Arguing for the unborn: Baltimore lawyer-turned-priest receives pro-life honor

For Monsignor James P. Farmer, the essence of the pro-life movement is simple.

“The truth is on our side, and the truth will set us free,” he said.

The longtime spiritual director of the Baltimore Archdiocese’s Office of Respect Life received the Pro-Life Award from Pregnancy Center North at the Towson center’s annual fundraising banquet Sept. 23.

“He was instrumental in starting the center,” said Cindi Ritter, Pregnancy Center North’s executive director.

That was in 1982.

“He met with the women who started it, he sat in on their board meetings, and all throughout the beginning years he was there as an adviser,” added Ritter, a parishioner at St. John the Evangelist in Long Green Valley.

By then, Monsignor Farmer had been involved in the movement for nearly a decade. Not too many can trace their activism all the way back to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision that effectively legalized abortion in America in 1973, but Monsignor Farmer can.

“I’m a lawyer, so I was surprised by the court’s decision,” Monsignor Farmer said, referencing his pre-vocation occupation.

From a legal standpoint, he explained, Roe was odd in its reliance on a “penumbral” constitutional right to privacy rather than any explicit right – such as free speech or free assembly, for example – laid out in the founding document. Furthermore, he added, Roe was similar to the court’s infamous Dred Scott decision in that both denied the personhood of a certain category of individual – preborn children in Roe and Black Americans in Dred Scott.    

Monsignor Farmer’s story includes his personal conversion and vocation to the priesthood, but he prefers to remember the people he met along the path.

“The women in pregnancy centers across the country – they’re the real heroes,” he said.

Ritter noted that he is always up for a good story.

“He says, ‘Tell me, how many women did you see this year?’ or ‘Tell me about some of your cases,’” she said. “He loves to hear about women who changed their minds about abortion.”

While technology can be a touchy subject among the faithful of late, Monsignor Farmer acknowledges its role in that change of heart.

“The ultrasound machine changed the whole debate around the developing baby,” he said. “When a woman sees her ultrasound baby, she calls it ‘my baby.’ Before that, she didn’t refer to it as that. You see it over and over and over again.”

The pastor of St. Thomas More in Baltimore has made other telling observations over the years.

“One of my closest friends is a doctor,” Monsignor Farmer said. “He has said that when you deliver a woman’s baby, and then you later run into her out somewhere, there’s a bond between the two of you. Then he said, ‘When you see a woman out whose baby you aborted – what’s that like?’”

Monsignor Farmer emphasizes that the pro-life movement should seek to “convince, not confront” and to “persuade, not provoke.”

“The human being is made in the image and likeness of God,” he said. “Once people understand that, they realize abortion is not an option.”

Ritter said the fundraising banquet was a success, with 287 people in attendance.

“That’s pretty good in a pandemic year,” she said, adding that “a lot of people came because we were honoring (Monsignor Farmer), and a lot of people donated in honor of him.”

She also noted that he is willing “to speak loud and clear from the pulpit on the atrocity of abortion” while at the same time sticking to his softer strategy of convincing and persuading.

“People come up to me and say, ‘I wouldn’t be pro-life it wasn’t for Monsignor Farmer,’” Ritter said.   

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