McGrath Institute Blog

As a former college track and field sprinter, I have spent countless hours of my life practicing. I have struggled through long workouts to build endurance, faster workouts to build speed, weight-lifting to build strength, and shorter workouts to provide rest before a competition. In each one of these instances, I began practice going through a set of drills. While these drills provided the necessary preparation for the workout, they also functioned to train my muscles to behave in a certain manner. Marching, skipping, high knees—all of these tedious drills were extremely important in creating muscle memory. Every sport has a series of drills or routines that athletes perform which allow an athlete to trust her muscles to act in the way she needs them to without thought.

Training and preparation is necessary not only in sports but in all areas of life, especially the moral life.

A friend told me in college that she couldn’t be pro-life because “not all mothers have the support they need to choose life. Pro-life people need to take care of the mothers, too.”

Until that conversation, I thought the issue of abortion was straightforward. (In many ways, it is: Life is a precious gift from God and should be treasured at all times, from conception to natural death.) But my friend opened my eyes to see beyond the babies to include the mothers carrying those babies in their womb.