The Quiet Work of a Pro-Life Dad
Being pro-life has meant a lot of different things to me over the years. In my Catholic high school, it was mostly about getting out of class for a day and marching in DC with my friends from another school. Being from an all-boys school, it really helped that my friends were mostly girls.
Fortunately, in college, I was able to improve my understanding and reasoning for being pro-life through conversation with good friends and this new-fangled internet thing. As a young adult and newlywed, I read books and attended conferences while resuming my participation in the March for Life with deeper friendships than those I had before.
Becoming a dad is pro-life by its very nature and it is a great reflection of the movement itself. Both being a dad and being pro-life involve countless hours of work that are invisible to most of the world. As a dad there are diapers, bills, and sleepless nights as well as the trickier balancing acts of career advancement versus being present for games, events, and those profound moments which occur at their own time and place, such as a child’s first steps or first-time reading. Being pro-life for me has required staying politically informed, volunteering at and donating to pregnancy centers, as well as casual witness in everyday life, not to mention a few decades of teaching NFP with CCL.
Rewards
The rewards of fatherhood are known to many: seeing children grow into adults who can navigate the world with their own resources and build their relationship with God. The rewards of being pro-life are similar: seeing a mother who has confidence and trust in raising her child as the movement grows to help even more people. So, there are rewards in both choices but the more I am pro-life and the more I am a dad, the less the rewards matter.
Now, as my kids are in college and high school, I’ve been less involved in the pro-life movement outside of my fatherhood and NFP instruction. In the meantime, they’ve begun picking up the torch themselves. Hopefully, they go to the March for Life for better reasons than I did in high school, but I couldn’t help laughing when they sent a picture from the March this year. They were standing with friends representing two colleges, two high schools, and a young adult newlywed without – all without a parent in sight.
The ultimate end of being a pro-life dad is passing it on to the next generation so the work of building the kingdom of God can continue, one baby at a time.
Written by Jim Volpe. Jim lives in eastern PA with his wife Jen and their five children. Jim and Jen have been a CCL Teaching Couple for 20 years and Jim is a FSI coach. When not teaching NFP, Jim enjoys board games, video games, splitting wood, and software engineering. Jim is also a CCL board member. This column was first seen in Family Foundations magazine.