Why Southern Baptists should March for Life

On today’s episode, you’ll hear from Jennie Lichter, president of the March for Life, as she speaks with ERLC Interim President Dr. Gary Hollingsworth about the importance of the March for Life, its impact on our culture today, particularly since the overturn of Roe v. Wade, and why Southern Baptists should be involved. 

The March for Life in Washington, D.C., is the world’s largest annual human rights demonstration, promoting the beauty and dignity of every human life by working to end abortion. This year’s march will take place on January 23, celebrating the movement’s enduring commitment to love mothers and preborn children. Built on compassion and care, March for Life reaches across denominational and partisan lines to promote a culture of life across the nation.

Now let’s turn to Dr. Hollingsworth’s conversation with Jennie Lichter.

Episode Transcript: Why Southern Baptists should March for Life

Narrator:

Welcome to The ERLC Podcast, where our goal is to help you think biblically about today’s cultural issues. I’m Lindsay Nicolet, and today we’re talking with Jennie Lichter, president of the March for Life.

The March for Life in Washington, D.C. is the world’s largest annual human rights demonstration, promoting the beauty and dignity of every human life by working to end abortion. This year’s March will take place on January 23rd, celebrating the movement’s enduring commitment to love mothers and pre-born children. Built on compassion and care. March for Life reaches across denominational and partisan lines to promote a culture of life across the nation. On today’s episode, you’ll hear from Jennie as she speaks with ERLC Interim President Dr. Gary Hollingsworth about the importance of the March for Life, its impact on our culture today–particularly since the overturn of Roe versus Wade–and why Southern Baptists should be involved. Jennie became the president of the March for Life in February 2025. She began attending the National March as a college student in 2001. Jennie has wide-ranging legal and policy experience in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, including at the highest levels of the federal government.

During the first Trump administration, Jennie served in the White House as a deputy assistant to the president and deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, where she supervised rulemaking and policy efforts implicating a number of federal agencies, and led policy initiatives across the federal government to defend the dignity of life. She graduated from the University of Notre Dame and from Harvard Law School. Prior to law school, she was a research assistant in bioethics at a D.C. think tank and earned a graduate degree in theology and religious studies from the University of Cambridge.

Now let’s turn to Dr. Hollingsworth’s conversation with Jennie Lichter.

Dr. Gary Hollingsworth:

Well, thanks for joining us today. It’s a real joy and pleasure and privilege for us to have Jennie Bradley Lichter, who is the president of March for Life, just an incredible ministry, and we want to just have a few moments today to hear a little bit more about March for Life. Jennie, thanks for joining us here today on our podcast.

Jennie Lichter:

Hi, Gary. Thanks so much for inviting me.

Dr. Gary Hollingsworth:

Well, it’s a real pleasure for us to have this moment, and we really, really appreciate, first of and foremost, your time today. But more than that, we appreciate your ministry, your work, and not just the work that you do, but so many who come together to make not just an event happen, but also it’s an ongoing emphasis as we well know. Life happens every day. We want to be pro-life every day. So Jennie, if you could just kind of from your perspective though, being involved in this work, what’s the biggest challenge from your point of view on the whole pro-life movement today?

Jennie Lichter:

This is such a good question, and I’ll offer a couple of thoughts. One is a challenge for the movement itself, I guess I would say, and one is more of a human challenge or even sort of a human tragedy that the movement is trying to address. First of all, I think especially in the last few years, especially since the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade, thanks be to God, in 2022, and then we saw a couple of years worth of loss after loss after loss at the state level on pro-life ballot initiatives where the people of states, including some pro-life states were voting against pro-life protections. That was disheartening in a way, but I think it also just was a real call to action for the pro-life movement itself, because I think what we were seeing, Gary, was that people were misunderstanding what the pro-life movement is and is about and what our goals are, right?

So that is a challenge for our movement, and we saw some polling during that time period about how essentially the brand of being pro-life sort of wasn’t as strong as we in the movement would really like it to be. And again, I think that’s because a lot of folks unfortunately, hear a lot of noise coming from people on the other side, if you will, about the pro-life movement and the messaging is this movement hates women or doesn’t trust women or wants to take away people’s rights, or doesn’t want to let women and couples and families make their own decisions about having kids. And so, you know, the messaging was don’t trust them, don’t vote with them. They are trying to trick people into doing something that they don’t want to be doing, having a baby. And of course we know that none of that is true, none of that is true.

But that messaging became culturally dominant, at least for a couple of years there. Now we’re seeing, I think that sort of post-Dobbs whiplash is subsiding some, both politically and culturally. But I take that to be a real challenge for us because the truth, of course, of the pro-life movement is that the pro-life movement isn’t about taking away people’s rights or bossing women around. It’s about love. It’s born out of a deep conviction, for many of us, a really deep conviction of faith that God created every human person with dignity and value and the right to life. And also the movement is built on just love for moms and their babies and the deep desire to support women who are pregnant and empower them to sort of step into their motherhood and find within them their God-given ability to carry a baby and be a mom.

So our theme for the March for Life for 2026 is “Life is a Gift.” And the reason we chose that theme is we wanted to really pour into for this year and for this moment, pour into the joy and the love that’s at the heart of the pro-life movement and pour into the fact that the whole movement, the reason we’re all doing this, is because life is such a gift. It’s such a gift from God. So I think that’s a challenge that our movement is meeting, but we still do have work to do. Of course, just getting the message out about what the pro-life movement is and why we are all so committed to the right to life.

The second and related challenge is something that my team and I also talk about a lot in our own work, and that is the real human tragedy of abortion and the tragic fact that something like 60% of post-abortive women have said in polling that they would’ve preferred to choose life for their baby if they had the emotional and financial support that they felt like they needed at the time. In other words, over half of women getting abortions didn’t want an abortion, but felt like, or were told that they didn’t have any other option, that abortion was the only option for them in their circumstances, that there was no one to help them, that no one would be there for them and their baby, and that really, they had to get an abortion. There was no other way forward.

That is so deeply tragic and the March for Life team and I pray over that number and those women every time we sit together as a staff, and we do everything we can to use our platform to shine a light on the good work doing by faith-based pregnancy resource centers and maternity homes and churches and church groups and all of the wonderful ministries and organizations in our country that are totally devoted to helping pregnant women so that women know that they do have another option, that abortion is not the only choice available for them, but too many women still aren’t hearing that message and still aren’t aware of the resources that are available in communities across the country.

So that’s a big challenge for our movement too, that again, we are trying to be really strategic about how we use our resources and our platform here at the March for Life to get the word out about what is available to pregnant women and how there are so many people who want to come alongside them, walk with them, and help them step into their motherhood.

Dr. Gary Hollingsworth:

Oh, that is so well stated. And what a beautiful theme. Life, indeed, is a gift. And I think those of us who have long been a part of the pro-life movement, and as a pastor I’ve long said that, you know, sometimes we feel like the battle is finished if a woman gives birth to a child and the abortion does not take place. And that is certainly a win. But really the work begins then. It is multifaceted. So that is a wonderful way to think about that, not only in having fewer abortions and more babies born, but then there is a reality of caring for them. And thank you for mentioning that. And by the way, just kind of as a segue to that, mentioning the March for Life, there are probably some listeners who may not know a lot about March for Life. So can you give us just a brief history of what it is and why this event and this moment is so significant?

Jennie Lichter:

Sure. The March for Life is an incredible event with a really incredible history. It was founded over 50 years ago in the immediate wake of Roe v Wade, the Supreme Court case, of course, that legalized abortion on demand across the country and invalidated pro-life state laws and made abortion available on demand across the country. That happened in January of 1973. In the wake of that decision, a government attorney here in D.C. named Nelly Gray–a single woman, never married, never had children of her own–she was practicing law at the Department of Labor. She had this inspiration that, well, we need to do something to mark the one year anniversary of Roe v. Wade and show the country and show the Supreme Court and our elected officials that the American people are not going to accept this. We’re not going to accept this regime of abortion on demand.

And this was a mistake. And so with an eye to that one year anniversary, Nellie Gray and her friends here in D.C. put together a rally and a march, and that was the first March for Life in January of 1974 here on the National Mall. And then they marched down the street towards Congress in the Supreme Court. And then what happened is, you know, they didn’t stop at one year, right? I think they sort of read the tea leaves correctly and saw, okay, this is not going to be a short-term project and we need to keep showing up and marching together as a pro-life movement and faith community for as long as it takes until our elites, our leaders, get the message that the American people don’t want abortion on demand. So from that little group of friends, essentially, right, as so many things that started out as essentially a friends and family event, grew and grew and grew over the years and has become now the world’s largest annual human rights demonstration.

The March for Life is one of one, it’s one of a kind in United States history and around the world. I think it’s really remarkable that no other social movement that I’m aware of, no other social movement in history has mustered the persistence and the hopefulness, right? The persistence born of deep hopefulness of the pro-life movement to keep showing up in January, which I will admit is not always the nicest time of year in Washington, but that’s part of the charm. I tell people that’s part of what makes the witness so powerful. You know, the pro-life movement shows up in January year after year to rally on the National Mall and then to march towards Congress and the Supreme Court. And over decades this event grew and grew and grew. So again, it’s now, you know, one of the biggest pro-life events and human rights events in the world that happens every year.

So that power, that little insight, I think is such a lesson for all of us, really, right? That what starts with one person truly can change the world. Because what Nellie built and led for almost 40 years until her death really did ultimately contribute to the fall of Roe v. Wade. and the Dobbs decision when one of the questions the Supreme Court had to grapple with in their legal analysis was, has this decision, which has been in place for over 50 years at that point, have the American people fully accepted this decision so it would be too unsettling for the Supreme Court to overturn it? And of course, the witness of the March for Life in particular, the pro-life movement gathered together every year, made it very clear that the American people had not accepted abortion on demand. And so the March for Life in the pro-life movement kind of directly contributed to the fall of Roe, I believe.

Dr. Gary Hollingsworth:

Well, and when you think about 50 plus now years of heritage of that, as you said, even with the overturning of Roe, there’s still so much work yet to be done. And as you well know, we are Southern Baptist, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. So I do have a specific question related to at least who we are at Southern Baptists. Why do you think it’s important for Southern Baptist to join their voices and our voices together on this March for Life movement?

Jennie Lichter:

Well, Southern Baptists have such a huge presence in the United States, such a beautiful and long, well established history, and just such a strong presence both, you know, at the level of local communities and local churches, and nationally through the Southern Baptist Convention and ERLC, Gary, which is a really, you know, important public policy entity as well. So as a group, the presence of the Southern Baptists is really powerful, just to see, again, one of the most visible and beloved and biggest religious denominations in the country. Joining the March for Life in the pro-life movement is really powerful. Taking a little bit of a step back, the founders of the March for Life were Catholics, and again, it started out as essentially a friends and family event. Nellie was a Catholic, and so she kind of launched it with other Catholics, but it was never intended to be a sectarian event.

And actually, our organization is a non-religious, secular nonprofit as a reflection of the fact that the pro-life movement, both descriptively and normatively. In other words, the pro-life movement, in fact, crosses sectarian lines and is, you know, an interfaith, for many years was a bipartisan movement. That’s not so much true anymore, unfortunately. But that’s the truth about the pro-life movement, and that’s how it ought to be, in other words, right? Because this is an issue that for many of us is deeply rooted in our own personal faith and what our faith teaches us. But we also, of course, know thanks to science and thanks to the basics of medical ethics and thanks to the natural law and logic and reason and the truth about fetal development, that science has let us know better and better in recent years. For all of those reasons, we know that abortion is wrong.

It takes a human life. We know that life in the womb is a real individual human person separate from its mother that has rights from the moment of conception. And we believe that thanks to our faith, many of us, but we also can and need to make those arguments at the level of reason as well, so that we can speak to people in the culture who are of any faith, or every faith, who are not Catholics, who are Southern Baptists, maybe even people who don’t share our religious faith at all. And the more we can build and show the country a truly diverse, interfaith coalition, I think the more that we can really amplify that, right, that this issue, again, just kind of crosses every possible line, and that we in the pro-life movement all stand united as a movement and that every American person can find a home in our movement, no matter if they’re Catholic, like the founders of the March for Life, or if they’re Southern Baptist or even, you know, neither of those that are members of a different denomination. So I appreciate so much the participation and the leadership of faith leaders across Christian denominations and even beyond, and I’m very grateful for the strong, just the unflagging, unyielding witness of the Southern Baptists and ERLC over the years about the dignity of human life.

Dr. Gary Hollingsworth:

Thank you for that. And you may well know I have stepped in in an interim role. We are looking for a new permanent president of the ERLC, but I can assure you and assure anyone who’s listening to this that my stance, and I’m certain that our new president, whoever that might be, we want to continue, as I’ve used this phrase, we want to make sure that our hands are on the ball and keep pushing and rolling as far and as fast as we can, because no one group can fight this battle, and nor should we. This is the heart of God, not a denominational issue. It is the very heart of God who, as we know, he created all of us in the image of God. Jennie, you raised an interesting thought there. I want to kind of tag onto this, if I may. I know that you’ve spent many, many years, obviously, in public policy and legal work, but also the March for Life, there are policy things, and that’s a part of what we do at the ERLC, but I’m going to kind of put two questions together. How has your past experience, particularly dealing more with the legal and policy issues, impacted your role now, but also with that, and I think this is important, how have you seen the march’s impact on our culture in recent years and what yet needs to perhaps, and I think you’ve hinted at this in our first question, is because there’s a lot of misunderstanding, a lot of misperception out there.

So kind of put those two together if you can, the policy part and the cultural part and your experience in that, in leading this important work.

Jennie Lichter:

Well, I’ll share with you Gary, and with your listeners just a little peek behind the curtain about how I ended up here. And I share it because I think my story is one of the millions and, you know, kind of innumerable stories over the years of God’s providence, right? And of the way that his plan for us is greater than we could ever imagine for ourselves. And he calls us out into the deep sometimes, right? So yes, I am a lawyer by background. I was practicing law for about 15 years prior to coming to the March for Life. Almost all of those years were here in Washington. So I built a career as a policy advisor and a lawyer, primarily for religious nonprofits. But I spent some time in the first Trump administration as a senior White House official. And I was a litigator early in my career, so kind of a classic D.C. legal career in and out of the government, in and out of the nonprofit sector.

And I loved, you know, being a lawyer gets a bad rap sometimes, but I loved practicing law. I really did. And I felt my work was so satisfying, especially getting to work with religious organizations. But the Lord had other plans for me. So when the previous leadership of the March for Life approached me about a year and a half ago now, and asked me if I’d be willing to discern about coming to the march and leading this beautiful historic organization, my initial reaction honestly was, “But that’s not what I do. I’m a lawyer.” In my mind, this is sort of what my career was going to be. And again, I loved it, but I also had always in all of my previous capacities, done some pro-life work, and I’ll say a little bit more about that in a minute. And I always also have just really tried to hold my work with open hands, right, as we all are called to do, and just give it to the Lord and ask him what he wants of me in any given season.

So, despite my kind of initial thought of like, “Oh gosh, but that’s not what I do. I do this other thing,” right? And thankfully, someone said to me, “Well, why don’t you just, at a minimum, why don’t you take it to prayer, right? And just sort of see what the Lord wants to tell you.” And then, you know what happens, Gary, once you start praying about something, right? You know, once you say to God, what do you want to show me Lord? Or where do you want me to go? Sometimes you don’t know where he’s going to lead you. Anyway, it became very clear to me and to my husband very quickly once we kind of started really genuinely discerning that this is where the Lord was calling us.

And I found so much peace, but also so much joy in that call. Just so much joy in this unexpected call because I have been coming to the March for Life since I was a teenager. I mean, I am a person who has been formed by this event like so, so many other people in the pro-life movement and the opportunity to lead this beautiful organization, which we talked a bit about the history. We have a incredibly powerful tradition, 50-plus year tradition, but at the same time, the work of the March for Life and our message is more fresh and relevant and important than ever, right? So that’s how I ended up in this role. And I will say again, in ways that I think fully didn’t even comprehend when I started working here last year. My previous work, although it was quite different than what I’m doing now, really did help prepare me for this.

I can look back and see the ways that kind of every step of my professional work, how the Lord was laying the groundwork to be able to lead this organization. And some of that is in the behind the scenes operations and compliance and all of the things it takes to kind of keep the business side of a nonprofit running smoothly and efficiently. And there’s quite a bit there, actually, if you look under the hood for any organization, nonprofit or for-profit, and I have spent so many years as a legal advisor to nonprofits that I came in with a pretty good sense of what that all needed to look like. And then on the other side of the ledger, again, have done some pro-life litigation, and I did quite a bit of pro-life policy when I was in the Trump DOJ and then especially in the Trump White House helping to lead the domestic policy team in the first administration.

So I knew and know my way around pro-life policy issues. And, and from a position like the one I had in the White House, I also had learned so much about strategic communications, honestly, and coalition building and all of these other things that are really core elements for the work that I do now. I had founded, while I was practicing law in my previous work at Catholic University as the deputy general counsel there, I had also founded a pro-life project on campus in the wake of the Dobbs decision. So I had had a little bit of hands-on experience working with pregnant students and other moms on campus that also became so relevant to the work we do now. So I just feel humbled and floored. You know, the feeling of when you see so clearly the Lord working in your life, and it’s almost overwhelming in a good way, right?

Just to think that little old me, you know, the Lord is seeing and leading little old me here, and who am I that he should take such notice of my own life that that’s who he is and what he does. And he called me here and I’m so grateful for it. So that’s how kind of my background and, again, sort of unexpected ways led me here.

Now interestingly, Gary, and I love that you paired these two questions together because I came in right with my legal and policy background. I came in as a policy expert, really excited to do pro-life policy work, especially. And the March for Life is really engaged in pro-life policy work alongside ERLC and all of our other coalition partners. And there’s certainly a lot of work to be done on the policy front, but it’s become very clear to me over the course of this past year that our cultural work is just as important, and in some ways even more important, our work of forming young people, forming young people of faith, and also trying to expand our coalition and bring in other young people especially, is really crucial.

Finding strong cultural voices to speak into this and empowering faith leaders and others to speak into this issue so that it isn’t just viewed as a partisan, political issue is really, really crucial. So the March for Life, you know, as we plan our events and we do our engagement and our communicating and our work, we are always mindful of those two sides of the coin. We are working really hard here in D.C. on policy issues that’s often kind of quieter and behind the scenes, but we also are just always looking for ways to share the pro-life message in order to form young people who are already in the movement. And again, to kind of expand the movement. So that is, you know, hence our “Life is a Gift” theme, which we’re hoping allows us to do some of that around the March for Life this year.

And one thing that’s encouraging to me on this front, again, there’s quite a bit of work to do on the cultural side here in the United States, but one thing that’s really encouraging to me and I share with everyone who’s listening as a point of encouragement is that just this summer, some really interesting polling data came out from Gallup. So not a pro-life or a conservative polling firm that showed that young people between ages 18 and 29, roughly Gen Z, give or take, were turning back towards identifying as pro-life. In other words, after a couple of years in which really every age group, but especially young people, were really shying away from being willing to say, I am pro-life, or from wanting to kind of affiliate themselves with the pro-life movement, those numbers are just shooting back up in the last year or two.

And that has been really, really remarkable to see pro-life sentiment and self ideas rising kind of in every demographic, but especially in that young cohort. And I think that is so indicative of the cultural shift that we are starting to see. And we’ve seen on other issues as well, my organization works, you know, specifically on abortion, but we see this in other issues as well. I think where there’s kind of this awakening going on among young people in particular that basically the cultural messaging that they’ve been sold that has been really sort of pushed on them isn’t right. Right? Whether it’s about gender or the family or all sorts of things. And I do believe that we’re starting to see that as to the life issue as well. And I think that the death of Charlie Kirk this fall also was just a moment where we saw so clearly that young people are hungry, they are hungry for someone to be telling them the truth, you know, and to be telling them kind of affirming for them that the desire for marriage and children is good, right?

That children are a good thing and that they want to see bold truth tellers. And the pro-life movement and the faith community really, I think, can and should be that for all of the young people in our country who are now kind of looking around, I think asking, well, he’s gone now, but who else is going to tell us the truth? And who else is going to kind of walk alongside us and affirm these instincts that we have for marriage and family life and sort of making sense of the world, right? For a return to the true, good, and the beautiful. So it’s such a promising moment, I think, for our movement and our work, and it’s puts a great responsibility on those of us who are doing this work right now, but there are just so many souls, I think, just really waiting for someone to harvest them, you know, for the Lord and for this issue.

Dr. Gary Hollingsworth:

That is so encouraging to hear. And I’ve been encouraged to see some of that and as a long time sort of personal student of revival and spiritual awakening movements globally and even here in the United States, I’ve read recently that if you look at our U.S. history, which we’re about to turn 250 as you well know, next year, and about every 60 to 70 years in America’s history, we have had some sort of reportable spiritual awakening, which means that if, and I do believe that the Jesus movement of the 70s was a movement of God, and if that’s the case, we’re due, we’re overdue. And the encouragement is that if you just want to look at it, you know, certainly from a spiritual and biblical perspective, but just from a historical perspective, and I wish I could claim what I’m about to say as my own.

It’s not. I can’t tell you who I heard this from, but I’ve used this definition for many years that culture is nothing more than the collection of our moral or immoral conscience. When you think about that is that the culture is really a reflection of our collective, and we pray that it will be a moral conscience, but it can also be an immoral conscience. And we’ve seen, of course, so much of that. And if we can see that return and that renewal to a biblical spiritual moral compass, that’s where culture begins to really shift. And so I’m personally glad as one individual now getting a chance to have this conversation so grateful that you said yes, that you said yes to the call of God, because being obedient to what God calls us to.

So if there’s just one takeaway that you’d really hope that any listener here today might walk away with about why the March for Life is so important to the larger pro-life movement, can you kind of boil that down? What would that one takeaway be that you’d want to make sure everyone hears as we leave in a moment?

Jennie Lichter:

Sure. Great question. Here’s my elevator pitch. Every year, the March for Life is where the pro-life movement renews itself by forming new young people for pro-life mission and encouraging those of us who have been in the vineyard for a long time now. And it’s also the pro-life movement’s biggest chance to witness. It’s our biggest chance for public witness to our political, cultural, and media elites that the pro-life movement is motivated and persistent and has its eyes on the Lord and is never going to stop until every baby is protected and every mom is supported in this country.

Dr. Gary Hollingsworth:

Oh, that’s a great elevator. I think you could do that between floor one and two right there.

Jennie Lichter:

I talk fast, so I probably could. That’s great.

Dr. Gary Hollingsworth:

No, that’s good. And, and you know, I love the fact that engaging that younger generation for future generations, that this battle will go on and on because we know that this is a spiritual battle. We know at the heart of it, we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against powers and principalities. We know that in Scripture. So, thank you for that good takeaway to keep that march alive. The final thing, and I do mean this as the final thing, I’d like for you to share how our listeners can be praying for the work of the March for Life. And I’d like to also ask you to just share some things so that those who will be listening to this can pray for you going forward as well.

Jennie Lichter:

Thank you. That’s really beautiful. I mean, I feel so profoundly the power of prayer and I know my team does as well, and we’re aware that we are so lucky to have people praying for our work all over the country. So please pray for my staff. We’re a small team of 11 people and some really wonderful longtime vendors and contractors who have a huge task ahead of us. The March for Life is so much more complex than I think anyone on the outside, you know, gets to see or realize, and we love doing it. It’s a privilege to be the caretakers of this beautiful event, but please pray for good energy for my team and good health so that everyone can sort of stay cracking and firing on all cylinders. Please pray for just a shield of protection and also decent weather on the March for Life itself.

For everyone who’s traveling in from out of town in particular, that travel goes smoothly. Then just please pray, as my team and I do every day, that our work and the work of the pro-life movement may be fruitful, that it reaches the ears of women who are pregnant, especially women who are unexpectedly or unhappily pregnant, so that they know that there are so many people with them who want to help them. And please pray that the ears and the hearts will be opened to hear the pro-life message through the work of the March for Life.

Narrator:

What began as a small band of friends advocating for pro-life causes has turned into a nationwide movement that champions pre-born lives and their mothers. The March for Life is a visible reminder of the value and dignity of every human life and of what can be accomplished when we join our voices together. The ERLC is committed to promoting a culture of life that sees the immeasurable value in every person and is committed to standing firm on Southern Baptist convictions, promoting a culture of life that sees immeasurable value in every person, from conception to natural death, because all individuals are created in the image of God.

Thanks for listening to The ERLC Podcast. Join us next time as we discuss our 2026 Public Policy Agenda and why it matters for Southern Baptists.