War over abortion heating up again

A pro-life movement emboldened by Donald Trump’s election makes its voice heard louder than ever.

Thousands of abortion opponents gathered in cold, blustery weather in Washington, DC yesterday to hear US Vice-President Mike Pence tell the annual March for Life that the Trump administration is determined to advance the fight against abortion.

The massive crowd, bearing flags, banners and placards, then flowed down Constitution Ave, filling the street, and rallied at the Supreme Court building, across from the Capitol.

‘‘We will not grow weary,’’ Pence said in a 10-minute address to the throng at the Washington Monument. ‘‘We will not rest until we restore a culture of life in America for ourselves and our posterity.’’

He said the administration was bent on ending taxpayer funding of abortion and abortion providers. He added that ‘‘next week, President Donald Trump will announce a Supreme Court nominee who will uphold the God-given liberty enshrined in our Constitution, in the tradition of the late and great Justice Antonin Scalia’’.

Scalia, a conservative associate justice of the Supreme Court, died last year.

‘‘Life is winning again in America,’’ said Pence, who added that Trump had asked him to speak at the rally. ‘‘That is evident in . . . the historic election of a president . . . who I proudly say stands for the right to life.’’

Pence was the first US vicepresident to address the march in its history.

Bundled against a stiff wind, participants from across the country first descended on the northeast grounds of the monument.

Pence, who has called himself an ‘‘evangelical Catholic’’, has long been a hero among American antiabortion activists. As governor of Indiana, he signed what were considered some of the nation’s strictest laws on abortion.

Also addressing the crowd was Trump counsellor Kellyanne Conway.

‘‘I am a wife, a mother, a Catholic, counsellor to the president of the United States of America, and yes, I am pro-life,’’ she said.

‘‘This is a new day, a new dawn, for life.’’

The right to life ‘‘is not a privilege’’, Conway said. ‘‘It is not a We will not rest until we restore a culture of life in America for ourselves and our posterity. choice. It is God-given . . . This is a time of incredible promise for the pro-life, pro-adoption movement.’’

‘‘We hear you,’’ she told the crowd. ‘‘We see you. We respect you. And we look forward to working with you.’’

This year, organisers of the march had hoped to see a surge of energy with the election of a president who is expected to move forward on anti-abortion policies, including cutting funding for Planned Parenthood and appointing an anti-abortion Supreme Court justice.

‘‘He’s pro-life,’’ Lynn Ray, coordinator of her Catholic diocese’s campus ministry at Louisiana State University at Alexandria, said as she stood on Constitution Ave with a group from the school. ‘‘So that’s good for us.’’

There were members of the clergy at the march, as well as ‘‘Bikers for Life’’. Many marchers were part of school and church groups, carrying posters – and a life-size cutout of Pope Francis. They sang, chanted and prayed.

Dan Kehoe said he saw the march not as a political statement but as a religious one.

The 34-year-old from Taos, Missouri, was a chaperone on his daughter’s eighth-grade Catholic church trip. They took a bus for 22 hours for what they called a ‘‘pilgrimage’’ to Washington.

Kahoe said he saw news coverage of last week’s Women’s March on Washington and thought that it was a political march about women’s issues. This event, he said, was ‘‘completely different’’ – not about women’s rights but human ones.

‘‘It’s not just a woman’s choice; it takes two to make a child,’’ he said.

More than 200 people made the trip from his central Missouri church community with him, most of them children. ‘‘If the younger generation doesn’t speak up now, who will?’’ Kehoe said.

One block-long mass of 200 teenagers from 15 churches and three Catholic high schools filled five charter buses but was only part of a 500-strong group from the Archdiocese of Mobile, Alabama.

The size of the crowd was typical, said youth leader Adam Ganucheau, who has attended more than a dozen of the annual marches since 2001. But he sensed an extra electricity this time.

Ganucheau said he was glad to have an anti-abortion administration in office, although there were other parts of the Trump agenda that concerned him.

Earlier, Jeanne Mancini, president of the March for Life, listed her four demands for Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress.

They are appointing an antiabortion justice to the Supreme Court; making the Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funding for many abortions in the US, into a permanent law rather than the one-year provision that has been extended each year since 1976; passing a law banning abortion nationwide after 20 weeks of pregnancy; and stopping all federal funding for Planned Parenthood unless the organisation stops performing abortions.

Nationwide, 57 per cent of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, the highest percentage since 1996, according to a 2016 Pew Research Centre poll.

Asked about the Women’s March, Ray, of Deville, Louisiana, said: ‘‘I’m all about women’s rights, except when it comes to the baby. I believe – it’s my opinion – but I believe a baby is a gift from God, and once the baby is a gift from God, it’s no longer your body, but there’s another body within. And that body has a right also.’’

When attendee Brianna Roberts, 21, of Reading, Pennsylvania, met her birth mother two years ago, she said she was upset to hear that relatives had wanted the woman to abort her.

Her mother was 20 at the time, already had one child and was getting by on food stamps, Roberts said. But when her mother went to a clinic seeking an abortion, she was told she was too far along for the clinic to perform one. So she placed Roberts for adoption.

‘‘She did the right and responsible thing,’’ Roberts said.

Roberts said she did not vote in November because she did not like either Trump or Hillary Clinton, but she was optimistic that Trump would advance anti-abortion policies.

Francis Leung, 18, a university student from Naples, Florida, said he had attended the March for Life with his parents almost every year since ‘‘I was a little kid’’ in a stroller.

Leung said he grew up in a devoutly Catholic family and had heard a strong anti-abortion message from his parents for as long as he could remember. His nine siblings – eight of whom came to Washington with him this week – had heard it, too.

The march was ‘‘a great movement, because it’s simple’’, Leung said. ‘‘Every unborn child has a right to life.’’

The first March for Life was held in 1974, one year after the Supreme Court’s Roe v Wade decision, which recognised a right to abortion nationwide.