Trump, Pence address the other Washington march — the one against abortion
Thousands of anti-abortion protestors gathered for the 46th March for Life rally on the National Mall Friday afternoon and were greeted with surprise addresses by both President Trump (on video) and Vice President Pence (in person).
Pence, introduced by his wife, Karen, took the stage shortly after the rally began at noon. Declaring that “Life is winning in America once again,” the vice president spoke proudly of the anti-abortion actions taken by the administration, including curtailing “American foreign aid to countries that promote abortion,” appointing “more conservative men and women to our federal courts of appeals than any president in American history,” and signing “legislation to empower states to defund Planned Parenthood.”
Pence then introduced the previously recorded video of the president who intoned: “When we look into the eyes of a newborn child, we see the beauty and the human soul and the majesty of God’s creation. We know that every life has meaning.” Trump vowed to veto any legislation passed by the newly Democratic majority in the House that is not in keeping with a pro-life agenda.
The march has been held each year on the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, which instituted a federal right to abortion access. This year’s event occurs at a moment both sides of the debate describe as pivotal, with a new conservative majority on the Court that appears likely to weaken Roe if not reverse it completely.
But it also comes at a moment when public opinion polls find up to 70 percent of Americans support some right to abortion, and when the so-called blue wave of the midterm elections brought new pro-choice majorities to a number of statehouses and replaced some Republican governors with pro-choice Democrats.
Jeanne Mancini, president of the March for Life, described this year’s theme as “Pro-Life Is Pro-Science.” In recent months, March for Life has vigorously promoted the findings of what it describes as two scientific groups.
The first, a review of medical literature by a professor of pediatrics at the University of Utah, says that because a fertilized zygote “directs its own development,” these earliest clusters of cells “are indeed living individuals of the human species.”
And the second, a statement by a group called the American College of Pediatricians, says its organization “values all human lives equally from the moment of conception (fertilization) until natural death. Consistent with its mission to ‘enable all children to reach their optimal physical and emotional health and well-being,’ the College, therefore, opposes active measures that would prematurely end the life of any child at any stage of development from conception to natural death.”
But by invoking science, March for Life organizers have been accused of misrepresenting it. The first paper was published by the Charlotte Lozier Institute, the research and education institute of the Susan B. Anthony List and which describes itself as “committed to bringing the power of science, medicine, and research to bear in life-related policy making, media, and debates to promote a culture and polity of life.” The definition of life as beginning with conception is an outlier among the many others that have found it impossible to make such a scientifically precise statement.
And the College is a group created for anti-abortion physicians with a membership only in the hundreds, compared to the 66,000 members of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which has consistently supported the right to abortion access.
As Sarah Horvath, a family planning and policy advocacy fellow for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which represents 90 percent of ob/gyns in the U.S., and which supports abortion access, told the Washington Post: “Science isn’t really designed to answer questions about the exact beginning of life or the moral assignations of these sorts of things. Science is really more designed to teach us how things work, and then we can allow people to make their own decisions about what that means for them,” she said. “Science tells us that abortion is safe. Science tells us that abortion is health care. Science tells us that abortion care can be lifesaving.”
Official crowd counts were not yet available for the March for Life, but news organization estimates ranged from “thousands” to “tens of thousands.” Those numbers have become a subject of much debate recently as the date of the March for Life falls within days of the Women’s March on Washington, to be held tomorrow. Crowd counts for the previous two years of that event have been in the hundreds of thousands in Washington and in the millions nationwide.
March for Life participants have taken to questioning those counts, complaining that their event is underrepresented in the press compared to the Women’s March.
“The media will ignore us because they always do,” said Ben Shapiro, editor in chief of the Daily Wire, in his speech from the march podium. “They will cover other marches, you know — the five people who show up tomorrow. They bet that the tens of thousands of us who stand here with the souls of the future of America will be forgotten. We will not be forgotten.”
The speeches on the National Mall ended at 1 p.m., and the crowd then marched to the Supreme Court building.
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