March for Life’s president knows pro-life issues are contentious
PERSPECTIVE | But she’s not going to back down out of fear
Photograph and interview by KK Ottesen.
Jeanne Mancini, 45, is the president of the March for Life Education and Defense Fund, which hosts its annual march around the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. She previously worked at the Family Research Council and the Department of Health and Human Services.
My family was a bit of a leftward-leaning Catholic family. We went to church every Sunday, said grace before meals, and social justice was very much instilled. But I turned out a little differently than most of my siblings, a little more quote-unquote religious. I had an experience when I was in high school that was profound and life-changing for me, a retreat called Youth Encounter. I think it was the combination of getting away in nature, of hearing affirmations that they had gotten friends and family to write, and a series of talks there about how there was a plan for my life, that I’m a unique, unrepeatable person — and that’s true of everybody. It was just a beautiful experience of God’s love. And I came away from it with a sense of mission. Which, in some ways, informs what I do now.
After college, I went into the Jesuit Volunteer Corps and worked in a youth crisis shelter and in residential treatment homes with kids who had either been sexually abused or even had been molesters. We’re talking deep, deep wounds. And I went through a whole kind of philosophical grappling: Would it have been better if these kids never lived? Would that have been more merciful? I came to the opposite perspective: Every life is a gift. Who am I to judge the value of this one’s life or that one’s? They could discover the cure for AIDS. They could be the first woman president. So that was very formative in my ultimate calling to pro-life work. I believe that everybody has inherent human dignity, from conception to natural death. And each person has the right to live out their unique mission. I can’t think of a more important social justice cause.
Waking up after the 2016 election, I will say I thought of the Supreme Court. That was really important to me. I’m actually an independent voter. But I feel so strongly about the pro-life issues that I usually end up voting pro-life, which, these days, tends to be more Republican. And it’s incredible what we’ve seen in the first months; the conservative voice is being taken more seriously. And right now, we’re being asked, the March for Life, to submit our founding documents and all of our papers to the women’s history library up at Radcliffe. They came down and visited and basically said, We know that we haven’t always given both sides a voice.
That’s important, because there’s so much divisiveness right now. And for folks like me, whose issues can be considered a little bit more contentious, there can be so much animosity directed towards us. Frankly, it’s a scary time to be a person that cares so much about this that you’re going to put your neck out. You kind of want to go back into your little cave because it’s gotten so ugly. That’s what really makes me cry, that you can’t even stand up for what you believe without being attacked for it anymore. But you can’t back down because of fear, or what people think, or your reputation. You have to do what you know in your heart is right. How can you not?
This essay originally appeared in The Washington Post Magazine.
