(LifeSiteNews) — Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Mike Johnson may have surprised the crowd at the 2024 National March for Life rally when he declared, “I myself am the product of an unplanned pregnancy.”
“In January of 1972, exactly one year before Roe v Wade, my parents — who were just teenagers at the time — chose life. And I am very profoundly grateful that they did,” he confided to the cheering crowd.
“We have to build a culture that encourages and assists more and more people to make that same decision,” said Johnson. “This is a critical time to help all moms who are facing unplanned pregnancies, to work with foster children, and to help families who are adopting, to volunteer and assist our vital pregnancy resource centers and our maternity homes, and to reach out a renewed hand of compassion and to speak the truth in love.”
“This is also a time to promote quality healthcare for women and their unborn children,” he continued.
“This week in Congress, you’ll be encouraged to know, the House passed the ‘Pregnant Students Rights Act,’ because being pregnant while finishing your degree can be really difficult, but women should not be presented with a false choice of being a mom, or being a student.”
“We also passed the ‘Supporting Pregnant and Parenting Women and Families Act,’” he added.
“Right now, the Biden Administration is proposing a regulation to restrict funds to pregnancy resource centers,” Johnson observed. “That action would undercut the important work, the important material support that expecting and first time mothers get from these centers.”
“Our bill would prevent that regulation from coming into effect and ensure that the states can utilize these centers to help people in need. Who could be opposed to that?” he wondered.
“We’re passing these bills and we’re marching today because it takes a lot of work to convince people that every single human child — every unborn child — has a value that is too profound and precious to ignore.
“We have every reason to be optimistic, my friends, that we can change public opinion. We find encouragement from the leaders of previous generations. We can learn from the great Americans who changed public opinion throughout our history. Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony. They challenged the prevailing narratives of their day, and they succeeded.
“Their success was grounded in our nation’s creed,” said Johnson, “and they reminded their fellow Americans about our founding principles, and as Abraham Lincoln said in his famous first inaugural, ‘the better angels of our nature.’ We should do the same thing today.”
“We can truly build a culture that cherishes and protects life.”
Johnson had opened his speech quoting G.K. Chesterton, an English writer who famously observed that “America is the only nation in the world that was founded upon a creed,” adding that Chesterton had said that it was listed with “theological lucidity’ in the Declaration of Independence.”
“What is that creed?” asked Johnson. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, in other words, obvious, that all men are created equal.”
“Not born equal. Created equal,” he emphasized. “And they’re endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, including the right to life and liberty [and] the pursuit of happiness. Those are inalienable rights. They cannot be taken away. So it’s from the very beginning that our founders boldly proclaimed those self-evident truths.”
“Our rights do not come from government. Our rights come from God, our Creator,” he declared to the cheers of the crowd.
“It also means that every single person has inestimable dignity and value, and your value is not related in any way to the color of your skin, or what zip code you live in, how good you are in sports, where you went to high school. It’s irrelevant. Your value is inherent because it is given to you by your Creator.”
“Our national creed is the essence of who we are in this country. It is the foundational principle that made us the freest, most successful, most powerful, most benevolent nation in the history of the world. And we can never forget that.”
The Louisiana representative, elected as House Speaker in October 2023, has been staunchly against abortion while in public office.
According to an analysis by Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, which has given him an “A+” rating, Johnson has a track record of opposing the notoriously pro-abortion efforts of the Biden administration. He has also introduced and endorsed multiple legislative initiatives related to protecting minors from being shuffled across state lines for abortions and revoking taxpayer funds for abortion. He has also criticized acts of violence against churches and pro-life pregnancy centers.
An Evangelical, Johnson is widely known to be socially conservative. In the 1990s, he and his wife Kelly worked to oppose lax divorce laws. In the 2000s, he was employed by the Christian-oriented law firm Alliance Defending Freedom, where he opposed homosexual “marriage” and took on religious liberty cases.
Johnson also has ties to the Family Research Council. In October 2022, he introduced the Stop the Sexualization of Children Act. The bill prohibits federal dollars from being used to push woke propaganda on minors under the age of 10. He has likewise been a boisterous opponent of the pro-LGBT “Equality Act.”
Doug Mainwaring
Doug Mainwaring is a journalist for LifeSiteNews, an author, and a marriage, family and children's rights activist. He has testified before the United States Congress and state legislative bodies, originated and co-authored amicus briefs for the United States Supreme Court, and has been a guest on numerous TV and radio programs. Doug and his family live in the Washington, DC suburbs.
