About 15 years ago our family came upon this idea of praying for an unknown, unborn baby. The idea was that you would name your baby and pray for it every day for nine months. That sounded pretty cool to our family of small to medium- sized children and so we began the practice of spiritual adoption that we have carried on every day since.
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Spiritual Adoption Prayer
We began our spiritual adoption on the Feast of the Annunciation because it seemed an appropriate day to begin. Jesus became an unborn baby on this Feast, so we figured it would be a good way to help us remember to pick a new baby the next year.
The prayer to be prayed each day is attributed to Ven. Fulton Sheen. According to spiritualadoption.org, "To help stop the anti-life push around the world, the late Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen encouraged the spiritual adoption of an unborn child. This is done by praying that the one particular but unknown child’s life be spared abortion and be allowed to continue to live."
This is the prayer that Bishop Sheen wrote. We pray it every night with our dinner prayers.
Jesus, Mary and Joseph I love you very much. I beg you to spare the life of the unborn baby, which I have spiritually adopted, who is in danger of abortion. Amen.
Our intention was originally to do it for just the nine months. Once we reached that point, however, we thought we would just pray another three months for the baby to have a good start to life and then begin another round on the following March 25th.
Name Your Unborn Baby
It is suggested that you name the unborn baby you are praying for, so we decided we would start with the letter A. Each family member picked a name that started with A and we wrote them down.
The next year we all picked names beginning with B and so on. The farthest record we have that I can remember is M, but sadly I can no longer find the piece of paper! I know we've been praying the prayer a few years since then, too.
A Wonderful Family Experience
This is such a simple thing to do to bring awareness of the pro-life movement to your family. You don't have to go into great detail about abortion to explain to smaller kids, either.
It's also a spiritual work of mercy to pray for those in need, so the few minutes it takes to do it is worth it. I've heard it said that one day, if we make it to Heaven, we will get to meet all of the babies that we have spiritually adopted, which sounds pretty cool to me!
This is a great idea!