March for Life goes virtual as abortion opponents debate Trump’s legacy

As the coronavirus forced their biggest annual rallying event - the March for Life - online on Friday, abortion opponents began facing the reality of a new White House strongly in favor of abortion rights and the question of whether Donald Trump has helped or harmed their cause.

The March for Life has been held each January on the National Mall since the passage of Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that guaranteed a woman’s right to an abortion. Last week, organizers announced that the massive event, which usually draws tens of thousands from across the country, would not be held in person, citing concerns about security and the pandemic.

Instead, a program was scheduled to begin streaming online at noon, and some 50 movement leaders planned to march to the Supreme Court afterward. Supporters have been encouraged to watch online.

In addition to the small march, there were a few other in-person events planned, including a protest at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Northeast Washington. Starting around 9:30 a.m., a few hundred mostly young people crowded around the entrance, holding signs that read, “Real men love babies” and “Choose love, choose life.” Between the canceled in-person march and the recent inauguration of a president who supports abortion access, the mood was somber.

Matt Britton, general counsel of 40 Days for Life, the group that organized Friday morning’s rally, told the crowd: “You may feel this is a bleak time, but the world needs the pro-life movement. . . . Only prayer can change this. We will only win on our knees. We will fight in court and legislatures.”

Across town, speaking to a sparsely filled Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle, and to young viewers live-streaming from across the country, the archbishop of Washington said that for 48 years, since the passage of Roe v. Wade, Americans have been given “all types of deceptive excuses to continue our dreadful practice of killing infant children within the womb.”

“Various people have called it merely a choice. Others claim it as a human right. Some have defended it as a personal decision,” Cardinal Wilton Gregory said. “A few even suggested it as just a womanly act of self-determination, anything to keep from accepting God’s standard of respect and love for every human life.”

Although some participants in the March for Life events have faced harassment for protesting the death penalty, the archbishop also spoke out against capital punishment and invoked concerns about euthanasia and treatment of immigrants.

“Today we find ourselves hopelessly mired in defective excuses that now extend to other acts of brutality against the terminally ill and aging, the immigrant seeking a better life, against prisoners who may have committed heinous crimes but are still human beings,” he said.

“We tell ourselves that capital punishment prevents crimes and that some horrible criminals deserve to die even as we continue to learn that too many convicted persons have been sentenced to death and later exonerated by DNA tests or whose very trials have been judged to be unfair or biased.”

The Mass followed a virtual youth rally earlier Friday hosted by the Archdiocese of Washington, which featured prayers, worship and lessons on how to present arguments against abortion to those who support abortion rights. The rally featured videos of youth from across the country praying the rosary together and concluded with a message from a young Black man saying: “Black lives matter. This message includes the most vulnerable people in the community.”

This year’s March for Life comes as the pro-life movement appears to be at a crossroads.

In the eyes of many abortion opponents, Trump was a historical game changer, giving them not only three Supreme Court justices believed to be sympathetic to overturning Roe v. Wade but dozens of more conservative lower-court judges. Advocates trust these judges will be more respectful toward the dozens of abortion restriction measures that have been enacted each year for more than a decade. Although Trump favored abortion rights before becoming president, as president he spoke more explicitly than many recent GOP leaders against abortion and attended the march in person.

“Usually pro-life efforts by the Republican Party have been kind of ‘We have to have them here, too.’ It’s not their pride and joy. But it was for Trump! He helped to bring a lot of attention to our issue, and that’s good,” said Shawn Carney, president of 40 Days for Life, which organizes prayer vigils outside abortion clinics. “What he did for abortion was just unmatched. I mean presidents, they move on, we move on, but those Supreme Court justices will last a lifetime.”

Among the crowd outside Planned Parenthood on Friday, there were people who agreed with Carney, such as Miriam Barbato, 29, who works for a medical supply firm in Dallas. She came with other Catholics who held flags representing Catholic communities of the past who were persecuted in Europe. A fetus, she said, is “the most innocent form of life. If you’re not willing to defend it everything else doesn’t matter.”

Michael New, a Catholic University professor who leads the local branch of the group 40 Days for Life, said, “The fact that [Trump] was willing to promote the movement and put it front and center did so much for us.”

The Biden administration offers both danger and opportunity to the movement, he added, because its pro-abortion-rights policies could galvanize the movement’s supporters.

That seemed to be true for Sister Dede Byrne, who spoke last year at the Republican National Convention and was at Friday’s protest. She said that not only were the souls of people inside the clinic in danger, but also “the soul of our president who has totally turned against his Catholic faith.”

For other abortion opponents, however, Trump’s tenure reinforced the perception that the institutional movement had become too heavily partisan.

The march itself had become a place where Trump clothing and signs were common and where allies who wanted to protest other issues, such as the death penalty, were sometimes shouted down. For other abortion opponents, Trump’s downplaying of a coronavirus pandemic that has killed more than 400,000 Americans, his ramping up of federal executions and his push for a border policy that led to children being separated from their families has poisoned efforts to convert hearts and minds.

“I don’t personally know anyone who was won over to the pro-life mind-set by Trump. I also think he drove people who were in the middle on this subject farther away from considering the pro-life stance. Many called him a hypocrite because he did not appear to respect the dignity of all human beings,” said Lisa McInerny of Lincoln, Neb., where she works in her Catholic parish on antiabortion efforts.

“When you talk about Trump, you talk about a loss of credibility,” said Justin Giboney, president of The And Campaign, a Christian advocacy group that includes topics such as abortion, religious freedom, immigration and economic justice. “When a movement is that attached to a party and a person, credibility is lost there. Do you really care about life and whose do you care about? You can’t say Black lives matter but say you’re pro-life? There’s a cognitive dissonance there.”

Mary Ziegler, a law professor who focuses on reproductive and gender issues at Florida State University, said the impact of the Trump years is very much still playing out on the antiabortion landscape.

Ziegler said leaders are fracturing over how to communicate about Trump, who has yet to disavow baseless claimsthat his election loss wasn’t real. Some, such as Janet Porter, who helped write the so-called heartbeat bills that ban abortions once a heartbeat is detected, have been on social media insisting Trump won. Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, in a piece for Fox didn’t mention controversies around Trump and his false claims about the election, focusing on the enormous judicial wins under the former president. “The standard has been set for future pro-life administrations,” she wrote.

Since the 1980s, the antiabortion movement has been focused on Supreme Court justices, Ziegler said, and the Trump years, “while disturbing to those who oppose abortion, were like a real-world experiment: What are those judges worth to the movement?”

Ziegler said the focus on judges and politics “loses sight of the fact that, regardless of laws, people will keep having abortions because the culture hasn’t changed much.”

Public opinion on whether abortion should be legal has been remarkably stable for decades. Gallup polling since the 1970s has shown that the percentage who say it should be “legal under certain circumstances” has hovered around 50, while about 20 percent say it should be illegal under all circumstances and 30 say it should be legal under all circumstances.

In recent decades, opponents of abortion have been successful at passing dozens of abortion restriction laws each year, while a fraction of that number of abortion protection laws have been adopted, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which tracks such data and supports abortion rights.

Meanwhile, Guttmacher in 2019 released a study saying that the abortion rate had hit an all-time low and that the numbers were steady across states with few or many restrictions. Guttmacher pointed to fewer pregnancies, contraceptive access and use, a decline in sexual activity, and infertility as possible causes. It also said the data did not include self-managed abortion, which occur outside health-care settings; might include the use of medication, herbs or other methods; and aren’t counted in the same way.

The Biden administration within its first days took action to protect and expand abortion access, including rescinding what has been called the Mexico City rule, which compelled nonprofit organizations in other countries that receive federal family-planning aid to promise not to perform or encourage abortions.

Ziegler said that although antiabortion movement leaders in the past have worked intensely to focus on abortion, a new generation of leaders is more explicitly conservative and “absolutist,” including figures such as Abby Johnson, who appeared at “Stop the Steal” events and last summer made news when she said police should someday profile her biracial son. New, proposed antiabortion measures include heartbeat bills with no exceptions, and ones similar to a bill finalized a few weeks ago that forces women who have surgical abortions to cremate or bury fetal remains.

“The insurgent wing is making a bid for dominance,” Ziegler says.

Some abortion rights activists say they feel emboldened after the Trump years.

Sheila Katz, chief executive of the National Council of Jewish Women, said she sees abortion rights advocates speaking out more, such as those making a religious case for abortion rights and those who are pressing for Biden to use the word “abortion” more.

“There’s an opening because we have a pro-choice Catholic president and it’s important for Biden to say the word ‘abortion.’ It’s not a dirty word. It’s health care. We take stigma away,” Katz said Thursday. “Right now people are more receptive because of all the potential risk at the Supreme Court” and the new state laws and coronavirus restrictions that aremaking it even harder to get an abortion.

Some interviewed at the D.C. protest on Friday were anxious to leave partisan politics out of the event. Andrea Clarke, 28, a government worker from Baltimore, said the situation for her movement is “very bad,” adding: “I’m really concerned about the future of life because it’s considered so cheap. We need these people. How many Ben Carsons did we miss out on?” Asked about the impact of Trump, she instead talked about how optimistic protests are and how they need to change the culture. “This is a march of love, not of politics,” she said.