A day in the 40 Days for Life prayer vigil

By Jennifer Senour

As On a chilly October morning, armed with lattes and rosaries, college students and young professionals in the Denver metro area gathered outside one of the city’s newest facilities—a sprawling 50,000-square-foot behemoth whose doors opened early this past July—to pray and take part in the Denver Archdiocese’s “40 Days for Life” campaign. The nationwide prayer campaign serves to pray for the election of public officials who will defend and protect human life, especially the life of the unborn.

The shining, $4.2 million facility is located in an up-and-coming residential area known as Stapleton, named for the former airport.  The neighborhood, home to a curious mix of low- to middle-income single family homes and upscale shops and bistros, has undergone a renaissance of sorts over the past several years, evident in the surrounding architecture.  The clinic occupies nearly an entire city block, staking it’s claim as the largest Planned Parenthood facility in the United States.

Standing on the street opposite the three-story center, it was difficult to comprehend that the attractive, modern building before us was not a community college or a middle school.  Shrouded in secrecy and built in the midst of a flurry of controversy, the job was contracted to the Weitz Company Rocky Mountain. 

Amid months of protest and dissent from other cooperative contractors—hired for a United Airlines project, from whom Planned Parenthood purchased the original facility—the clinic nonetheless opened three months ahead of schedule, and has since served as headquarters for Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains.

The young people gathered outside weren’t thinking about subcontractors or corporate intrigue, though.  They had come to pray, and pray they did, heads bowed and gloved hands clasped in quiet supplication.  It was a study in contrast to behold these attractively-clad young adults, many of whom had chosen to either delay or interrupt their work day to stand in the street and bow their heads before the grave injustice perpetrated against their generation.  Not one of them was old enough to qualify as “Pre-Roe.” 

Born after 1973, each of them had trumped the odds simply by arriving on earth intact.  And perhaps this was the strongest motivator, the awareness that but for the grace of God, any number of them could have come to an early, legal end in their own mother’s womb. 

Ann, a young mother who declined to give her last name, was there with her husband and their 7-month old twin boys, and said “I got pregnant young, but it was never a question.”  She abruptly broke off her explanation to hurry toward a young couple who were approaching the clinic, hoping to speak with them about her own experience with an unplanned pregnancy.

I searched the faces of these young prayer warriors, expecting anger, outrage, and certainly sorrow.  What I found there in the shadow of the clinic, however, in the eyes of the men and women gathered to pay their respects to the missing persons of their own generation, was hope.  Unquenchable, unflinching hope, and a refusal to surrender to the prevailing culture.

Steph Parnow, a FOCUS (Fellowship of Catholic University Students) missionary at the University of Colorado at Boulder, had come to pray with two of her fellow missionaries.
“The work we do, even in the face of death, is ultimately filled with hope,” she said. “Knowing the spiritual battle has already been won in heaven, gives me great hope when praying for the soul of each man, woman and child inside.”

Jennifer Senour is program manager of mission development with the Fellowship of Catholic University Students.