The quintessential Feast illustrating the Church’s belief of the importance of human beings from the moment of conception is the Annunciation (March 25).  This is why the Annunciation icon was chosen for this Akathist website.

The Annunciation Feast is so important that a Divine Liturgy must be served even when it falls on Great and Holy Friday. The Annunciation Troparion makes a most profound statement: “Today is the beginning of our salvation, the revelation of the eternal mystery! The Son of God becomes the Son of the Virgin as Gabriel announces the coming of grace…”

This is a far cry from the “pro-choice” rhetoric of “who knows when life begins?” or the degradation of the unborn by calling him a “blob of tissue” and a “product of conception.” Can any Christian seriously propose that Jesus Christ was ever a “blob” or an appendage of the Theotokos’s body?

At the Great compline the hymnography makes this astonishing claim: “…O marvel! God has come among men; He who cannot be contained in a womb; the timeless One enters time…For God empties Himself, takes flesh, and is fashioned as a creature, when the angel tells the pure Virgin of her conception…”

This is not sung at the feast of our Lord’s Nativity but at His conception. Such concepts as “viability” and “quickening” are utterly without meaning and irrelevant.

*** excerpts from The Orthodox Christians for Life – ProLife Handbook – www.oclife.org