirm that the right to life is the cornerstone of human dignity and human flourishing.
As Pope Leo XIV told Vatican diplomats at the start of the new year: “The protection of the right to life constitutes the indispensable foundation of every other human right. A society is healthy and truly progresses only when it safeguards the sanctity of human life and works actively to promote it.”
The Holy Father’s words should renew and inspire us in our work for the great cause of human life in our time.
In his address to the diplomats, Leo encouraged the protection of doctors’ and nurses’ rights to refuse to take part in abortion, euthanasia, and any other practice that violates their conscience.
He opposed policies that make abortion more accessible and urged work to make laws and policies more family-friendly. Public monies, he said, should not be used “to suppress life,” but instead be “invested to support mothers and families.”
“The primary objective,” Leo says, “must remain the protection of every unborn child and the effective and concrete support of every woman so that she is able to welcome life.”
This has always been OneLife LA’s vision. Twelve years on, our mission continues to be urgent.
As we face the challenges ahead I have great hope, because over the years I have seen so many ordinary Catholics working quietly and making sacrifices, walking with mothers in need, serving as foster parents and adoptive parents — working to build a new world where life is welcome and cherished.
Keep praying for me and I will be praying for you. And please join me at OneLife LA and our Requiem for the Unborn.
Let us ask the Virgin Mary, the Mother of Life, to intercede for all who are weak and vulnerable, and may she inspire all of us to continue in the great cause of life.
