The Pro-Life Nazi March

The Pro-Life Nazi March

The picture of a bloody fetus torn apart by a surgeon's scalpel danced overhead in the cloudy sky. I stared at the swaying poster and at the tiny body lying in a green garbage bag. Around it, hundreds of similar signs filled the sky with bright words and colors as a huge mass of men, women and children paraded under them in a huge march. I stared at the marchers, disbelieving of the sight in front of me. They were the Pro-Lifers, marching in favor of banning abortion as a choice and a right for women.

I stopped on the sidewalk and looked up toward the White House and then back in the other direction. Both my cousin and I hadn't expected to see anything but the usual Washington museum exhibits and eateries that day; instead we got caught up in a march that neither of us believed in and one that I wouldn't have chosen to see. The march seemed to have no beginning and no end; it seemed as though it went on for miles. I looked at the mass of people in awe, amazed that so many people could organize to fight for something they believed in. I'd never seen something of this scale and I was stunned by its mass and power.

As we got closer to the marchers, my excitement, and my disgust, grew. The march seemed never-ending; people were filing up Pennsylvania Avenue, shouting slogans and waving their posters in the air. They marched together in unity, spilling over onto the sidewalks and flooding the street. The Pro-Lifers marched side by side, at least fifteen people across, line after line.

I began to look closer at the faces of the protesters, looking at the marchers so I could see and remember those who were so violently opposed to a woman's right to choose. Women were marching, denying their rights, and among the huge crowd were children. I saw one child sitting on his father's shoulders, waving a sign with pictures of dead babies as other children marched in the street, singing anti-abortion slogans. I couldn't believe it. Children barely old enough to read the signs they were carrying or understand the slogans they sang marched along with their parents, brainwashed into denying women their right to chose. I continued to watch the posters and cardboard signs as they went by.