Array
Thousands of abortion opponents descended on Washington DC for the annual March for Life on Friday, the first time since achieving its foundational objective: persuading the supreme court to overturn Roe v Wade.
Each year around the anniversary of the landmark 1973 decision that once established a constitutional right to abortion, anti-abortion activists have come to the nation’s capital to march, plead and pray for a post-Roe America where abortion wasn’t just banned but was “unthinkable”.
Half a century after the first March for Life, the marchers once again gathered on the National Mall in Washington to celebrate the movement’s greatest victory. But they also came with a new commitment to fighting the battles now playing out in their states.
“While the march began as a response to Roe, we don’t end as a response to Roe being overturned,” Jeanne Mancini, the president of the March for Life Education and Defense Fund, told an energized crowd. “Why? Because we’re not yet done.”
Movement leaders urged Republicans to use their new House majority to pass federal restrictions on abortion, while they pressed for new bans and restraints at the state level. They warned activists against complacency, with one speaker acknowledging that the decision had ushered in “challenging times of unrest and new threats to human life” as a reinvigorated reproductive rights movement pushes back.
“This is not the end of our journey,” the Mississippi attorney general, Lynn Fitch, whose office won the supreme court case – Dobbs v Mississippi – that overturned Roe, said from the stage before the march. “It is our charge today, in this new Dobbs era, to channel that same determination and hope and prayer that has led you to these streets for 50 years.”
From the White House, Joe Biden marked the occasion with a vow to protect abortion access and a proclamation recognizing the 50th anniversary of the Roe v Wade decision, which falls on Sunday 22 January.
“Never before has the court taken away a right so fundamental to Americans,” Biden said in the statement. “In doing so, it put the health and lives of women across this nation at risk.”
He called on Congress to codify abortion rights and pledged to continue to use his limited authority to take executive actions to protect access.
In the seven months since the supreme court dismantled Roe’s federal protections, abortion access in America has become a patchwork of state-by-state policies. More than a dozen states have enacted sweeping bans on abortion, while several more aim to take similar actions when state legislatures reconvene this year. Legal challenges are pending in several states.
