As winter storm Jonas began to pummel Washington, D.C. into a declared “state of emergency,” thousands of activists gathered Friday for the March for Life. Perhaps contrary to expectations, a great many of them were women—and young women at that.
As Kristan Hawkins,President of Students for Life of America, wrote for Fox News, “Abortion advocates cannot wrap their minds around the fact that young women are the majority of participants in the pro-life movement.”
Voters under 30-years-old were once the most ardent abortion supporters. In 1991, 36 percent of 18-29-year-olds believed abortion should be legal in all circumstances yet in 2010, only 24 percent of the same age group believed abortion should remain legal in all circumstances, making this generation more pro-life than their parents. In addition, millennials are the age group that is most in favor of a ban on abortions after 20 weeks, at 52 percent.
Hawkins also quoted Nancy Keenan, president of the pro-abortion group NARAL in 2010, who referred to an “intensity gap” between pro-life and pro-choice millennials. “Young, pro-lifers are more passionately pro-life than young pro-choicers are about being pro-choice,” Hawkins wrote.
She pointed out that millennials are at the forefront of the pro-life movement, from 26-year-old David Daleiden, who released the undercover Planned Parenthood videos this summer, to LiveAction Founder Lila Rose, to Abby Johnson, a former Planned Parenthood director who became a pro-life feminist activist. Hawkins noted that she launched Students for Life’s full-time operations at age 21 in 2006.
As a millennial myself, I can confirm her testimony. I joined the March for Life, traveling to Washington, D.C. from southern Michigan three separate times during my college years, in one of three buses which carried over 100 students. Despite the cold and rain or snow, we stood in solidarity with thousands of other young people, passionate about ending the practice of abortion. Pro-choicers accuse the pro-life movement of waging a “War on Women,” but one look at the crowd shows that just isn’t the case.
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