Faces of OneLife LA

You’re reading Align’s pro-life issue: our look at some of the different people and perspectives within the anti-abortion movement. Please also see our dispatch from the March for Life; the college student’s guide to preparing for the March for Life; interviews with comedians JP Sears and Nicholas De Santo and skyscraper-scaling activist Maison DesChamps; Robin Atkins on how to talk to pro-choice advocates; and Kevin Ryan on abortion’s brutal culling of people with Down syndrome.

"I never thought I'd be out here with all these pro-life people," a woman going by "Gigi" at a small table on the edge of downtown's Los Angeles State Historic Park told me. "I believe in a woman's right to choose."

She was there collecting signatures for a California state ballot initiative to protect minors from various pernicious effects of gender ideology, from chemical castration to biological males competing in girls sports. Her own teen daughter's experience in sports prompted Gigi to get involved, which is why she was here on a rainy Saturday in January, at the 10th Annual OneLife LA march, seeking out the proverbial strange bedfellows.

Not 200 feet away from Gigi stood a far more stereotypical exemplar of pro-life activism. Tim was a tall, sad-eyed white man in his late 60s with a combover and a placard bearing a blown-up color photograph of a fetus in the womb. He was there to garner support for an amendment to the Constitution that would extend personhood to the moment of conception.

Both Gigi and Tim were perfectly pleasant and eager to talk, as were the many other attendees I encountered, most of whom fell somewhere between these two ideological poles. The exception was a group of paparazzo-weary Franciscan sisters I failed to charm with my opener, "Are you guys Catholic?"

Matt Himes

Tammy: "In college I advised a friend to get a abortion. Luckily she listened to another Catholic friend and kept the baby. [Later] when I read Mother Teresa's quote, 'If a mother can kill her own child, what is left for me to kill you and you to kill me?' I realized it was true."

Matt Himes

Paul: "In my ministry as a parish priest, I've met people who've delivered their children in very difficult circumstances, people struggling to raise special-needs children, older people with great disabilities, people facing difficult deaths. These [situations] are all very hard, but I've seen them bring people closer to each other and closer to God."

Matt Himes

Miguel (right, with Manuel): "There's a scene in the movie 'Unplanned' where they're getting rid of the remains of the unborn as biological waste. It's very powerful because in reality we know that those are lives. Those could've been our friends, our neighbors, husbands, wives, priests, religious. They were lives waiting to blossom and change the world, and we saw them as inconvenient. We saw them as garbage."

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Isabella: "I'm here for my family and what my family's gone through. Especially my own mother having such a hard time having children. She's a strong lady. She barely even had the choice to have children. So I'm here for that."

Matt Himes

Elvira: "They love the science until it comes to proving life starts at conception. If they found a few cells on another planet, it would count as life. But in the womb it doesn't."

Matt Himes

Hernan (standing): "I used to be pro-choice, so I know both sides. Pro-choice is about choice without any consequences. My mother used to ask me, 'Would you abort?' When I said I wouldn't, she said, 'So you're pro-life.' But I didn't want to bug people or tell them what to do. That's how the devil works: He tricks you into thinking that if you let people be, you're a good person."

Jeanette: "I'm eight months pregnant with our first. I can feel my baby inside me and I think, 'Wow, there's actually a human inside of me.'"

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Leticia: "I'm here to to honor the memory of the daughter I aborted on June 7, 1990. I feel like I'm the voice from the inside out. The voice that says, 'Don't make this choice. I regret it.'

"So many people have been touched by abortion, but until you're ready to ask for forgiveness, to take it to confession, to seek healing, the only way you can survive is to support it."

Matt Himes

Briana (right): "We live in a world where people are so desensitized that we're not worried about other people's humanity. Everyone's for themselves."

Rosa (left): "I was raised Catholic and with the belief that no matter what, it's a baby."

Matt Himes

Elise (left, with Dominic): "We're traveling missionaries. A big thing in my ministry is allowing young women to understand the sanctity of their own lives and realizing that their own lives have worth. As they come to realize that, they can believe in the sanctity of all lives."

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Francesca: "I'm convert. I've been a Catholic since 2018. I grew up Jewish. Being pro-life has always been important to me. I'm adopted, and if my birth parents hadn't been Christian, they would've aborted me. I was raped at 14 and 16, and I conceived both times. Abortion never crossed my mind. It was really important to me that I carry them and I love them. Unfortunately I had miscarriages. When my pro-life friends try to tell me it was a good thing, I say, 'No. These were my babies and I loved them.'"

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Irvin: "I make no bones about it when I argue with people. 'You're telling me what degree of murder you're comfortable with.' At least be honest. Everybody put their big-boy pants on and own it. Existing's pretty great. I just don't think we should cut bait, you know?"

Matt Himes

"You can take our picture, but we're not going to do the whole interview thing."

Matt Himes

Matthew: "I'm director of sacred music for Lucis Missio, an organization out of San Secondo d'Asti in San Bernardino diocese. My role is to spread a love of and renewal of Catholic sacred music. While chant and polyphony are often seen as kind of intimidating, people really do desire this music.

Beauty is the thing that can inspire people towards goodness. Oftentimes people see the pro-life movement as something that is radically anti-women's rights and something that is regressive. Sometimes people within the movement focus on what it's against. But it's right there in the name: We're pro-life, in all its many stages. But abortion is the pre-eminent moral issue of our time — so fight that, and fight these other battles."

Matt Himes

Michelle (left, with daughter Evangeline): "I'm an atheist, and I've been involved with the pro-life movement for ten years now. I grew up in a pro-choice family. My dad taught me about abortion when I was a preteen as a necessary procedure for gender equality. When I got pregnant at 15, that completely shifted my worldview on abortion.

"My parents tried very hard to get me to abort. [It was from] shame — they didn't want anybody to know that I was pregnant. They said, 'This is a problem we could make go away.' But I felt my child. I knew I had to protect her. I went online and found amazing organizations like Secular Pro-Life that argue from a non-religious point of view.

"My mom's pro-life now. There are a lot of atheists who believe I'm secretly a Christian or that I'm brainwashed. I face hostility all the time."

Matt Himes

Matt: "I work with women — and men — in a [post-abortive] healing ministry called Rachel's Vineyard. And its amazing to see the transformation a weekend retreat will make in the lives of people who encounter God's mercy. People are speaking out [in favor of abortion] mostly from life experience. They've been hurt and felt condemned. You have to come from a place of compassion."

Matt Himes

Tim: "My wife and I talk to women who are going in for abortions and try to help them in any way we can so they don't go through with that. I think most people who go into this want to save babies. But what happens is you end up with a very grateful mother. We have women who have been saying for decades now, thank you so much for my son, for my daughter, for being there for them in that time when they needed us."