March for Life, 2020

I went to my fifth March for Life.  The process was pretty much like previous years.  We start with early morning Mass, get on the bus and get to Washington D.C. in four plus hours, find our way to Constitution Avenue, roughly parallel with the Washington Monument.  You make your way into the crowd, proceed west toward the Capital Building, making a right onto First Street just passed the Capital, and the March ends at the Supreme Court, two blocks in from Constitution Avenue.  The distance is perhaps a mile.  This year it was so packed that we stood still for about an hour before the march started moving for us.  Once we entered the crowd, it took us about two and a half hours to reach the end, including that hour of waiting.

This year there was a special speaker.  For the first time ever, as everyone probably knows by now, the President of the United States attended in person.  No, I did not get to see President Trump speak.  Most of the speakers at the March are in the morning.  Those of us who travel that same day to Washington usually miss the speakers.  The bus from Staten Island, NY usually gets to Washington around noon time, and then has to make its way down to the Mall area.  The prominent speakers have all spoken by then. 

Every year it seems to be more packed.  I don’t know if it had to do with the President showing up, but it felt like it was the largest crowd I have ever seen the March have.  My hunch is that the size of the crowd had not much to do with President Trump attending.  He only announced it a day or two before.  People who attended had to make their plans weeks before.

OK, here are some pictures.

Let me say, there was lots of true and deep support for President Trump this year.  When Donald Trump was first elected, the pro-life movement was skeptical of him.  They voted for Mr. Trump out of expediency.  To whom else could they vote for?  No one else took our cause.  But now, Donald Trump has won them over.  The feeling across the board was of true devotion to the President.  No one cared about his indiscretions.  He is truly a Pro-Life hero.  There were Make America Great Hats everywhere.  In our very group, there was an 80-ish old Nun who went out of her way to buy a MAGA hat and wore it the whole time.  And she did it with the most pleasant smile I’ve ever seen a woman have.  There were lots of pro-Trump signs.

Oh, I should recount this too.  There was an enterprising street seller of hats who had the best sales pitch chant: “Don’t become a Democrat/Buy yourself a MAGA hat.” 

There was lots of rosary praying as you marched—the marchers had to be eighty or ninety percent Catholic—and you heard lots of marching chants:  “We Are The Pro-Life Generation” and “We love babies, yes we do/We love babies how about you.”  I always get a kick of the the chants.  For some reason I didn’t encounter as many bands and music as I have in the past, but here was a good one.

Some more photos.  Here’s a nice photo of the March heading toward the Capital. 

As you reach the top of Capital Hill, I like to look back on Constitution Ave and see the crowd behind me.  It stretches as far as you can see, and there had to be more than an hour’s worth of crowd ahead of me.

And finally the end at the Supreme Court.

How fitting someone with a MAGA hat walked by.