PRO-LIFE ACTION
MARCHING FOR LIFE IN ROME BY LI AM G I B S O N
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or the sixth year in a row, the Rome Life Forum was followed by the Marcia Nationale per la Vita, Italy’s biggest pro-life demonstration. Pro-life rallies around the world are not just a public challenge to the culture of death but by nature are hopeful celebrations of the gift of life. This may be especially true of the March for Life in Rome since it gathers in the city where St Peter, St Paul and countless other martyrs laid down their lives in the service of Christ. When the early Church was being persecuted by a world which attached so little value to human life, few would have foreseen that the gospel would triumph over the pagan Roman state. For the participants of the ninth Rome March for Life gathered in the Piazza della Madonna di Loreto, close to the ruins of Trajan’s Forum, it may seem equally unimaginable that the gospel of life will overcome
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the modern secular culture of death. Nevertheless, those committed to the pro-life cause know that no matter how hopeless the situation might appear it is essential to carry on the fight. And this was the central message delivered by the president of the March for Life Virginia Coda Nunziante. In her address to the crowd, Miss Coda Nunziante reminded them that they were engaged in “a great moral and civil battle”. “It is our determination not to retreat,” she said, and “not to embrace compromises, as negotiations on innocent human lives are not acceptable. We cannot allow even one child, to be extracted with violence, from her mother’s womb. And you subscribe to this crime when you accept a law that provides for abortion.” Describing the culture of death as an organised ideological movement,
she said that having introduced abortion it now intends to move on and approve infanticide and euthanasia. The justification for the legalisation of abortion was that the embryo was not a human being just an indistinct clot of cells without a human identity. She continued: “Science has shown that from the very first moment of conception, that a human being has his own identity, he has in himself features that are unique and unrepeatable: he is a man. “The abortionists who wanted to introduce the 194 [abortion] law in Italy lied when they denied the foetus a human identity. It was a deliberate lie, and that is proved by the fact that if yesterday they were demanding the embryo's suppression, today they ask for the killing of a human being, up to the ninth month of pregnancy, and even later when it is already perfectly
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