This year, Catholics who joined the annual March for Life had much to celebrate.

Polls confirm a steady decline in support for legal abortion; reportedly, the number of abortions continues to decrease; and state bills designed to restrict the procedure are gaining traction.

Yet, amid the whirl of pro-life events marking the U.S. Supreme Court’s fateful rulings in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, there are signs that the culture of death has opened new fronts that require a broader, more integrated response.

The campaign to legalize euthanasia, under the benign term “assisted suicide,” is advancing in the wake of the high-profile case of Californian Brittany Maynard, a young patient with terminal cancer who moved to Oregon, where doctors are allowed to prescribe lethal medication in such cases. Maynard and her husband, Dan Diaz, embraced her “right to die” as a compassionate choice. The Jan. 26 cover of People magazine features a photograph of the attractive couple and tells readers that Diaz is ready to “break his silence” about his late wife’s final hours. “She was surrounded by the people who loved her, and her passing was peaceful,” Diaz says, adding that further details are “sacred,” in one portion of the online version of the cover story.

Assisted suicide is already legal in Montana, Oregon, Vermont and Washington. But there are fresh efforts to expand this practice to other states. Diaz traveled to Massachusetts in the wake of the narrow defeat of a previous effort to secure the legal right to die. In January, two California legislators proposed a new bill on assisted suicide.

Meanwhile, the New Mexico Court of Appeals has agreed to review a case filed by another cancer patient, who is presently in remission. New Mexico state officials had appealed a lower-court ruling by second judicial Judge Nan Nash, who found that laws barring the right to die violated the New Mexico Constitution, which prohibits the state from threatening the basic rights of residents.

“This court cannot envision a right more fundamental, more private or more integral to the liberty, safety and happiness of a New Mexican than the right of a competent, terminally ill patient to choose aid in dying,” Judge Nash wrote in her decision.

Safety — and compassion and privacy — was used to sell legal abortion before Roe v. Wade and then to defend that “right” in the decades following the landmark ruling.

But the record reveals the hollowness of such terms when they are severed from a moral framework that guards human dignity and the sanctity of life. We can point to the belated criminal convictions of the Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell. We remember the mainstream media’s refusal to address the suffering of post-abortive women. And, now, we witness coercive efforts to force pro-life health-care workers and institutions to participate in direct abortions and more deceptive efforts to make U.S. taxpayers underwrite the procedure.

“The two most important issues facing the pro-life movement are abortion and euthanasia,” threats to the sanctity of human life that often involve “misplaced compassion,” said Bishop Thomas Daly, the auxiliary bishop of San Jose, Calif., in comments featured in our page-2 story on the Walk for Life West Coast.

Efforts to advance a culture of life also face new challenges posed by the redefinition of marriage. The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear four appeals by states that have challenged lower-court rulings that overturned laws effectively banning same-sex “marriage.” Most legal experts predict that, by late June, the high court will issue a ruling making “marriage equality” legal in all 50 states.

Catholic leaders acknowledge that rising support for same-sex “marriage” would not be possible without the use of artificial contraception, which severs procreation from the conjugal act. Subsequently, reproductive technologies repeat that pattern and often feature genetic screening, with the routine disposal of embryos that “fail” to meet the client’s criteria. Now, as mainstream America accepts “marriage equality,” it is expected that many same-sex couples will depend on assisted reproduction to form their families.

Catholic teaching opposes any attempt to redefine marriage. Not only does same-sex “marriage” violate God’s law and natural law, it further legitimizes the notion of marriage as an adult-centered institution in which children are optional. In contrast, married Christian love is valued as the sanctuary of life, the realm where a child is conceived in love and welcomed and raised by his or her biological parents.

Death and other unexpected calamities, like crisis pregnancies, may result in the severing of the bond between a child and one or more of his parents. But it is a tragedy of another order to bring a child into the world with the knowledge that she will not grow up with her mother or father — and perhaps also with the knowledge that her own birth required the exchange of money, making her a commodity.

Shockingly, this is a stark fact of life for an increasing number of children, whether their births were contracted by same-sex couples or heterosexual couples.

In hindsight, we as a society see the progression from artificial contraception, which facilitates sexual relations without the fear of pregnancy, to reproductive technologies, which facilitate the creation of a child without the conjugal act. This progression reveals the interlocking elements of a culture of death.

This dark reality also reveals the need to provide a more integrated vision of the culture of life that includes, but is not limited to, the defense of the unborn child. The need for such an outreach effort is clear: While polls show that more young people oppose abortion, they also show that this same demographic may have no problem with technologies that destroy embryos and may celebrate same-sex “marriage.”

Whether or not “marriage equality” becomes the law of the land, and whether or not assisted suicide is legalized in other states, we have a great deal of work to do.

And, ultimately, this is the work of evangelization, inspired by a passionate love for Jesus Christ. Political projects will not suffice.

As Pope Francis said at his Jan. 21 weekly general audience, “Every child is a blessing.” And as he tweeted the next day — the day of the March for Life — “Every life is a gift.”