The March for Life announced its theme for the January 23 demonstration: “Life Is a Gift.” Jennie Bradley Lichter, the new president of the March for Life, said in an announcement that this year’s theme “invites everyone . . . to be swept up into a movement that transcends politics and celebrates the joy, beauty and goodness of life itself by recommitting ourselves: to each other, to every woman facing a pregnancy and to every child.”
“Life is a gift” has long been a salient message when fighting against abortion, but it is similarly relevant in other fertility-related discourse, specifically that about in vitro fertilization. Reproductive technologies treat children as products rather than gifts, and, accordingly, children are subjected to versions of quality control and performance reviews — not only with respect to health but also aesthetic traits such as eye and hair color. Parents with big enough bank accounts can essentially test and grade their embryos with respect to hereditary disorders and physical traits like height, then choose whichever children are supposedly worthy of implantation and thus a chance at birth. Moreover, products for purchase can become the topic of heated debates about ownership: In divorce cases in which a married couple has frozen embryos, the children are treated as property to be owned rather than as human beings with rights.
Putting aside fertility and pregnancy, “life is a gift” seems to have great resonance this season as a series of devastating events in our country has revealed a thriving culture of death. We saw the assassination of the Unitedhealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in 2024 because someone had a grievance with his line of work, and then we watched the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk onstage during a university appearance as he was responding to a question from the audience. Neither tragedy should have occurred, and each provided an opportunity for the divided nation to attempt catharsis by categorically condemning politically motivated violence, thereby restoring a bit of faith in the American project. But that didn’t happen, not really. Alleged assassin Luigi Mangione has become something of a heroic celebrity and accumulated more than $1 million in donations for legal support, while Kirk’s murder was widely celebrated in progressive forums such as Bluesky as a victory over “fascism.” These murders, along with the reactions to them, evoke a sense of despair, frustration, and fury that drains our confidence in ourselves and in our country.
“Life is a gift” is a morally instructive theme when evaluating issues like abortion that treat a young child as a removable appendage, when navigating new technologies that devalue human life to a customizable commodity, and when pockets of the left rejoice in the brutal deaths of their perceived political enemies.