Editor's Note: This story features quotes and commentary taken from an EWTN interview conducted by president and COO of EWTN News, Montse Alvarado with Jeanne Mancini and Jennie Bradley Lichter ahead of the March for Life 2025 on Jan. 24, 2025. The interview is airing on EWTN TV in a 2-part series beginning Jan. 17 and will also be featured next week. 

The 2025 March for Life’s theme is “Life: Why We March,” a choice that reflects the reality that the national pro-life movement remains in flux, courtesy of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade.

The Jan. 24 march will take place on the National Mall in Washington at a time of major political transition, only four days after Donald Trump — who appointed three of the Supreme Court justices who voted to strike down Roe — formally returns to office for his second term as U.S. president. 

But it’s also a time of transition for the March for Life itself: On Feb. 1, current March for Life President Jeanne Mancini will be succeeded by Jennie Bradley Lichter, a lawyer who until November served as deputy general counsel for The Catholic University of America.

This year’s march is the 52nd gathering since the event was initiated in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which held access to abortion to be a federal constitutional right. Professional surfer Bethany Hamilton will be the event’s keynote speaker, and Christian pop-alternative band Unspoken will perform at the pre-march rally.

When the 2025 theme was unveiled in October, organizers said it was intended to emphasize the pro-life movement’s fundamental messages of encouragement, joy, and that every life matters, CNA reported.

Speaking alongside Lichter in an interview with EWTN News in November after Lichter’s appointment was announced, Mancini explained that this year’s theme was chosen to help provide renewed hope to pro-lifers who have been dismayed by the series of state-level pro-life defeats since Dobbs struck down Roe’s constitutional framework and returned legal authority over abortion to individual states.

“And perhaps not surprisingly, people are discouraged right now,” she said. “That’s our sense, at least, that we’ve had this massive victory of the overturn of Roe, but we’ve lost at the state [level] in a number of these ballot initiatives.”

But according to Mancini, these setbacks should be understood as temporary obstacles, not as permanent roadblocks, while pro-life advocates work to rebuild an authentically pro-life national culture where abortion is viewed as unacceptable under any circumstances. 

“We want to remind them that they’re on the right side of history,” she said. “One of the best ways to do that is to return to the basics, ‘Pro-Life 101’: Where are we pro-life? And then also, why are you pro-life?”

“And that is really an invitation for marchers to tell their story,” Mancini continued. “And every story is unique, and those stories are beautiful. And so that’s really the hope with the theme.”

 

Veteran Marcher

Lichter stressed in the EWTN interview that for her this year’s theme is a deeply personal one, “because I have been a marcher since 2001.”

“I’ve attended many Marches for Life in the past number of years. So I have a story about why I march and why I marched as a college student and a young professional, with my husband when we were newlyweds, with my children more recently. 

“And I’m excited to keep telling that story and to hear the stories from every marcher, because, as Jeannie said, every marcher has a story just like mine.”

Lichter’s involvement with the event during her student years is a point of continuity with the priorities of her predecessor, who became the March for Life’s second president after its founding president, Nellie Gray, died in 2012. In her initial months as president, Mancini highlighted the importance of enhancing engagement with youth, viewing this as essential to achieving the ultimate goal of ending legal abortion. 

 

Legal Bonafides

Another point of continuity between the two women is that both served in policy-formulation roles during Republican presidencies. 

But like Gray and unlike Mancini, Lichter is a lawyer. Included in her legal credentials are terms of service as in-house counsel for the Archdiocese of Washington and with the Office of Policy of the U.S. Department of Justice, where her duties included working on federal judicial confirmation efforts. And, during her most recent tenure as CUA’s deputy general counsel, she founded and directed the university’s Guadalupe Project, a campus-wide initiative that supports pregnant and parenting students, staff and faculty. 

Lichter told EWTN that “really the most tragic thing about pro-abortion rhetoric is the messaging to young women that motherhood holds you back and that it’s at odds with personal and professional flourishing and fulfillment, and that maybe having two or three kids is okay, but if you have any more, then your life is going to fall apart. 

“And I hope that my own experience as a mom, as I step into this more visible role, can be a lived counterexample to that, a counterwitness,” she added. “I have three kids, 10 and under, and they are a part of my flourishing and fulfillment. They’re certainly not at odds with it whatsoever.”

 

The Challenges Ahead

Given that Dobbs has returned abortion law to the authority of individual states, and that President-elect Trump has communicated he won’t support any new federal limits on abortion, in the near term the March for Life will need to continue to address the complexity of widely varying state-by-state legislative and judicial contexts that range from bans on abortions in some states to almost unimpeded access to abortions until birth in others. 

Mancini pointed out that three years ahead of Dobbs, her organization initiated its “State March Program” aimed at mobilizing the March for Life’s pro-life advocacy at that jurisdictional level. The initiative has taken root in 17 states, and under Lichter’s stewardship, Mancini predicted, it will soon be present in all 50 states.

At the same time, she emphasized, “We need to continue rallying at the national level, both because we want to pass good legislation at the federal level, but also because the march is about more than just passing legislation. It’s been famously said that culture is upstream of politics, and we want to change culture. We want to march until abortion is unthinkable.”

Lichter referenced the problem of abortion pills, which are now the primary means of obtaining an abortion in the U.S. and which can be accessed via mail even in states where abortion is banned. 

A key pro-life point to be made in this regard, according to the incoming March for Life president, is to highlight the grave health problems that can arise for pregnant women who access these life-ending medications and take them at home without direct medical oversight. 

“And that is so risky and sometimes has tragic results, as we’ve seen in the news even just recently,” she said. 

 

Exciting Opportunity

Mancini hailed her successor’s range of abilities as being uniquely suited to the challenges that lie ahead. “The particular phenomenal skillset that she has, her brilliance, her motherhood, so many wonderful things about her, I think, are really what the organization needs now,” she said.

Lichter told EWTN that she was “so excited” to have been given this opportunity to serve the pro-life movement.

“I mean, I’ve been coming to the March for Life for so many years, and it’s so special to me,” she said. “And I have admired first Nellie Gray, when I first started attending the march; and then Jeannie, for so many years, have just watched her and admired her leadership of the march at the event itself and in the media and all the ways in which she has led in the pro-life movement.” 

“So I am honestly just floored that this call came to me,” Lichter added. 

“And I’m so grateful to Jeannie, for trusting me and asking me to consider this, and to the Lord, for opening my heart to saying ‘Yes’ to it. And I just am so excited and humbled by this opportunity. I really can’t wait to get started.”