Interview with Virginia Coda Nunziante, the spokesperson for the March for Life, an event now at its fifth edition and which will take place again in Rome on 10 May 2015.

1. ‘Life is a gift’, ‘children are a gift’, Pope Francis said last Wednesday (11 February 2015): can we explain the characteristics of this gift?

To the word ‘gift’ are linked the phrases and words ‘not able to be disposed of’, ‘intangibility’ and ‘sacredness’. The gift of life, precisely because it is such, should be defended: against the proposals to manipulate it through the use of new scientific discoveries which are increasing in number, thereby seeking to fulfil the dream that has always fascinated man – to take the place of God; against ‘wishes’ that are extraneous to the concept of true freedom and would like to eliminate it after conception or before natural death; against the culture of ‘total disenchantment’, as Benedict XVI called it, which leads to not distinguishing what is human from what is not human and to despising that ‘gift’ which is the foundation of the friendship between God and man.

2. What can we offer in words but above all at the level of facts to those mothers or those families that are in ‘doubt’ about whether ‘to keep or not’ the child that awaits them?

We can tell them to turn with trust to those institutions and agencies – I am thinking here of Centres to Help Life – made up of people who work voluntarily and without payment and who can help them in a disinterested way at such a delicate and important moment in their lives. I know very many institutions and agencies of this kind that have created an extraordinary ‘network’ of humanity and generosity. Many of these people from all over Italy take part in the March for Life, to bear witness to the beauty of unborn life. There is another thing I would like to propose: to look for people who are able to explain that abortion takes place in a moment, but it remains alive in the memory and in the intimacy of the conscience for the whole of a person’s life.

3. What instruments do our Christian communities have to give greater visibility to the ‘Christic perspective on human life?’

The first of these ‘instruments’ is certainly prayer and the saying of the rosary in font of hospitals where abortions are carried out or inside these hospitals, in chapels where many volunteers have a roister so that their spiritual support is never absent. The Christian communities, if they address the question of abortion, have an authentic ‘mountain to climb’ which is represented every year – in Italy alone – by 100,00 official abortions (those obtained with the support of law 194/78); by hundreds of thousands of the victims of Norlevo (the day after pesticide); by the five-days after pill; by Ru486 and other forms of chemical abortion; by the 140,000 abortions with the fivet technique (supported and financed by law 04/04); by the 16,000 examples of freezing due to the same law: by the 850,000 examples caused by the use of the coil and the 220,000 caused by the Ep. pill. Prayer, says the Gospel, can ‘move mountains’. In our case, together with another instrument that we cannot forgo which is ‘witness’, this can avoid persevering in the wish to transform a crime into a right, as we can read in Evangelium Vitae of the Blessed John Paul II.

4. What are the greatest forms of resistance today at a social, cultural and political level to an authentic welcoming of human life?

The ‘forms of resistance’ are due above all else to the deCrhistianisation that has been produced in our country and the whole of Europe where, according to the statistics, one abortion takes place every 25 seconds. This is a slaughter without end, in relation to which the consciences of men and women do not put up suitable opposition. It should also be observed, as regards the economic crisis, that a great mystification is widespread: societies do not die because of economic crises but, rather, because of a lack of principles. It is this lack that that impedes the ‘political power’ from defending the natural family from all the attacks that it receives and to support it, helping it to procreate as well. The battle is, therefore, above all cultural and it is an immense battle to fight and one that requires great efforts, great tenacity and great determination.

5. What are the great ‘educational’ challenges – above all in the world of adolescents/young people – as regards developing an overall culture of life and the subjects that are strictly connected with it, such as what the body is, what affections are, what relationships are and so forth.

They are those that our ‘modernity’ offers us and in an unprecedented way when we consider the past. We may think of ‘gender theory’, the ‘construction’ of sexes that are different from the ones created by God. The degeneration we are witnessing even comes to wanting to remove from parents the education of their own children as regards the values of the body, the affections and relationships and entrusting it to improbable ‘directives’ which should be served up to them at school. These are directives that come from Europe, from the World Health Organisation, from the United Nations…This battle is strictly connected to that over abortion: both reflect an anti-human ideology that is opposed to the principles of the natural and thus divine order.