The 44th annual March for Life, organized by abortion opponents, comes Friday to Washington, D.C., a city still reeling from back-to-back events with the presidential inauguration and the Women’s March on Washington.
And for the first time, Utah will have its own fully organized local event, to be held on Saturday, Jan. 28, with activists meeting at 11 a.m. at the Salt Lake City Hall and marching up to the state capitol.
The Salt Lake City March for Life, spearheaded by Pro-Life Utah, a nonprofit that's barely 18 months old, will feature speeches from two disabled people, said Deanna Holland of Highland, who is organizing the event.
Barb Granja, center, speaks with March for Life coordinator Deanna Holland, right, in downtown Salt Lake City on Jan. 28, 2017. | Luke Franke, Deseret News
One of the speakers will be Bryonna Jones, a young Ogden mother with cerebral palsy who recently gave birth to a boy after resisting pressure from friends, family and doctors to terminate her pregnancy last spring.
44 years
The first March for Life occurred on Jan. 22, 1974, one year to the day after the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark Roe v. Wade decision. Repeated every year since, the March has become a key event in the social conservative social calendar.
Since the days of Ronald Reagan, Republican presidents have usually addressed marchers via telephone or satellite, but for the first time this year, the sitting vice president, Mike Pence, will attend the event and speak to the crowd.
Trump himself is something of an enigma on the issue. In the 1990s, he was on the record as being pro-choice and even favored partial-birth abortion, an issue the divides abortion supporters. By 2000, he had reversed his position on that controversial procedure, and in 2011 when he began toying with running for president, he declared that he had evolved into a pro-life position.
Anti-abortion demonstrators gather at San Francisco City Hall for the 13th annual Walk for Life West Coast March on Jan. 21, 2017. | Jocelyn Gecker, Associated Press
March for Life President Jeannie Mancini said her group is "delighted" with some of the early indicators coming from the Trump White House. She praised Trump's personnel decisions, as well as his decision this week to revive a policy first implemented in 1983 by Ronald Reagan which will prevent U.S. funding from being used to support abortions abroad.
With a Republican Congress and a president who seems to be in their camp, Mancini said "enthusiasm is definitely higher this year than normal."
Filling a void
Utah’s March for Life engagement began accidentally last year when Deanne Holland, a mother of five from Highland, tried to find out how to attend an event in Utah and found nothing.
The national March for Life was scheduled. Most other major cities and states had local marches scheduled, but Utah had nothing.
Holland contacted Pro-Life Utah three days before last year’s March and put together a makeshift effort on the fly, ultimately mobilizing just 35 people. This year, their hopes are much higher.
Pro Life Utah supporters stand in front of the Utah State Capitol building during their March for Life in Salt Lake City on Jan. 22, 2016. | Luke Franke, Deseret News
One reason Utah had no March for Life was that the state had no dedicated pro-life organization until 2015 when Pro-Life Utah formed as an outgrowth of protests against Planned Parenthood sparked by a series of controversial undercover videos.
"We all felt like something bigger needed to happen," said Mary Taylor of South Jordan, who's the president of Pro-Life Utah. "I'm not sure why there was a void in Utah.”
Catholic perspectives
Utah marchers are also getting a boost from the Catholic community, a group that is critical in any pro-life conclave but brings a distinctive perspective.
Jean Hill, government liaison for the Catholic Archdiocese of Salt Lake City, notes that the March for Life’s stated vision is “a world where every human life is valued and protected.”
Hill and her fellow Catholics see no reason that should not extend to other issues, such as euthanasia and the death penalty, mentioned in “The Gospel of Life,” a landmark papal encyclical issued by Pope John Paul II in 1995.
Utah Catholic leaders are currently circulating 10,000 postcards amongst all the parishes in the area. They will collect them in February and distribute them to legislators, calling for action against the death penalty and for opposition to proposals to legalize assisted suicide.
Pro-Life Utah’s Taylor says she understands the Catholic position, but she also sees a need for an organization that focuses directly on abortion, rather than blending it with other life issues.
“There are a lot of different theories about how best to approach this,” she said, “and I respect all these opinions.” But still, Taylor says, she sees a need for a dedicated Utah voice with a pro-life perspective.
Personal experience
A bookkeeper by profession, Taylor sees herself not only filling a void in Utah’s nonprofit advocacy scene, she says, but also a void in her own life story.
When she was a young adult, pregnant and needing advice, Taylor ended up at a clinic in Salt Lake City. There, the woman advising her laughed off her concerns, telling her that her 11-week old fetus was a “bundle of cells” and “no larger than a pencil eraser,” and urging her to terminate the pregnancy right then, without leaving the clinic. Which she did.
Five years later when Taylor was pregnant with her daughter, who is now 30, she began tracing the development of the child in her womb. “When I got to 11 weeks,” she said, “I read that my daughter now was the size of a fig, was fully formed, with tiny fingers, and a beating heart.”
The realization fell on her with a crushing weight, she said. Since that time, Taylor has been looking for opportunities to reach out to young women in like circumstances.
Taylor says she has gone public with her own experience because it is the best way to reach out to other young women in similar circumstances, but also in honor of the child she lost.
“I do this for him,” she said.