This article first appeared in Our Sunday Visitor magazine. Subscribe to receive the monthly magazine here.
Jennie Bradley Lichter, president-elect of the March for Life Education and Defense Fund, will assume her new role on Feb. 1. A regular participant in the National March for Life since her college years, Jennie brings extensive experience in law and policy. During the first Trump Administration, she served in the White House as deputy assistant to the President and deputy director of the Domestic Policy Council, where she led initiatives defending life across federal agencies. Currently the deputy general counsel at The Catholic University of America, Jennie also founded The Guadalupe Project, which supports pregnant and parenting members of the university community. She is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and Harvard Law School, and she and her husband, Brian, have three young children who love to participate in the March for Life.
Our Sunday Visitor: How did you connect with the pro-life movement? Why did you decide now was the time to undertake this role?
Jennie Bradley Lichter: My personal history in the pro-life movement goes back to my parents. My mother raised us in the movement. She was a volunteer for pro-life organizations from when I was very small. In my hometown, my dad has been involved in pro-life work as a legal strategist.
Even though my family didn’t grow up coming to the National March in Washington, mostly because we lived 600 miles away and had eight kids, we did go to our local pro-life demonstrations and rallies. I grew up holding signs on the side of the road in South Bend, Indiana, whenever the opportunity presented itself.
I started coming to the March for Life here in Washington as a college freshman. When I was 18 years old, a freshman at Notre Dame, I came on an overnight bus, like so many people do, to attend the march. And that experience — and every march I’ve attended since — was super impactful for me. The March for Life in Washington in particular is a really joyful event and it’s full of young people; it has an incredible amount of energy and esprit de corps.
I didn’t ultimately feel like I was saying yes in spite of the challenges of the present moment. And there are challenges. A lot of recent ballot initiatives in the last couple of years haven’t gone our way. But all the things that the pro-life movement is fighting for, our call to action, doesn’t change. That is such a gift: that we know that we’re working for a truly righteous cause. The winds swirl around us, but our charge to keep on witnessing to the truth and to the beauty and dignity of human life doesn’t change.
The March for Life is an anchor in the storm. Year after year after year, the March for Life gives pro-life Americans a chance to get together, to take encouragement and inspiration from each other and also just to show our nation that pro-life people are still motivated. We’re still here, we’re still willing to come out in January, regardless of the weather, and get together and witness to the beauty and dignity of human life.
Our Sunday Visitor: How does your Catholic faith animate the work that you do?
Lichter: I have been walking with Jesus for many, many years. I was lucky enough; through the influence of my parents, a wonderful high school and a really on-fire high school youth minister; to build the habit of daily prayer, daily Scripture reading, journaling and active discernment as a teenager. I have carried all of those habits with me through my life. I felt like the Lord was asking me to do this for the March for Life, and I just have a lot of confidence in his call in my life.
Of course, the Church teaches that abortion is truly an evil. As a mom — having experienced pregnancy and bringing children into the world, and raising my kids … that has made me feel deeply in my bones that every life is precious and that the unborn have great dignity. I have experienced that for myself, and I believe it’s tragic that women are told a lie by our culture that motherhood might hold them back or that motherhood is at odds with flourishing and fulfillment.
The grace of the Holy Spirit has opened and softened my heart to see the suffering of a lot of my fellow moms who haven’t had the resources to make a choice for life. I see my calling in this role (as) to do everything I can and everything we can as an organization to make women know and feel a great deal of support.
Our Sunday Visitor: You’ve got a marvelous marriage, beautiful kids, and now this intensely meaningful job. How do you balance it all?
Lichter: I put pretty strict boundaries around my workday and I’m very transparent with my colleagues about those boundaries. People are typically really understanding, in my experience, and it’s never been an issue for me. I have a hard stop at the end of the workday so that I can get home or go downstairs from my home office and make dinner and supervise homework and piano practice and just be fully present with my family. I stay offline until all of my kids are in bed, which is getting later and later now that I have an almost-11-year-old. And then I log back in and work a little more.
Our goal is to eat at home together every night during the week. And most days we pull it off. We do have to move around our meal time a bit as necessary to make sure we can all sit down together — during soccer season, for example, when my son isn’t home until later than usual. We pray, or we sing the Johnny Appleseed song (“The Lord is good to me”), which is a family favorite. We lift up intentions. We talk about the saint of the day.
We talk about our days, of course, and I also use family dinner time to give the kids a heads-up about anything coming up, whether it’s work travel for my husband or me, a special visitor that we’re anticipating, a family member’s birthday so that we can all brainstorm together about a great gift to give to Nona and Papa. We try very hard to get the wild 3-year-old to stay still long enough to absorb a little bit of conversation and of table manners, or at least to eat a little bit of dinner. Some days that goes better than others!
On Sundays, I try to make a special meal when time allows, and we end the weekend with a family Rosary on Sunday evenings, which is pretty hilarious recently as our young three-year-old has started asking for a turn to lead a decade, which we’re happy to let her do, but she only can do about half of it. She gets about half of the prayers right. We figure that God knows our good intentions and doesn’t mind too much if we aren’t hitting all the words every single time.
And finally, one key element to running our household is the touch-base meeting that my husband and I do on Sunday nights after the kids are in bed. Sometimes we make cocktails or pour ourselves glasses of wine and then we open up our calendars and we do a short-term, medium-term and long-term look-ahead. It sounds very corporate, but we love this meeting because it really ensures that neither of us ends up feeling caught off guard by anything coming up on the calendar.
