The snow just kept falling.
It had been falling most of the week on those Marching for Life.
Their planes landed in it, their buses plowed through it, their taxi and Uber drivers negotiated through it. It was cold and wet and windy, even for D.C. in January.
Steadily, silently, the snow kept falling. The marchers watched it, drifting down, from frosty hotel windows, from the warm coffee shops they crowded into, from the foot of the stage on the National Mall.
And yet, from the early hours, they came.
Thousands upon thousands.
All ages, all backgrounds, all ethnicities, all faiths. They came, and kept coming, bundled up in wool caps and leather gloves and layers of sweaters and scarves and coats — shivering anyway, listening to the speeches and then marching their mile on those slippery streets and icy sidewalks: young people, moms pushing strollers, dads with toddlers on their shoulders — the snow pelting their faces and smearing their glasses.
They shivered, and laughed, and marched.
The March for Life, held on Jan. 19 this year, is an event distinguished—for more than 50 years now —by three things: bad weather, huge crowds, and unexplainable joy.
Those three should be antithetical.
When there are blizzard conditions, folks stay home. And those who don’t, complain.
If you want bad weather, big crowds, and an overflow of good cheer, you have to offer people one of two things: the promise of a great football game — or a chance to change the world.
The weekend of the March for Life offered both. The Kansas City Chiefs snow-plowed the Buffalo Bills, 27-24. And the Marchers for Life … well, they’d already won their big victory a year-and-a-half ago, 6-3, with the seismic Dobbs (Dobbs vs. Jackson Women's Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215, (2022) decision that reversed Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973) — the case that first prompted this march, half a century of winters gone by.
Those who continue to gather on the mall each January know a miracle when they’re part of one.
And Dobbs — the extraordinary legal win so many of them, and their parents, and their grandparents, had walked for — might have been to the March for Life what Appomattox was to Sherman’s March to the Sea.
Yet the 18 months since the Dobbs decision have seen political setbacks for pro-life activists in states like Michigan, Kansas, Ohio, and Virginia. It seems a cold political climate for those who cherish women’s health and hold sacred an unborn child’s right to life.
But one couldn’t help but be encouraged, listening to the conversations last weekend—conversations taking place at rallies and in restaurants, at receptions and on snow-crunchy sidewalks.
I stood in awe hearing testimony after testimony: from attorneys, chipping steadily away at the laws that defend the indefensible … from young people, challenging the complacency of their campuses … from volunteers, embracing the lonely souls crowding our nation’s embattled pregnancy care centers.
Their efforts are translating into tangible results: upcoming oral arguments for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine case (Docket No. 23-235) at the U.S. Supreme Court, exposing how pharmaceutical companies and politicians have been eliminating commonsense safety standards for abortion drugs, placing profits and power over women’s health; a flurry of new state ballot initiatives, giving voters a chance to support life; and hope for women, as more of those who are anti-abortion realize the best way to help a baby is to ensure that her mother and father flourish.
The battle for life has opened new fronts — political, legal, cultural, spiritual — and the happy warriors who enlisted the recent walk in the snow aren’t about to give up the good fight.
The marchers demonstrated cheerful determination: a new generation not just willing, but eager, to do the hard, driveway-shoveling work of clearing a path, state by state, for life.
Amazing, really, how much our lives and our liberties in this country have always depended on people willing to march in the snow.
Somehow, it goes to the soul of what makes us who we are. Somewhere, in America, it’s always Valley Forge: ordinary people, battered by a harsh political climate, steeling themselves for the battles to come.
With the snow was falling, once again, on the faithful thousands who turned out for the March for Life.
Clearly, in the words of a colleague of mine, "the future of the quest to make abortion unthinkable is in good hands."
It’s in good feet, too.
Erin Hawley, is senior counsel and vice president of the Center for Life and Regulatory Practice at Alliance Defending Freedom (@ADFLegal)
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