When she was a freshman at the University of Notre Dame, Jennie Bradley Lichter ’09 took a long bus ride to Washington, D.C., to participate for the first time in the March for Life, an annual gathering of the pro-life movement. She would attend many more times, but during last year’s event, nearly 25 years later, she was no longer in the crowd. She stood on stage to deliver remarks as the incoming president of the March for Life Education and Defense Fund.
The first time she attended the March was formative, she recalls, remembering being among thousands of young people “who all share your fundamental belief in the dignity of the human person.” Now as president, she embraces her role as the public face of an organization she has been committed to for her entire adult life, driven by her belief that abortion is morally wrong because, she says, it involves deliberately ending an innocent human life.
“I’m very aware in this job of the way that I now have an opportunity to embody this beautiful organization and this incredible history of a social movement that has had the persistence to continue to show up in person in January in huge numbers for over 50 years,” Lichter says.
The March for Life was established to protest the then-recent Roe v. Wade decision, which in 1973 legalized the right to abortion nationwide. In the aftermath of the 2022 Dobbs decision that overturned Roe, the organization still advocates to change law and policy as individual states enact their own regulations on abortion, but it also is focused on convincing more people to accept its contention that abortion is immoral. Lichter also promotes the benefits of pregnancy resource centers that provide material assistance to pregnant women as well as parenting education and counseling. The movement will remain committed, she says, “until every baby is protected and every mom is supported to choose life.”
Throughout her career, Lichter has worked in positions that align with her convictions. After two appellate clerkships and a stint as an associate with the firm Jones Day, she joined one of its clients, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, as counsel. She would later serve as deputy general counsel for The Catholic University of America. Devoted to her faith, Lichter says, “The idea that I could use my legal skills to be contributing to the life of the church was incredibly appealing to me.”
“Contributing to the life of the church was incredibly appealing to me.”
Between those jobs, she served in the first Trump administration starting in the fall of 2017 in the Office of Legal Policy at the Department of Justice, where she helped establish a religious liberty task force and worked on judicial nominations. Later, she became deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, involved in policy initiatives on religious freedom, public funding for faith-based social organizations, and pro-life matters, among many others.
Lichter’s career shows the variety of pursuits a law degree can prepare people for, she notes, something she learned from a young age. Her father, GerardBradley, who recently retired asa longtime professor at Notre Dame Law School, exposed her to a large community of attorneys.
As she grew older, she understood the impact he had on his students and others in the legal community, because of both his teaching and his commitment to the causes and principles he cared about. “I like to think that I have inherited something of my dad’s boldness and courage and determination,” she says.
As the eldest of eight children (including three other lawyers), she also learned early on how to be a leader. Her siblings all followed her to Notre Dame for college, but Lichter decided on a different environment for law school. She’s glad she did, calling Harvard Law a great experience, with a vibrant intellectual life and myriad opportunities to pursue her interests. She was active in the Federalist Society and Harvard Defenders. Her background and perspective were different from those of many of her classmates, but even when they disagreed, they could talk with respect and understanding, she says. “Everyone in [my 1L] section was really good to each other, and that mutual support has still lasted.” This year, she returned to HLS as a fellow of the Wasserstein Fellows Program, which brings public interest lawyers to campus to meet with students.
Lichter has settled in the D.C. area with her husband, Brian, an attorney who currently works as a cybersecurity consultant, and their three children. While she has always been pro-life, the “profound” experience of the birth of her first child, now 12, accentuated her sense of mission. He was born shortly before a March for Life event that she didn’t attend because he was sick. As she was holding him, wishing she could be at the event, she remembers praying for other mothers.
“I was really bowled over in that moment by how tragic it is that our culture has driven a wedge between women and their children to such a degree that motherhood is often framed or experienced as something that gets in the way of flourishing for many women,” she says. “Or that having a child or having a child at the wrong time is seen as a failure or a diversion from what women are really trying to accomplish.”
She thought then that if she ever had a chance to do something to change that culture, she would.