22% of our generation was aborted. We are the 78%, and we will tell our own story. We are the pro-life generation.

We are the 78%, of diverse background and unwritten future, beautiful and horrifying, as capable of great good and great evil as any generation before, but we stand out of all generations unique, in that we are only a remnant of the generation that should have been.

Our generation has been ravaged by abortion, and for every three of us that survive, one is lost. Like any generation, we have great diversity, but at our core we share a great bond of unity in common tragedy. And from this bond stems a duty, universal and inexorable, to embrace our unity.

To join together on such grounds is fundamentally to acknowledge the horror of abortion and to do so in the sight of all humanity. To act upon the terrible truth that underpins our generation is to affirm in our every deed the great worth of life, with which we are all gifted, and of which a quarter of our generation was deprived.

We are the 78%, bound together by tragedy, and we will stand as one generation—not the one that should have been, but the one that remains.

The generation that should have been will never be, so let us instead strive to become the generation that must be. And the task is in the striving. To strive is to tell one's own story; to strive is to navigate life's barrage of events and experiences by the faith that something ties them together; to strive is to reveal that single underlying truth, and in so doing to become a symbol of that truth.

The story of our generation will be told, one way or another, but only if we strive to be the generation we must be, will we tell the story we must tell. And in that striving we must claim every last tattered thread of life as a vital stitch in our great tapestry, pointing every word of our story to the fundamental truth that every human life has equal value.

We are the 78%, and we will strive to become the generation that must be. We will tell our own story.

And this with tenacity, for to strive is more than to hope; to strive is more than to try, no matter how desperately; to strive is more even than to pray fervently that something might be achieved.

We cannot settle to wish for the end of abortion. Much more than that, we must shape from all the mundanities and catastrophes of life a story that uncovers the beauty and value of life itself. We must become, united in tragedy, a generation of life. In art, in community, in politics, in religion, in everything we do, in everything we are, we must define our generation, the 78%, as the pro-life generation.

We are the 78%, and with everything that we are, we will be the pro-life generation.