This Tuesday marked the 18th annual National Catholic Prayer Breakfast (NCPB). Notable Catholic advocates gathered to pray and speak on behalf of the direction of our nation and this year’s guest speaker shared the Catholic response to the abortion argument in a post-Roe America.
Professor Carter Snead, Director of the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame traveled to Washington, D.C. to speak as the guest speaker and share the hope that we all have with the overturn of Roe v. Wade.
“This morning we have something else to celebrate,” he began as this year was the first NCPB in a post-Roe America. Naturally, the audience roared in praise.
Snead was quick to note however that there’s still more work to be done, more work especially for everyday Americans and religious people who have a moral obligation to help women and children in need.
He pointed out how flawed Roe was in the first place and how its overturn initiated Americans to recognize truth.
“It (Roe) grafted onto our nation’s founding document (the Constitution) a wrongheaded idea about what it means to be and flourish as a human being."
He said that Justice Blackmun, the Justice who authored the Roe v. Wade decision in ‘73, “pitted” a mother and her child against each other - instead of explaining how intertwined the two are and how beautiful and miraculous their interconnectedness is.
Snead mentioned that this mentality encouraged women to put economic and social aspirations of her own above the life of her child which has been widely adopted in the Western world.
The common leftist notion of “my body, my choice” is a way to put a mothers interest over the actual life of her innocent child. Snead says, “It’s not surprising” that people would use “lethal violence to produce these self-invented goals."
This attitude “absolves us of our obligations to care for her and her child” as it’s “her body, her choice, her problem,” Snead added.
As pro-life Americans, it’s our duty to care for these women and their children and promote the idea that all people deserve human rights not just some.
Children don’t have to earn the right to be cared for by their parents, according to Snead. He mentioned how the “womb is the first place of belonging” for all of us and then concluded with where we as a nation and as a pro-life community need to “go from here.”
He claimed society needs to “rush to the aid to that mother and that child” … “before and after that child is born” and added that the law should facilitate that aid.
The event was a great encouragement for living in a society where God is so frequently ignored and Snead’s speech was a vision of hope for the pro-life movement moving forward in our post-Roe America.
