Thousands of abortion opponents gathered in cold, blustery weather near the Washington Monument on Friday and heard Vice President Mike Pence tell the annual March for Life that the Trump administration is determined to advance the fight against abortion.
"We will not grow weary," he said in a 10-minute address. "We will not rest until we restore a culture of life in America for ourselves and our posterity."
He said the administration is bent on ending taxpayer funding of abortion and abortion providers.
And he said that "next week President Donald Trump will announce a Supreme Court nominee who will uphold the God-given liberty enshrined in our Constitution in the tradition of the late and great Justice Antonin Scalia."
Scalia, a conservative associate justice of the Supreme Court, died last year.
"Life is winning again in America," said Pence, who added that Trump asked him to speak at the rally. "That is evident in ... the historic election of a president ... who I proudly say stands for the right to life."
Pence was the first U.S. vice president to address the rally in its history.
Bundled against a stiff wind, marchers from around the country rallied on the northeast grounds of the monument.
Pence, who has called himself an "evangelical Catholic," has long been a hero among anti-abortion activists and as governor of Indiana signed what was considered some of the strictest laws on abortion.
Also addressing the crowd was Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway.
"I am a wife, a mother, a Catholic, counselor to the president of the United States of America, and, yes, I am pro-life," she said.
"This is a new day, a new dawn, for life," she said.
The right to life "is not a privilege," she said. "It is not a choice. It is God-given. ... This is a time of incredible promise for the pro-life, pro-adoption movement."
"We hear you," she told the crowd. "We see you. We respect you. And we look forward to working with you."
This year, organizers believe they will see a surge of energy with the election of a president who is expected to move forward on anti-abortion policies, including defunding Planned Parenthood and appointing an anti-abortion Supreme Court justice.
"He's pro-life," Lynn Ray, coordinator of campus ministry at the Louisiana State University at Alexandria, said Friday as she stood on Constitution Avenue with a group from the university. "So that's good for us."
"Being that we're Catholics, we're very pro-life," she said. "Every step we take, we take for an unborn baby," she said. "We're not persecuting anyone, of course, just marching for the babies."
Madeline Runyan, 22, a senior at LSU, said she, too, was pleased with President Trump's stance on abortion. "I'm very confident in what he's doing to help this cause," she said. "I'm really excited and optimistic."
Dan Kehoe doesn't see the March for Life as a political statement, he views it as a religious one.
The 34-year-old from Taos, Mo., is a chaperon on his daughter's eighth-grade Catholic Church trip. They took a Greyhound bus for 22 hours for what they called a "pilgrimage" to Washington.
He saw news coverage of last week's Women's March on Washington and thought that that was a political march about women's issues. This, he said, is "completely different" and is not about women's rights, but human ones.
"It's not just a women's choice; it takes two to make a child," he said.
More than 200 people made the trip from his central Missouri church community with him, most of them children. He said he voted for Donald Trump and is happy with his president's performance so far.
"If the younger generation doesn't speak up now, who will?"
Earlier, Jeanne Mancini, president of the March for Life, listed her four demands for Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress:
• Appoint an anti-abortion justice to the Supreme Court.
• Make the Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funding for many abortions in the United States, into a permanent law rather than the one-year provision that has been extended each year from 1976 to the present.
• Pass a law banning abortion nationwide after 20 weeks of pregnancy.
• Stop all federal funding for Planned Parenthood unless the organization were to stop performing abortions.
The gathering comes a week after Trump's inauguration and follows last Saturday's Women's March on Washington that drew nearly 500,000, according to an estimate by city officials.
Asked about the Women's March, Ray said:
"I'm all about women's rights, except when it comes to the baby. I believe -- it's my opinion -- but I believe a baby is a gift from God, and once the baby is a gift from God, it's no longer your body, but there's another body within. And that body has a right also."
The first March for Life was held one year after the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 that recognized a right to abortion nationwide. Subsequent marches have been held on or near the Jan. 22 anniversary every year since.
Information for this article was contributed by Michael Ruane, Perry Stein, Steve Hendrix, Terrence McCoy, Paul Duggan and Michael Chandler of The Washington Post.
A Section on 01/28/2017