Thread by NYer.
Against the Tide: Covering Up the Size of the March for Life
March for Life - January 22, 2010
On Friday, January 22, 2010, a crowd estimated at half a million marched up Constitution Avenue to the Supreme Court. It was the annual March for Life and it commemorates the 1973 Blackmun Supreme Court decision Roe v Wade which legalized abortion throughout nine months of pregnancy.
Over half the marchers were under 37, so they were there to protest a decision which could have cost them their lives. They are survivors of Roe v Wade. Over 50 million of their peers have lost their lives to that decision, literally a third of the generation which surged past the Capitol Building to stand in protest before the Supreme Court. A living tsunami, they held signs like “All Politics are Local; they begin in the Womb”. They listened in silence to Dr Alveda King, niece of Dr Martin Luther King Jr., express regret over her two abortions, and assure them that her uncle was indeed pro-life. But there were very few members of the press present.
Deep in the crowd, there were dissenters. A tiny band of counter protesters, about a dozen in number, circled tightly in front of the cameras with their blue “Keep Abortion Legal” signs. They were members of another generation, the legacy of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, women who had burned their bras with Gloria Steinem, and they were there to celebrate “choice.” One of their members doggedly walked against the swell of humanity climbing Capitol Hill, looking like a salmon swimming against the spring freshet to spawn. Except that her message was one of sterility, inundated by the tide of fecundity. Did she catch the irony?
This year’s March for Life, following on the heels of Democrat electoral upsets in Massachusetts, New Jersey and Virginia, was the largest ever. It occurred in the year when polls reflect a sea change of opinion against abortion, yet the mainstream media either blacked out or downplayed the event. No news cameras besides Fox and EWTN were visible, and no photographers took aerial shots of the Mall full of marchers, the way they had during the Inauguration, when “even the seagulls were impressed at the crowds.” Comments were muted and photographs were of individuals, not crowds. Both the NARAL huddle and the sea of humanity were given equal play on the mainstream media, like Krista Gesamen’s “Who’s missing at the March for Life; young women.” CNN anchor, Rick Sanchez, openly wondered which group was larger. Jill Stanek writing for Breitbart’s Big Journalism, took Gesaman to task for her characterization of March for Life participants as geriatric. Young women were present in the hundreds of thousands. Only the Washington Post columnist Robert McCartney, admittedly pro-abortion, stated that the crowds were young (much to his chagrin) in his piece, “Young activists adding fuel to anti-abortion side.”
The left must suppress the truth — that the pro-life movement is on the march and that they have hundreds of thousands of reinforcements — in order to preserve their chances for big gains under the most pro-abortion president in US history. They just missed a chance for a health care reform bills that would have enshrined Planned Parenthood within the federal government, and their future looks pretty grim now that the next generation has arrived. Are they aware how tenuous is ther hold over the information which reaches the American public? It’s the quiet before the tsunami. Generation Life is coming, and they use the New Media — blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube — to spead the word that Americans are majority pro-life and we are going to end abortion someday soon.