Families, young people and various Chattanooga religious leaders gathered at a Thursday service to pray and rejoice after the Supreme Court’s decision last week overturning Roe v. Wade.
“For the past 50 years, it’s been legal to terminate the life of the child in the womb of the mother, and so what I would say, more than a celebration, or better than calling it a celebration, would be to say, it’s a righting of a wrong,” the Rev. David Carter of the Saints Peter & Paul Catholic Church on Eighth Street, told the Chattanooga Times Free Press.
Attendees at the Calvary Chapel gathering heard messages from Pastor Lou Engle; Doug Daugherty, anti-abortion activist and president of the conservative policy advocacy group Hamilton Flourishing; and Charlie Wysong, president of American Rights Coalition, on abortion and the effects the procedure leaves on women.
“The reality of today means that we have to do the work of caring for mothers, women and children,” Carter said. “‘Our’ in our calling just got more serious, so this is a day of serious, sober, joy.”
Nonprofit organizations Choices, which according to its website provides services for unplanned pregnancies, and the Momentum Network, which provides housing and financial support for young women with unplanned pregnancies, had kiosks at the event.