Jeanne Mancini will lead Washington’s big annual abortion protest next month with a much brighter outlook than she had expected.
The March for Life president had a period of deep discouragement in June, when, within two days, the Supreme Court struck down Texas’ new abortion provider regulations and then declined to reverse a case upholding a Washington state requirement for pharmacists to sell the morning-after pill.
“I just thought, wow, we’re going to lose our culture as we know it,” Mancini said. “Truly, that was a dark moment.”
The following week, Mancini hosted a meeting of anti-abortion leaders to discuss what they felt would be a “new normal” in which their priorities would be increasingly hard to advance.
At the time, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton was favored to win the White House. Had she won, abortion foes would have been able to advance virtually none of their federal goals, including getting a conservative to replace one of their greatest Supreme Court heroes, the late Justice Antonin Scalia.
But now, Donald Trump’s presidential victory has changed that. As Mancini and tens of thousands of abortion foes march down Constitution Avenue on Jan. 27, they will do so with their hopes renewed by Trump’s promises to sign anti-abortion legislation into law and appoint abortion-opposing justices.
“In a million years I never anticipated things would turn the way they turned,” Mancini said in a briefing with reporters Tuesday.
It will be Mancini’s fifth year to lead the March for Life, a protest held every year since the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, in which abortion foes march from the National Mall to the front of the high court.
Mancini says this year’s theme will be “The Power of One,” to stress the impact individuals can have in fighting abortion. The group points as an example to former Rep. Henry Hyde, author of an amendment on federal spending bills that blocks taxpayer funds from being used for most abortions.
The Hyde Amendment emerged as a hot-button issue this year, as Democrats for the first time called for removing it from spending bills, even though the measure had long enjoyed bipartisan support. Mancini and other abortion foes are pushing back by calling on Congress and Trump to write the amendment into permanent law, although Senate Democrats are sure to try to block any efforts to do so.
“We try to discern the [march’s] theme in terms of the most pressing issue,” Mancini said. “We thought hope would be a necessary theme this year for a lot of reasons.”
Last year’s theme was “Pro-Life and Pro-Women Go Hand in Hand,” hitting back against the “war on women” message Democrats popularized in the 2014 election.
March for Life is typically held on or around Jan. 22, the anniversary of the Roe decision, but during inauguration years, it’s held a week later. As in previous years, March for Life will host a conference the day before the day of the march, an hour-long rally before it begins and a dinner afterward.
Mancini has released a list of speakers, which includes Radiance Foundation President Ryan Bomberger at the Thursday conference and Mexican actress Karyme Lozano at the pre-march rally. She said the march is trying to get a prominent guest from Hollywood as well, but that hasn’t been finalized.
Mancini and Tom McClusky, the March’s vice president of government affairs, expressed hope that by the time the march takes place, Congress will have voted to strip Planned Parenthood of most federal funds.
Republicans plan to use special budgeting rules to repeal big parts of Obamacare, allowing them to sidestep opposition from Senate Democrats. The measure is likely to include a provision prohibiting Planned Parenthood from receiving Medicaid funding as long as it continues to provide abortions.
Yet the two also said they’re not counting their victories yet. While Trump signed a pledge during his campaign to advance key anti-abortion priorities, they haven’t seen him in action.
“We’ve seen great decisions made in terms of the transition team,” Mancini said. “But again, we haven’t seen him in his administration and how that’s going to go yet.”
