Vice President Pence addresses annual anti-abortion rally in Washington
By
Fred Mazelis
28 January 2017
Mike Pence became the highest elected official and the first sitting US vice president to address the annual “March for Life,” which took place on Friday in Washington, DC. The marches have been an annual event for the past 44 years, protesting the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion.
Pence, a right-wing fundamentalist and long-time ally of the anti-abortion movement, spoke at the 2011 rally, when he was an Indiana congressman and before he became governor of the state. This time, as vice president, he told the marchers, numbering in the tens of thousands, “life is winning again in America.”
Among the other speakers at the rally was Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign manager and now counselor in the White House. The turnout at the march was far below that at last Saturday’s Women’s March in Washington.
The opponents of abortion rights have been energized by the promises of the new Trump administration to advance their cause through legislation, executive order and the appointment of ultra-right judges to the US Supreme Court. Short of overturning the 1973 decision, they expect a raft of executive and legislative measures aimed at undermining abortion rights.
One of Trump’s first executive orders reinstated the so-called Mexico City policy, which restricts the use of American aid, provided through the US Agency for International Development, by any overseas non-governmental organization that provides abortion assistance or “promotes” abortion by discussing it in connection with family planning. This policy, so named because it was issued by Ronald Reagan in 1984 at a UN conference on world population held in the Mexican capital, has been…