Brothers and Sisters,

If you happen to use the St Joseph’s Guide for Christian Prayer you will see that today is a Day of Prayer for the Legal Protection of the Unborn. Since Roe V. Wade it is estimated that more than 60M children have been lost to abortion in the United States alone. It has been estimated by local pro-life leaders that the abortion clinic on Sparkman Dr in Huntsville, AL does approximately 1,300 a year. It is estimated that the abortion center in Tuscaloosa routinely performs the most abortions in the State on a yearly basis.

While overall, thanks be to God, it appears abortions are decreasing, we still must work, fight, and above all pray to end this scourge.

During an address to the Italian Movement for Life in April 2014 Pope Francis declared: “Human life is sacred and inviolable. Every civil right is based on the recognition of the first, fundamental right, the right to life, which is not subject to any condition, of a qualitative, economic and certainly not of an ideological nature.” https://cnsblog.wordpress.com/2014/01/21/top-13-quotable-quotes-by-pope-francis-on-sanctity-of-life/

The sacredness of life was affirmed in the Encyclical Letter EVANGELIUM VITAE a summary of which is available at http://priestsforlife.org/magisterium/evvatsummary.htm
From the summary document:
The first chapter of the papal document is devoted to an analysis of the lights and the shadows of the present-day situation with regard to human life.
First there is a denunciation of the proliferation and increased intensity of threats to life, especially when life is weak and defenseless at its very beginning and at its end: abortion, immoral experimentation on human embryos, euthanasia. There is a clear description of the unprecedented and specific features of these crimes against life: At the level of public opinion they are claimed to be rights based on individual freedom; there is a trend toward their recognition in law; they are carried out with the help of medical science. This involves a distortion of society’s nature and purpose and of the constitutional state itself: Democracy, if detached from its moral foundations and linked to an unlimited ethical relativism, risks becoming the pretext for a war of the stronger against the weaker; the roles of health care personnel tend to be subverted: Instead of respectful service of life, they lend themselves to actions which bring about death.