The March for Life, which draws right-to-life activists and sympathizers from all segments of American society and whose organizers estimated the crowds this week at 100,000, has always stood fast and firm on a single point: In the United States, laws must protect the innocent from the moment of conception until natural death; abortion must be outlawed without exception. By their public witness year after year since the infamous Roe vs. Wade decision Jan. 22, 1973, marchers have kept the issue before the public and worked to make legislators understand that this is a subject on which there can ultimately be no compromise.

At the same time, in other venues, the Catholic bishops’ Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities and numerous other groups and individuals have opted for an incremental approach. This is in line with what Pope John Paul said in his encyclical "The Gospel of Life": that while we are working to protect all life at every stage it is worthwhile to simultaneously work for intermediate improvements in law and in society.

The Second Look Project presents basic facts about abortion, prenatal development, and U.S. law, urging people to take another look at their views on abortion. "Have we gone too far?" the advertising placards ask.

Many Americans who automatically favor "a woman’s right to choose" — after all, what red-blooded American could be against rights or choice? — really don’t know what they’re supporting when they stand behind Roe vs. Wade. They don’t know that abortion is legal at every stage of pregnancy. They don’t know that by the seventh or eighth week after conception — when about a third of U.S. abortions take place — the unborn baby, though very tiny, has all the familiar features of a human child including brain waves and a heartbeat, elbows and toes. The baby’s heart, in fact, beats by the end of the third week. More than 130,000 abortions in the United States take place each year between the 13th and 20th weeks of the babies’ lives.

The Second Look Project is designed to stop the knee-jerk positive reaction to "rights" language and encourage Americans — even those who think abortion should be legal under some circumstances — to think about the reality of a nation in which nearly 25 percent of all the children conceived are legally killed. As pro-life people talked about partial-birth abortion as a "wedge issue," an issue that would make people look again at the reality of abortion, so this new campaign takes a calm and quiet approach in the hope of swaying public opinion and perhaps affecting some mothers who may be contemplating abortion.