Hundreds of pro-life supporters gather in Raleigh at 2020 Rally and March for Life
Hundreds of people gathered on Bicentennial Plaza outside the North Carolina General Assembly Saturday for the annual Rally & March for Life. Some held signs that said “Stop abortion now,” “I was an unplanned pregnancy,” and “Life if the first inalienable right.”
The event, organized by North Carolina Right to Life, opened with a prayer and featured speakers who shared their religious and personal reasons for supporting the pro-life cause.
Bill Pincus, president of N.C. Right To Life, said the goal is to influence public policy and legislation through education and lobbying elected officials.
“We need to shed the light of truth on the horrors of abortion,” he said at the rally.
In his speech, Pincus said there have been more than 61 million abortions in the United States since Roe V. Wade, citing research by the Guttmacher Institute and analysis by National Right to Life Committee.
He said abortions must be stopped.
Pro-life supporters want to protect children
Emmy Slaton, president of the Students for Life group at Campbell University, and other students attended the rally for the first time. Slaton said it was great to see people from all walks of life, different ages and different backgrounds come together as a pro-life community.
“We believe that life begins at conception and we believe that every human life has value and that every human life was created by God,” Slaton said. “Every innocent life should be protected and that’s why we stand for the lives of unborn children and we want to support their moms.”
Jean Cooper, a 69-year-old woman from Clayton N.C., and her husband attended the march to support the cause, which she says is pro-woman and pro-family.
“To me it’s a human rights thing,” Cooper said. “I’m trying to speak up for the unborn who can’t speak for themselves and have every right that every other human being has.”
Cooper said she doesn’t blame women who have abortions, but the culture and the society that pushed them in that direction.
Keynote speaker Kurt Kondrich, whose daughter has Down syndrome, told the crowd he’s devoted his life to defending and protecting children in the womb.
“Abortion, coupled with genetic prenatal testing, is being used for the ultimate form of discrimination, bigotry, profiling, bias, prenatal bullying and hate,” Kondrich said. “That’s genocide because we are identifying, targeting and killing people because our cultural mandate says they don’t belong here.”
Kondrich is an advocate for children with Down syndrome and travels around the country to share the message “embrace don’t erase.” He is the president of Chloe’s Foundation, which focuses on providing assistance to those children and their families.
The majority of Americans support abortion and that support is growing, according to the Pew Research Center. The national poll shows that 61% of people say abortion should be legal all or most of the time and 37% say abortion should be illegal in all or most cases.
A national Gallup poll found that abortion gets less support in cases where the child would be born with Down syndrome. In those cases, 49% of Americans think abortion should be legal when the woman is in her first trimester and drops to 28% in the last three months of pregnancy.
While there’s widespread public support, abortion is a divisive issue that’s embedded in state and national politics. The issue was highly debated in North Carolina in 2019 when a federal judge ruled a North Carolina abortion ban unconstitutional and Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed the controversial ‘abortion survivors’ bill. The debate should continue with 2020 being an election year.
March for Life met with pro-choice protesters
During the rally, a group of about a dozen pro-choice protesters shouted into a megaphone and held signs that said “my body, my choice.”
As the March for Life participants marched around the legislative building, pro-choice supporters held signs supporting the protection of abortion and chanted at the marchers as they walked by.
Kelsea McLain, a leader in the Triangle Abortion Access Coalition, organized the protest to push back against the pro-life movement.
“It’s important for us to be out here to remind folks that there is support for you no matter how you personally feel about this,” McLain said. “If you ever end up needing abortion access, there are groups out here that will support you and that will do it without stigma and shame.”
The group offers escorts to abortion clinics for women locally and is working to expand its services and support of women’s rights as a non-profit organization.
“I think compassion is being a pro-choice person,” McLain said. “It’s really respecting that people know what’s best for them, their lives, their futures, when it’s best to start or grow their families, and we really want to make sure that we’re constantly pushing back on that narrative that suggests one side is good and one side is bad.”
This story was originally published January 18, 2020 at 4:59 PM with the headline "Hundreds of pro-life supporters gather in Raleigh at 2020 Rally and March for Life."
