A Millennial Mom Reflects on Pro-Life Teens| National Catholic Register

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Hope found on the battleground over the value of life …

In Minnesota, girls who are minors can now have an abortion and suffer injury from the procedure without their parents being informed. This means that sex traffickers can use Minnesota as an abortion destination to keep underage girls enslaved. 

Babies who are born alive during an abortion procedure can legally be left to die in Minnesota, and because of this law, doctors can refuse to treat babies born with severe medical conditions. 

Abortion facilities don’t even have to explain to women the procedure or give them a chance to see their unborn babies on an ultrasound. Further, the state has removed all public funding from facilities that provide alternatives to abortion for women in crisis pregnancies. 

It is no wonder that abortion rates are skyrocketing in Minnesota — with an estimated 14,000 babies being killed in 2023 — as these babies are not even given a chance. Our state has become a battleground over the value of life.

Last week, I was given the opportunity to chaperone my high-school daughter and her classmates at the Students for Life of America’s first local conference in St. Paul. 

It hit me that while Roe has been overturned largely due to years of work by my parents’ generation, my generation — those of us born in the ’80s and ’90s — have failed the teenagers these days. Emcee Maddie Schulte, Students for Life of America development director, spoke about what colleges call the “demographic cliff,” which is coming with my daughter’s Class of 2027: The decreasing number of 18-year-olds in America won’t be able to fill college dorms and classrooms. This is happening because many of those raised in the first generation since Roe chose to give birth to fewer children or not have any at all. I am one of a generation that, like Schulte described that of my daughter, “have known nothing but abortion.” 

Schulte went on to talk about how we can’t even assume that the teens these days even know who Jesus is or have ever been taught that in order to love others we must lay down our lives for them. My generation was not taught the value of sacrificial love in school or from TV. But I was taught it in the home, through example and attending Mass every week.

I remember the one day a year in fifth through eighth grade where my classmates would go off to a presentation about “safe sex,” and, at my parent’s request, I would stay alone in the classroom so as not to be taught society’s false views about human sexuality. My mom taught me all I needed to know at home: the value of the marital act, its meaning and goodness. She took me to pray at abortion facilities, and we prayed that the horror of killing unborn babies would cease. I knew the value of life.

But my upbringing was clearly not the norm for my generation. And now the politicians in Minnesota seem to want every young girl to have the experience of abortion. How many potential friends did my daughter never meet because abortion has been legal and because contraception has been pushed on women?

My husband and I got married and started having kids in the Great Recession— we had four children in six years and since then have not been able to have more

Our children are among a generation of fewer babies. We were fortunate to find other young families having babies in their early 20s, to have play groups for the kids, and men’s and women’s groups to support us as most of our peers were still living the single life. I could easily keep up with my high school and college friends’ social lives through Facebook — many of them posting pictures from weekend nights out while I contributed baby pictures to my feed. It was a lonely time online, but this period saw the rise of Catholic-mom bloggers, for many of them did not have local support in their lifestyle choice of motherhood and sought community in the digital space. If I had not found the support of pro-life Catholic friends who celebrated every new baby with joy, who talked about how hard NFP is, who built a pro-life culture one baby at a time, I do not think I would have been able to thrive. Because of our parental efforts, supported by our Catholic community, my children know the truth about the dignity of life in all of its precious stages — even as we are pressed in on all sides by secular society to think otherwise.

Sometimes it feels as if we live perpetually at that point in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King where there seems to be no hope in the battle of Minas Tirith or at the Black Gates:The orcs are at the gate and catapulting the heads of their victims into the city. Frodo, overcome by the temptation of the Ring, puts it on his finger. Can hope break through?

Abortion is truly evil, and the fact that 14,000 babies can be murdered in our state in one year is unthinkable. But they are. The evil forces are upon us, taking every heart they can, and unborn babies in the womb, all while plastering bright-pink Planned Parenthood ads for contraception on our city buses. 

Yet, being with those 700 high schoolers last week, praying and processing with them through the city streets behind the Blessed Sacrament, kneeling for Benediction at the steps of the state Capitol, and being a witness with them to the value of their lives and the lives of all, including the unborn, is a sign of hope. 

2025013012010_d4d0dc53bba316bbfc4968fd9a95d710b0209bee3d6ae35601fe739fa79743f4 A Millennial Mom Reflects on Pro-Life Teens| National Catholic Register
Benediction at the steps of the state Capitol, Jan. 22, 2025(Photo: Courtesy of Susanna Spencer)

These teens are holding on to hope. 

They are ready to make a difference — a difference that they must make without the help of their aborted peers. They have to speak for those of their generation who were murdered while they survived. 

They have to speak for the generations that come after them, too. 

And we have to remember that the kingdom of God is here —  and the ultimate battle has been won. And while things look bleak in Minnesota, if we let him, Christ can work great good through us, here and elsewhere. 



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