Hundreds of thousands of women descended on Washington last weekend to protest President Trump. Today, the nation’s capital is hosting a very different demonstration. The March for Life has taken place every year since 1973, when the Supreme Court handed down its Roe v. Wade decision, which conjured the constitutional right to abortion.
Hundreds of thousands of anti-abortion advocates march each anniversary of that ruling up Constitution Avenue, past the Capitol, and to the Supreme Court to protest this morally and legally abhorrent, arrogant decision.
Marchers are notably young and diverse, as an aghast Nancy Keenan, former head of NARAL Pro-Choice America, noted once when she looked on and said, “My gosh … there are so many of them, and they are so young.” Or, as one marcher once put it, “Of course I’m against abortion, I’m a child.”
Many of the marchers, probably most, are women. This shouldn’t be a surprise. For despite the Left’s propaganda effort to treat women as a pro-abortion bloc, women are just as likely as men to oppose the barbaric practice now enshrined in law. Last week’s “Women’s March” would have us believe in a monolithic female demand for the right to kill babies in the womb, but it is a lie.
Women are nearly as likely to oppose abortion as to support it. Polls show they are actually likelier than men to oppose abortions in all circumstances, including when pregnancy is the result of rape or incest. These are the millions of women who believe what is surely both natural and civilized, that the intentional destruction of unborn children is inimical to what it means to be a woman
It’s an interesting phenomenon that even as the public has become more permissive on most cultural issues such as same-sex marriage, divorce and out-of-wedlock birth, its views on abortion have changed very little. This is surely understandable, for proscriptions against the first three are largely social and cultural, whereas horror of the last is evolutionary and goes to the core of our being as a species.
Scientific advances have confirmed the wisdom established in the ancient world (enunciated at the latest in the pre-Christian Hippocratic Oath) that a developing fetus is a living, feeling human being with a beating heart. We can now see that this is so, and every suggestion to the contrary is a palpable falsehood.
Most abortion-rights advocates are unwilling to acknowledge scientific fact; (which portion of the ideological spectrum really believes in science?) A recent article in the Atlantic is illustrative. The author suggests that fetal ultrasounds are used by pro-life pregnancy centers to trick women into believing that their fetus is a human being. She dismisses the detection of a heartbeat, which is present as early as six weeks into a pregnancy, as arbitrary. But it is not arbitrary. If clinical death is when the heart stops, it is not arbitrary to say that life is present when it starts.
When will pro-lifers stop marching? Not when Roe is overturned but when the very idea of abortion as a response to pregnancy becomes unthinkable. Until then, pro-lifers will march, and women will continue to lead the way.
