Every year, a few hundred thousand people march on the Washington Mall to demand that the government protect the lives of the most vulnerable human beings, and the media…well, where is the media? Yet, when a group of 1 or 2% that size protested against police violence in Ferguson, we had a cover story almost daily for weeks. (Note: When searching for numbers of protestors, the highest I found for Ferguson was about 4,500 at the funeral of Michael Brown.) Both cases are about legalized violence towards fellow human beings – human beings that the protestors claim are innocent.

(Note: I’m just posting a few of the Tweets I took during the March to illustrate this story rather than googling free images.)

The biggest obstacle to the pro-life movement today is not the pro-choice movement, but ignorance. The statistics are very clear that the more someone understands about abortion, the more likely they are pro-life. But the media currently decides to look the other way. We need to get this debate back into the general consciousness. It seems that certain protestors get media attention much easier. The Rev. Al Sharpton seems able to get big attention whether he’s protesting police violence, slum poverty or the racial make-up of Oscar nominations. How can we put pro-life back on the map through our protests?

Young people are the most #prolife population segment. We need to destroy the Hollywood stereotype. #WhyWeMarch pic.twitter.com/0zcNuRktnx — Fr Matthew Schneider (@FrMatthewLC) January 22, 2015

I want to suggest a few ideas. I offer them as suggestions, not as dogmatic necessities.

First, we can track clinics and organize a protest every time a woman is seriously injured or dies. The pro-life movement has made great strides by focusing on the damage it does to the woman and not just the baby. Why not get 2,000 protestors in front of a clinic every time a woman is seriously injured or commits suicide after abortion? Then when a woman dies during abortion – about 8 women do a year in the USA (maternal deaths are about 3x higher in the USA than Ireland with much more restrictive abortion laws) – let’s protest outside an abortion clinic in every major city.

A woman is giving her testimony on the horror of her abortion with @frfrankpavone @ the Supreme Court. pic.twitter.com/U1YvH4WiBx — Fr Matthew Schneider (@FrMatthewLC) January 22, 2015

Second, let’s focus on the present, not an anniversary. When I was trying to hold the media accountable for skipping the March, I had an interesting conversation with Fr Jonathan Morris (a priest who’s a commentator on Fox News – here’s my tweet but he deleted his). He noted that because it is an anniversary celebration, it isn’t news-worthy. If we could somehow turn it into a yearly March about abortions and legislation for the coming year, maybe the media would cover it.

Third, social media lets us hold the news media responsible – to report on them. We may need to shame the media into covering the issue. You notice how they mention tweets whenever something like #DeflateGate, #ICantBreathe or #BlackLivesMatter trends. I tried to get #MediaBlackoutGate to force it upon them so that at the very least cover they could cover it since their competitors weren’t– but it didn’t get going enough to be big. A friend of mine got #PrayToEndAbortion trending for a while. That alerts thousands – if not millions – of Twitter users who notice it in their trends. But it wasn’t related to a current event, so the media wasn’t forced to cover it.

The pro-life movement has been fighting for the lives of innocent children for decades. It has saved many but its effects can be improved until abortion is unthinkable. I hope these ideas help us use the resources we have so the media has to pay attention to the issue of abortion. Let’s pray for a moral nation.

EDIT: Someone pointed out that I had misread the original statistic relating legal and illegal abortion deaths. I replaced it.