By: Heidi Thom
The first month of 2020 has been an historic time in our nation’s capital, with two prominent rallies occurring – with two radically different outcomes.
The Women’s March, which began three years ago in reaction to the 2016 election and anti-Trump sentiment, has since changed drastically. What was once a march of roughly half a million participants has dwindled to a rally of a few thousand just three years later. While this can be attributed to multiple factors, the most prominent is last year’s rampant anti-Semitism among prominent leaders of the Women’s March, such as Linda Sarsour and Tamika Mallory.
The 2020 Women’s “March” was much less of a march than it was a shout-fest desperate for attention. The bulk of the participants and activities were confined to Freedom Plaza, around the corner from the White House. There was little to no positive sentiment, with signs, chants, and apparel riddled with crude language and mockery of the current administration. The media was conspicuously absent for the most part, and the event lacked notable attendees.
Among the crowd were a few scattered attendees with pro-life signs advocating for unborn and aborted children. Others with signs such as “Keep abortion legal” and “Abortion on demand without apology” surrounded them, attempting to block the graphic images and yelling profanities at them as the pro-life sign holders stood with their signs in silence.
Less than a week after the Women’s March, hundreds of thousands of people flocked to D.C. for the 47th annual March for Life. This year, these two marches stood in particularly stark contrast with the March for Life theme being “pro-life is pro-woman”. It is no secret that pro-life women never had representation in the so-called Women’s March, whose exclusion of this large percentage of women in the country may have substantially contributed to the Women’s March demise into near irrelevancy.
YAF hosted its Winter Activism Training Seminar in tandem with the March for Life, allowing more than 120 college students and YAF chapter members to attend the march. These students witnessed history in the making when President Trump became the first sitting U.S. President to attend and address the March for Life. Numerous bipartisan members of Congress were in attendance or submitted short videos to show their support.
The March for Life could not have been more different from the Women’s March. The Women’s March mainly catered to an increasingly diminished population clearly battling insignificance. The March for Life represented the continuing significance of the pro-life movement and its effect on young people especially. Even after 47 years of abortion being legal in the U.S. the pro-life movement continues to grow and make positive change that was evident and on full display at the March for Life.
Heidi Thom is a Program Assistant for Young America’s Foundation.
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