March for Life

It was incredible.  The size of the crowd.  All the enthusiastic young people.  Priests, bishops, seminarians, and nuns everywhere.  500,000 or more pro-life people all in the same place.  You'd never know by looking at their faces that it was 25 degrees and snowing.

Well, okay, maybe these people look a bit cold.

Wall-to-wall people as far as you could see.

Note to self:  If carrying a sign in the future, make it double-sided.

The only people not happy were the police.  They seemed very stern, almost angry.  Maybe they were intimidated by the large crowd?  It was the nicest, friendliest crowd I've ever been a part of...  One policeman yelled at DH (to get off the ledge) while he was taking this picture.  It was my fault--I asked him to stand up there.  :)  I figured it would be okay because others were sitting on the ledge...

Beforehand I wondered how I'd react during the March in light of our infertility.  I thought I might be extra sensitive or emotional, but I wasn't**.  I actually managed to forget that I was infertile most of the day and just focused on what was going on around me.  It probably didn't hurt that I was at one of my more stable parts of the cycle (early/mid-post peak).  ;)

**The one exception, which I don't think had anything to do with IF, was when I started sobbing while walking by a display set up on the sidewalk showing pictures of unborn babies, both living and dead.  It was the only time and place during the March where I saw them.  (Everywhere else the pictures were of cute living babies.)  I've seen pictures of aborted babies before; years ago as part of training to volunteer at a crisis pregnancy center, they had us watch a few videos with them.  I think I cried back then during those videos also.  I understand the arguments both for and against showing graphic images in public, and normally I might lean toward not showing them, but in that moment on Friday, I was glad that I saw them.  Not that I had been complacent about abortion, but it just convicted me deeply that this is what we want to end.  It took me a minute to compose myself though; I really didn't want to spend the rest of the March crying.

The most moving part of the March for me was just after we turned the corner of the last block before the Supreme Court, where the March ended.  There was a line of people standing along the sidewalk from Silent No More holding signs like, "I regret my abortion" or "I regret lost fatherhood."  I really admired their courage.  Some of them also spoke to the crowd in front of the Supreme Court and gave their testimony of how they had been hurt by abortion.

I didn't have very many expectations ahead of time, but I did assume there would be counter-protesters.  I remember in previous media coverage of the March, they liked to show pictures of the counter-protestors, often more than the marchers themselves, so I half-expected there to be a lot of them lined up on the sidewalks yelling at the pro-lifers.  I was (pleasantly) shocked and relieved that I counted three pro-abortion signs in total (and no one else next to them without signs), and they were only in front of the Supreme Court.  Believe me, I was scouring the signs people were holding on the sidewalks as the rest of us walked by to see what their position was.

The March seemed to be over so quickly, but I guess it doesn't take that long to walk a mile, even in a huge crowd.  (If you stood in one place and watched everyone walk by, it would have been at least an hour and a half, maybe more than two hours.)  My fingers were starting to get cold at the end, otherwise I probably would have dragged DH back to the beginning and walked the route again.  :)

I definitely hope to attend the March for Life in the future, but I will keep praying that one day they won't have to hold it anymore.