The following is a transcript from the Pro America Report.
Welcome, welcome, welcome. Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report. It is great to be with you. Thank you for joining us. Please visit Proamericareport.com, ProAmericaReport.com. Sign up for the daily email there, but also all these great interviews we do and segments are over there in standalone links, you can get them and listen. Also, you can find the podcast Pro America Report with Ed Martin anywhere you get podcasts. Um, March for Life – I can’t recall the exact year, the first time that I went to the March for Life, but I do remember the experience. It probably was the 90s, it was probably sometime in the late 90s. I can’t be sure what year.
But I got on a bus in St. Louis and we went to the March for Life and we arrived in time to be at the March for Life for about 8 hours, then got back on the bus and went home. Now that’s a young man’s game, right? Or a young woman’s game to go and stay, sleep in the bus as you drive, and then go out and March and all. But lots of people did it. As I recall, there were three or four or five buses. I think it must have been four for sure. I can picture the pickup point was down at the Arch in St. Louis and we drove and there were lots of families. At the time,
I was single and I think as I watched, as I got in the bus, I had a bag, I had some snacks, I think. I think it was pre BlackBerry or phone. So I don’t know, I probably had a flip phone or a phone, but no smartphone. Probably had a book. But I remember seeing families and they had kids with a mom was going or mom and dad or dad and the kids. And there were high school kids with their parents and grammar school. Well, all these years later now I’ve got my own kids and they’re going to the March for Life. But at the time I was like, oh, yeah, look at those people. Now I am those people, right? The parents.
But it was a great experience because it made you pause your life for two days and be on a bus thinking about where you were going. It almost doesn’t take that long to get anywhere anymore, right? I guess if you drive cross country or you decide you’re going to go to the Grand Canyon from St. Louis, it takes a day and a half to drive out there. So I guess on vacation you’ll sometimes drive, but there’s nothing that takes that long anymore because everything is so fast and most of the times you’re flying and there’s something about the destination event and your mind is just geared toward and again, as I recall on those buses…
And by the way, the reason I’m telling you this is there are hundreds and hundreds of buses that have been going across the country to get to the March for Life. As always, the March for Life is in Washington, DC, on the mall. And it happened on Friday the 21st this year of January. And lots of people going on the buses, lots of people. Now they got their smartphone, they’re watching a movie, they’re watching Netflix, they’re calling their friends their facetiming, home, all that stuff. Back then, you didn’t have any of that.
And my point in remembering this was I don’t recall, by the way, like lots of prayer or lots of focused programming of the event. I don’t recall, there could have been some, but I don’t recall. I just recall being aware, and I had some friends, more work colleagues, people that were in the pro life effort. So no buddies or pals and just thinking the whole thing was focused on your destination and then returning. And it clarified the mind a bit because you just had nothing else to think of. I remember that.
And so in these days, we’ve had a bunch of interviews with pro life folks. And what you need to know is the pro life movement is never at an end. It has, in some sense, the abortion, the antiabortion, the fight against the pro aborts has a beginning. Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton – 1973, January 22, where they made up this abortion right. But before that, there was, before that date, there was an argument happening about abortion.
And all these decades later, the argument about abortion, forget that, go talk about the argument about life and the argument about life – and the late Phyllis Schlafly talked about this, and she wrote about her efforts to keep one of the two major political parties, in this case the Republican Party, pro life. She worked to keep the pro life plank in the platform. And she spoke on this subject of how technology changed the whole debate. Right?
By the time you got into the 90s, you started to have the ability to do basic ultrasounds. And into the 2000s, you had ultrasounds machines, ultrasound machines – they were common. They weren’t just in major, they were… Ultrasounds existed before 2000, but now they were able that, you could buy one, and the Knights of Columbus in your Church, Parish, or the local pregnancy resource center could purchase one. And people started to see an ultrasound. Then there were 3D ultrasounds. Then the 3D ultrasounds had sound. So you weren’t just looking at 10 seconds. You could look at minutes of a baby and you could hear the baby gurgling and moving around and heartbeat.
So the moment we’re in for the life movement is really key because more and more people are persuaded by the science and by the arguments that this is a life, that these babies are lives. And yet around us, the culture is as decadent as ever in terms of sexuality. And so we don’t have any lessening of the problem of women vulnerable or relationships shallow, and the horrendous difficulty of an unwanted pregnancy, quote unquote, where someone is trying to decide what to do and they’re scared. That all exists, probably like it’s always existed, maybe worse. I don’t know. I don’t know how to quantify that. I mean, there are people that can tell us what the numbers are in polling and all.
But here’s what I want to tell you, what you need to know today. Life matters. Life matters, and life matters because it permeates through everything we do. I think it was Mother Teresa who was famous for saying when you drop an atomic bomb and liquidate 100,000 people, it has an effect on how you see life. And she went on to talk about when you’re killing millions of kids in abortion, it has a way you look at life broadly and how you relate to people. And I think that’s true.
And today’s WYNK, what you need to know is life matters and we need to continue, no matter whether there’s a Supreme Court decision in June or the FDA decides to allow chemical abortions to be mailed to homes, which they have. And Planned Parenthood decides to spend tens of millions of dollars to assist in mailing chemical abortions to people’s houses and all these kinds of things that are happening that seem not just daunting but terrifying, not just terrible but haunting your whole lives.
And health, by the way, health related, it makes you crazy to think about this, but we have to consider how life matters. And here’s why: we are going to face over the next 25 to 30 years an extraordinary set of circumstances where we’re going to have our seniors aging out with great technology and great medicine and having discussions about what life means. And if life is defined by the latest CMS or Medicare billing rate for Hospice, you’re going to find that we are disrespecting life in a way that was never contemplated in this country. Forget about this crazy movement for assisted suicide. I mean, I think it’s a terrible movement. Forget about that.
That’s a minor footnote compared to when Medicare uses the power of its dollars to incentivize end of life, quote unquote, care for our seniors that is not less care and more end. Right? I mean, the Hospice movement in the world, really started by conservative Catholics, actually, and in America, one in particular who was based in Northern Virginia or at least the Northeast, and they talked about care and comfort, and cure was previous, right? You’re not getting cured, but care and comfort and the comfort had a spiritual component.
So let me back up. As people rode across the country on buses to get to the March for Life or flew out or came down and drove in cars with their families or friends or whatever, we have an opportunity to not just focus our attention on the bad decisions on abortion, but focus our lives on how life matters. It matters for our kids. I don’t know if you’ve seen the viral video of a woman in Great Britain. I think she was a College student in the beginning of the pandemic, and she breaks down into tears. She’s this kind of articulate, bright eyed kid, but she’s a kid, really young, maybe 20, and she breaks down on the camera and she’s weeping about how they took care of everybody else and they didn’t take care of us, the kids.
And your heart breaks as you watch it and you realize the impact on a life, on the lives of people. We have an epidemic of callousness to lives and to life matters. And we need to take the time to think to ourselves… now we can never stop the fight against abortion. Those are the innocent babies. But we have to also think to ourselves, how do we build the culture of life so that people understand? As much as I love my dog, we have two dogs, Lady and Duke, and I love those dogs. I mean, I love them. I can tell you another time about my theory about how animals and dogs especially, are a gift from God. They’re extraordinary, but they’re not the same gift from. God as a human being, as a person. They’re just not.
And we have to remember that and get to the center of things in this world where the culture is trying to divide us into hyphenated Americans and hyphenated groups, it’s demeaning, depersonalizing, and ultimately not from God. So as people have, I don’t know, celebrate’s the wrong word, commemorated the March for Life and these things, I just think to myself and say it to you, life matters.
Life matters. And our journey as people who love life and love babies and love a set of values and a set of laws that comport with those values to protect life, we also have to be thinking, how do we as a community figure out how to stop the demeaning of life?
And let me pause, I should wrap this up. I’m going too long. But there’ll be a lot of talk accurately about the horrendousness of sexual trafficking. That is a problem. I understand it, and I understand how big it is. I mean, I understand how problematic is, how terrifying it is and how, frankly, the open borders encourage it and other things encourage it. However, it’s one problem, and it’s a problem that you’ll watch the politicians seize on because it has a certain cachet. It has a certain ease in describing it.
Much harder problem is the problem of loneliness. And people whose lives are lonely and desperate and need, not companionship, they need human touch and human interaction and human flourishing. And so we have to be careful anyway. So as we celebrate life, what you need to know is life matters broadly across the board because it’s a great gift from God. And so thank you to all those people who made the trip and were at the March for Life.
And we’ll take a break. We’ll be right back. Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report. Back in a moment.
