At the 52nd annual March For Life on Friday, the most discussed and by far the most popular figures were Donald Trump and JD Vance.
Five days after taking office as president and vice president, Trump and Vance electrified the thousands of anti-abortion activists who dared chilling weather to march in Washington, D.C. —Trump by recorded message, Vance in an unexpected personal appearance.
“Trump is taking positive, pro-life action,” Jim Salole of Chicago told Newsmax. Salole, who has participated in four previous marches for life, recalled that he did not vote for Trump in 2016 because he wasn’t sure of his commitment to the pro-life cause.
“I had a wait-and-see attitude about him,” said Salole, quickly adding that after concluding the president was truly an abortion opponent, he voted for Trump without hesitation in 2020 and 2024.
As the March For Life was in progress, the president signed executive orders that revived restrictions on federal funding for family planning and other health programs abroad that discuss abortion as an option or provide referrals for the procedure. In addition, he signed the long-anticipated reinstatement of the Mexico City Policy, which bans foreign organizations receiving U.S. health funding from providing and promoting abortion with other sources of financing.
But the most uplifting news to the marchers was Trump’s decision that day to pardon 10 defendants convicted of blockading a Washington, D.C. abortion clinic and sentenced to prison.
Calling them “peaceful pro-life demonstrators,” Trump said flatly “they should not have been prosecuted.”
“We finally have the backing of a president and I’m lighter in my step over it,” said Heather Keane, a marcher from Stamford, Connecticut.
As has been the case in recent years, the March For Life is increasingly younger and, while Roman Catholics provide the lion’s share of marchers, the number of non-Catholics participating in the event is on the rise.
The National Association of Lutheran Churches, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, and Lutheran Evangelicals all carried signs in the procession toward Capitol Hill, as did representatives of several Anglican churches.
One trait increasingly evident among teen-aged and twentysomething right-to-lifers is support for ending all exceptions to abortions. Although President Trump and many other pro-life Republicans support three exceptions for abortion — rape, incest, and the life of the mother — several younger pro-lifers who spoke to Newsmax want to go further and end all exceptions.
“One, two, three, four — Roe v. Wade is out the door!” many of them chanted in marching to the U.S. Capitol. “Five, six, seven, eight — now it’s time to legislate!”
Carina Kiesling of Rochester, Michigan, was one of several pro-lifers marching under the banner of “Save The One”—that is, people who could have been aborted for any one of the three exceptions but lived.
“My mother was conceived in rape,” she told us, “and my grandmother gave birth to her only after two unsuccessful attempts to get a back alley abortion. We’ve got to eliminate the exceptions in thought and legislatively.”
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