I just got home from the 2013 West Coast Walk for Life. I have posted here a “photo blog” of the event. Two realities again dominated the visuals of the march: the vibrant youth of the pro-life crowd and the further shrinkage of the still-horribly-angry opposition. I will let the photos tell the story with this bit of context.
1. From a 2010 Daily Beast article: “NARAL president Nancy Keenan . . . considers herself part of the “postmenopausal militia,” a generation of baby-boomer activists now well into their 50s who grew up in an era of backroom abortions and fought passionately for legalization.
Today they still run the major abortion-rights groups, including NARAL, Planned Parenthood, and the National Organization for Women. These leaders will retire in a decade or so.
This past January [2010], when Keenan’s train pulled into Washington’s Union Station, a few blocks from the Capitol, she was greeted by a swarm of anti-abortion-rights activists. It was the 37th annual March for Life, organized every year on Jan. 22, the anniversary of Roe. “I just thought, my gosh, they are so young,” Keenan recalled. “There are so many of them, and they are so young.”
2. Nancy Keenan did not make it another “decade or so.” Keenan resigned effective this month, January 2013, “to make room for a younger leader and a new generation of reproductive rights activists.”
I suspect you will find the “new generation” of “reproductive rights activists” in the photos that follow, filled with young, exhuberant activists determined to defend the rights of the unborn to life. Now, there’s a reproductive right you can get excited about!
The big opposition banner below reads “Fetuses are Not Babies, Women are Not Incubators.” Some of the small opposition crowd was chanting the same. This was an interesting shift away from “Keep your rosaries off my ovaries” and “My body, my choice” chants from prior years.
"Fetuses are Not Babies, Women are Not Incubators"
Oppostion to life: We won't go back.
SF Police have made this march possible over the years. Duty is more relaxed now. In the early years, the police had to remove bodily protesters trying to block our path.
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Powerful images — thanks for posting them. I love the young man holding the poster about lost fatherhood.