Thousands March for Life in Washington Despite Arrival of Winter Storm Jonas
As the pro-life movement has gained much momentum since the release of the undercover Planned Parenthood videos last year and the election of Republican majorities in both the House and Senate in 2014, Rep. Chris Smith, R-New Jersey, who is one of the most outspoken pro-lifers in the House, assured the crowd that the "the pro-life movement is stronger than ever."
Smith explained that the gains at the state level have been "historic," as 282 pro-life laws have been enacted since 2010. In the last year alone, nine "powerful" pro-life measures have passed through the House.
When the House votes Tuesday on whether to override President Barack Obama's veto on legislation that would strip Planned Parenthood, an organization that conducts over 300,000 abortions annually, of its over $500 million in annual taxpayer funding, Smith promised that there would be enough votes in the House to override the veto.
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"Planned Parenthood, all of you know this and over time the press will recognize it as well, is the tip of an ugly iceberg, a multibillion dollar industry that systematically exterminates children," Smith asserted. "Planned Parenthood dismembers and chemically poisons a baby to death every two minutes, killing over 57 million innocent children since 1973. Planned Parenthood is child abuse incorporated."
As there has been a push to get more Protestants and Evangelicals to participate in the march, the march was again attended predominantly by Catholics. However, a few cohorts from the Anglican Church and the Lutheran Church were visibly present at the rally.
Also present was the activist group Secular Pro-Life, which is a pro-life organization made up of atheists, agnostics, liberal Christians, Wiccans, Muslims, Jews and others who don't fit under the definition of "religious right."
"We need to be here and we want the world to know that is not exclusively a Christian cause," Secular Pro-Life president Kelsey Hazzard told The Christian Post. "You don't need to believe in a God or the Christian God to know that abortion is wrong."
"What we are dealing with in a lot of these Christian-secular divides is that we are dealing with a difference of language," she added. "A Catholic person might say that every human life is created in the image of God. A secular person hears that and it's a foreign language. We actually agree if you were to phrase it, 'Every human life is valuable or has intrinsic worth. Human rights for all humans are not earned. The idea of earned human rights is repugnant to me."
