It is no secret that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is staunchly pro-life and opposed to abortion, and he just revealed how deeply personal the issue of protecting the life of unborn babies is to him.
On the eve of the annual March for Life event in Washington D.C., Johnson revealed in an interview that he was the "product of an unplanned pregnancy" but, thankfully, his teenage parents chose life for him instead of death via an abortion, according to the National Catholic Register.
In an interview last week that didn't air until Monday, Speaker Johnson shared in an interview with EWTN reporter Erik Rosales how his life could have been tragically ended before it had even begun if he'd been conceived a year or two later and his parents had made a different decision.
"I’m the product of an unplanned pregnancy. My parents were teenagers when I was born, exactly one year before Roe v. Wade in 1972, in January," Johnson said, referencing the Supreme Court precedent that legalized abortion nationwide but was just overturned by the high court in 2022.
He went on to talk about his devout belief "in the sanctity of every human life at all stages" and told the reporter, "Often we talk about the unborn, which is certainly important because we believe life has value from the moment of conception because it’s our Creator that gives us that and gives us our value. But it’s all the way through every stage of life."
"This is an important thing to support young mothers who are in times of crisis in unplanned situations, to support families, to support them all the way through the pregnancy," Johnson continued. "And then after, we need to be promoting adoption, cutting red tape that hinders the foster children system. So there’s a lot of work to do to build a culture of life."
Speaker Johnson also spoke in that interview about what Congress needed to do to address the pro-abortion backlash that was sparked after the 2022 ruling that ended Roe and included dozens of attacks and incidents of arson and vandalism against the pro-life community and pro-life pregnancy centers.
"We have to, again, bring accountability," he said of the legislature. "We have a very important responsibility here in Congress to ensure that the rule of law is maintained, to ensure that the inherent and fundamental freedoms of all people are respected."
It was "not by accident," the speaker noted, that religious freedom is "literally the first freedom listed in the Bill of Rights," and further explained, "The founders understood that was essential not only to who we are as Americans but to who we are as human beings," and added, "And so Congress has a role to advance that, to maintain those founding principles and to defend them at all costs."
Johnson also touched on the ongoing congressional investigations into the Biden administration's "weaponization" of federal law enforcement to go after political opponents, including members of the pro-life community but also just traditionalist Catholics, who were revealed last year to have been broadly targeted by Biden's FBI as potential domestic terrorists.
The annual National March for Life in Washington D.C. was held on Friday and began with a rally on the National Mall followed by a march by participants through the nation's capital to an endpoint between the Capitol building and the Supreme Court.
The Associated Press reported that turnout for the event "appeared smaller than in past years," largely due to the cold temperatures plus snow and ice, but even still thousands of pro-lifers showed up to hear rally speeches from a handful of politicians and celebrities before the march began.
Speaker Johnson was among the few to address the crowd, according to Roll Call, and he shared his personal story there as well, as he told the crowd, "I am, myself, a product of an unplanned pregnancy. In January of 1972, exactly one year before Roe v. Wade, my parents who were just teenagers at the time chose life. And I am very profoundly grateful that they did."
He also spoke of recently passed GOP bills to support pregnancy centers and pregnant college students, and said, "We are passing these bills and marching today because it takes a lot of work to convince people that every single human child, every unborn child, has a value that’s too precious to ignore. We have every reason to be optimistic that we can change public opinion."
