I am a busy parish priest half-way through Lent with Holy Week and Easter in sight in my rear view mirror — so I quite frankly did not have time this week to write about what it means to be prayerfully pro-choice … again.

But the orchestrated efforts to turn back the clock on women’s reproductive freedom left me no other principled choice.

It boggles my mind that in the year 2016 we are still battling Congressional efforts to defund Planned Parenthood, are subject to smear campaigns using doctored videos to villainize health care providers and need to show up at the Supreme Court to resist an orchestrated campaign to regulate women’s health clinics out of existence — actions that place an unconstitutional and undue burden on women seeking the termination of a pregnancy.

And so I’m grateful to Congresswoman Judy Chu for her strong words on the House floor yesterday, including “Women in Texas are being put at risk because of anti-choice laws. I urge the Supreme Court to recognize that our rights do not depend on our zip code!” And I’m grateful to be part of a church that has been on record as pro-choice since 1989.

What does “prayerfully pro-choice” look like? It looks like this: