Kate Everett, Staff Writer

“Finger nails the size of a grain of rice,” sings pop artist Ed Sheeran.  Notre Dame Right to Life’s Media Commission showcases pro-life voices, such as Sheeran, each Monday on the group’s Facebook page by posting songs that celebrate life in a new initiative called “Music Mondays.”

Sheeran, whose recent single “A-Team” neared the top of pop music charts worldwide, is one of many popular artists whose music speaks to the dignity of the unborn.  In a popular culture that can often appear engulfed in what Pope John Paul II called the “culture of death,” these songs provide a powerful pro-life witness.

The music for “Music Mondays” ranges from songs that describe the fragility of life and the pain of abortion to songs that, in keeping with Notre Dame Right to Life’s theme this year, simply celebrate life.  Previous posts have included the Notre Dame Folk Choir’s rendition of “Baba Yetu,” a Swahili translation of the Our Father, and Sheeran’s “Small Bump.”  Singing softly about the child’s fingers and eyes, Sheeran describes the fragile beauty of an unborn child.  But the final lines of “Small Bump” are tinged with sadness, as he reveals that the mother had a miscarriage.

Sheeran’s anguished tone is echoed by Flipsyde, a rap-rock alternative group, in the song “Happy Birthday.”  Flipsyde, whose single “Someday” was NBC’s theme for the 2006 Winter Olympics, sings “Happy Birthday” from the perspective of a father speaking to his aborted child.  Reflecting on the day that would have been his child’s birthday, the father apologizes and then wonders what might have been: “Would you have been a little genius in love with math?/ Would you have played in your school clothes and made me mad?/ Would you have been a little rapper like your papa The Piper?”

From the alternative sound of Flipsyde to Ed Sheeran’s soft rock to country and hip-hop, the music featured in “Music Mondays” spans genres.  Country star Kenny Chesney sings “There Goes My Life” about a high school couple who decides to keep their baby daughter despite fears about their futures.  “A couple years of up all night and a few thousand diapers later,” Chesney croons, “that mistake he thought he made covers up the refrigerator/ Oh yeah, he loves that little girl.”  Hip-hop artist and host of “America’s Got Talent” Nick Cannon raps from the perspective of his unborn self in his strikingly pro-life single “Can I Live?”  Cannon acknowledges the difficulty his mother is facing but then urges her to let him live.

Though Chesney and Cannon are current stars, previous “Music Mondays” have also included artists now out of the limelight.  The 70s rock duo Seals and Crofts produced the album “Unborn Child” containing a title track that urges mothers to reconsider the choice to abort.  Released in 1974, shortly after the Roe v. Wade decision, the song was one of the first to carry a strong anti-abortion sentiment.  The duo sings of the unborn child, “oh tiny bud, that grows in the womb, only to be crushed before you can bloom.”

Nearly forty years after Seals and Crofts released their controversial album and nearly twenty years after Pope John Paul II coined the phrase “culture of death,” abortion remains very much a part of modern society.  But musical voices proclaiming the dignity of life still remain.  Notre Dame Right to Life’s “Music Mondays” spotlight songs that uphold the dignity of life, in all its beauty, fragility and potentiality.  In a recorded performance posted on a “Music Monday” last semester, Italian opera singer Andrea Bocelli tells the story of a pregnant mother suffering from appendicitis who, despite encouragement otherwise, chooses not to abort her child.  Part way through the song, Bocelli reveals, “that woman was my mother, and I was the child.”

Andrew Weiler is a sophomore economics major with a minor in philosophy, politics, and economics.  He is a self-proclaimed cereal connoisseur and can be reached at aweiler@nd.edu.