While watching the annual March for Life and its speeches, 53 years after the abortion age began with Roe v. Wade, I found it both encouraging and very frustrating.

First, I heard nothing about the death toll accumulated each year from so-called “contraceptives” whose back-up mechanism kills countless embryos by rendering attachment to a mothers’ uterine lining impossible. This makes the annual prenatal death toll exponentially greater than the number abortions procured by the abortion pill and surgical means. I also heard nothing about the embryonic human beings killed in IVF, whose estimates often surpass the number of surgical abortions.

Second, I heard nothing about how “the pill” created a fornication culture in the 1960s that demanded legal abortion – nor the truth that abortion will not be rejected by society until these two pillars upholding it, contraception and fornication, are also rejected. Every sexually immoral culture in history has had abortion as its “safety net”.

Third, and relatedly, until people acknowledge the sacred value of marriage and the family, they will not see the sacred value of human life. In other words, you will never convince a society that abuses sex and defiles marriage not to denigrate its natural end: babies. Yet, despite these critical truths, March for life protesters focus on peripheral issues (tax-payer funding, abortion pill reversal, etc.) and shout their mantra “we’re the pro-life generation.”

You may say “we need to take small steps” and shouldn’t approach this grave evil and injustice with any depth. But how many more years of slaughtering more than a million preborn Americans annually do we need before realizing “small steps” don’t work?

It’s good that Roe is now history, but we must now convince a society that kills more babies than before Roe’s overturning to reject all forms of prenatal murder at their state’s ballot box. These people live in a post-Christian culture that has lost sight of God, the value of life, and what it means to be a human being (not just a woman or a man).

Unfortunately, the March for Life and the professional pro-life movement in general continues its P.C. practice of having virtually all speakers and announcers be female, most of whom speaking of their own experiences. This presents two problems: it inadvertently marginalizes males – who are half the babies’ parentage and half the population of unborn children (not to mention society’s natural leaders and protectors) – and it packages the message to be an emotional appeal rather than a matter of grave injustice.

Meanwhile, as is the case every year, the crowd was cheering and clapping to celebrate life rather than expressing the solemn mourning innocent victims of an ongoing slaughter deserve. If, hypothetically, Germans in the 1940s had freedom to assemble, would they protest the ongoing holocaust around them by cheering and celebrating life? How can the world take our claim seriously if we don’t act like prenatal murder is murder, and that a systematic slaughter of innocents surrounds us each and every day?

Personally, I would have the March for Life be a national day of mourning, where all marchers are dressed in black, slowly marching in silence, with only the faint sound of silent prayer being heard. This would follow a solemn rally where speeches stress the unspeakable injustice and underlying causes of our culture of death, and the tough, challenging steps necessary to facilitate its demise. If an all-out effort to end abortion does not have integral to its message the reversal of our contraception and fornication culture, the pro-life movement will continue spinning its wheels for another 53 years of slaughtering the innocent.