March For Life 2011!
Hundreds of thousands expected at 2011 March for Life
By Benjamin Mann
Washington D.C., Jan 21, 2011 / 05:52 am (EWTN News)
Photo Credit Eric Martin and Rick Johnson
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Hundreds of thousands of people are expected to pack the National Mall in Washington, D.C. to declare their commitment to the unborn at the 38th annual March for Life.
This year's march will be held Monday, Jan. 24. Nellie Gray, the March for Life's 85-year-old founder and organizer, is expecting 400,000 demonstrators to attend the event.
The march has occurred every January since 1974. It originated in October of 1973, among a group of citizens who were convinced that the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade - handed down on Jan. 22 of that year - was a grievous violation of both constitutional and moral principles.
That decision by the high court found that an implicit legal “right to privacy” prevented the states from outlawing abortion, although they had commonly done so throughout U.S. history. There have been, by many estimates, approximately 50 million abortions in the United States since the Roe decision.
Twenty thousand people marked the first anniversary of the verdict in 1974 with a public demonstration at the nation's Capitol. They began a tradition that organizers and participants - whose numbers over the years have reportedly increased by at least a factor of 10 - plan to continue as long as abortion remains legal.
This year's march comes at a complex and deeply conflicted moment in U.S. history. The Guttmacher Institute, a former research affiliate of Planned Parenthood, reported in January 2011 that the country's abortion rate was rising after more than decade of decline. But nationwide polls have also shown an increase, during the same time period, in the number of Americans who consider themselves “pro-life.”
Abortion is also a factor in the current debate over health care reform. Many critics of the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, including the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, have called attention to provisions and omissions they say will result in taxpayer funding for abortion, despite a presidential executive order that blocked some of the means for providing that funding.
Although opposition to abortion is perceived to be strongest among religious believers, others - such as the “Atheists For Life” seen at the march in past years - oppose abortion on non-religious grounds. Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York, president of the U.S. bishops' conference, recently said the defense of unborn life was “not a church issue,” but rather “the premier civil rights issue of our day.”
For Nellie Gray, abortion has been primarily a question of justice and human rights. While her Catholic faith has strengthened these convictions, she told EWTN News that her initial objection to the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade was motivated not by religion, but by a more basic sense of principle.
In fact, she became concerned that the United States was starting to resemble the Nazi regime it had fought against in the Second World War. By denying the most basic rights to an entire class of people, she said, the United States had betrayed its own ideals - in favor of the chilling notion that some people's lives can be destroyed at will.
“I come from the World War II era,” she explained. “Being from that era, that's the way I approached abortion when I heard about it.” At first, she said, it was almost “unreal” - to imagine that her country, which had fought against Nazi Germany, could ever declare that a class of persons had no right to live.
“We sent our men over to Europe,” she recalled, “to stop the evil of selecting out a group of people, and treating them differently from anybody else, to the point of killing them.”
“And then, all of a sudden, out comes the Supreme Court decision in 1973. I realized: 'My goodness, this thing is real' - and it's the exact same issue as World War II.”
In subsequent years, Gray, said, “I thought about it as a Roman Catholic - but that was much later.” What she saw more readily, first in Nazi Germany and later in the United States, was “a government, being able to single out a group of people, and have them killed.”
Grief and outrage over the continuing death toll brought an estimated 400,000 demonstrators to the nation's capitol for last year's March for Life, and Gray expects comparable numbers this year.
EWTN will be providing live television coverage of the march, beginning at 11 a.m. EST on Monday, Jan. 24.
Read more: http://www.ewtnnews.com/catholic-news/new.php?id=2483#ixzz1BjBRw2yC