As faithful Catholics and the pro-life community gear up for the 2026 March for Life this Friday, president Jennie Bradley Lichter shared with EWTN Pro-Life Weekly a moving story of the importance of prayer for mothers who are contemplating abortion. 

Speaking to host Abi Galvan in an interview set to air Wednesday evening on EWTN, Lichter remembered one year that she was unable to march. 

“The year that my oldest child was born — he’s a winter baby and was born in the winter of 2013, 2014, which was a particularly cold winter here in Washington — I couldn’t march that year,” Lichter recollected to Galvan. 

“He was 2 months old on the day of the March for Life. He had been sick a lot that winter. And I knew that it would just be irresponsible to take him out in the cold and take him down to the mall. So what I did instead that day, when my husband was at work, is just I sat holding my baby, my first born child, and just prayed through that whole afternoon, knowing that the march was going on at the time, just holding my baby and just praying and crying, honestly, for all of the women who were choosing abortion that day, for all of the moms who had let the culture or their partners, or their parents, or anyone else in their lives get between them and their babies, right?”

And clutching her baby, basking in the beauty of that amazing bond a mother feels so deeply to the core, she felt the weight of the reality of abortion much more heavily. 

“After becoming a mom myself, [the tragedy of abortion was] just felt so deeply personal and so profoundly tragic to me, even more so than it ever had before. And that moment in that day was something I thought back to quite a bit when I was discerning about joining the March for Life, right?”

And as she marches for the second year as president of the staunchly pro-life organization — whose movement started with the first march founded by Nellie Gray in 1974 in response the the Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade — Lichter said that the pro-life cause remains a constant mission and prayer for herself and her team. 

“And just wanting to make sure that moms aren’t ever put in the position to have a wedge driven between themselves and their babies. So the team and I pray, my team and I pray, every time we pray together for mothers who are finding out about an unplanned pregnancy on that day, any mother who’s contemplating abortion on that day, I think that’s really important.”

In this way, Lichter says mothers and pro-lifers across the country can take part in this historic and monumental day even when distance and life’s responsibilities get in the way. 

“I just know that there’s so, so many other women out there who maybe can’t be marching because they’re taking care of a sick child or they can’t travel but whose hearts are with other mothers and are really joined in prayer to other moms. And I think that’s incredibly important, too,” Lichter said.

“It’s really great to come to the march when you can, but holding other moms in prayer and other women in prayer is one of the most important things we can do.”