Moments at the March for Life...

In the midst of the massive amount of God's faithful believers, here my family stood for four hours...may the prayers of all be according to God's ultimate will.

FDR with Hannah and Colin

I love this shot (well done DH) where you can get a glimpse of the amount of faithful that showed up on this beautiful sunny Washington DC day holding onto hope through their prayers

Met. JONAH of the OCA giving the first address to the faithful

Hannah united with Srs. Vicki and Martha from the Monastery of the Holy Transfiguration in Ellwood City, PA...happy smiles all around!

one of the many icon banners of St. Elizabeth and the Theotokos, as expectant mothers, bearing in their wombs the Forerunner John the Baptist and Jesus Christ, the Son of God!

Hannah with a friend, Lucy

FDR in the thick of it all...awesome!

The following is taken from the National Review by Frederica Matthews-Green

Just two days after the inauguration, another crowd fills Washington
streets, the pro-lifers who gather each year for the "March for Life." This
January 22 marks the 36th anniversary of Roe v Wade, and after so many years
with little change or improvement, the nation has grown a bit blasé about this
annual demonstration against abortion. We still say abortion is a "hot issue"-
but if you think about it, it's not as hot as it used to be. The abortion
controversy used to command cover space on magazines, and TV networks showcased
hour-long debates. You don't see that anymore.

You could say that
people just got tired of hearing about it. Year after year the two sides said
mostly the same thing, and nothing much changed. Eventually, public attention
was bound to sidle off to a newer, more exciting topic (gay marriage, anyone?).
When attention drifted, it was the pro-choice side that had command of the
status quo.
And you could say that that settles that; from now on there will
be less and less talk about abortion, and we'll just get used to things the way
they are.

But I can imagine things going a different way. Not
soon-maybe not till the baby boomers have passed from the scene-but it's
possible that a younger generation will see abortion very differently. And the
reason is, as the saying goes, "Nobody knows when life begins." With abortions
now running around 1.2 million per year, the total number of abortions since Roe
v Wade is about 49 million. That's a big number-about a sixth of the US
population. It's a big number, if you're not absolutely sure that it's *not*
life.

After all, if you saw a little girl hit by a car, you're
going to yell, "Get an ambulance!" not "Get a shovel!" It's in the very fabric
of humanity to be on the side of life, if there's the faintest hope that life
exists. We don't throw children away when we're not sure whether they're alive
or not. And, as the pro-choice side never stops saying, it's not that they're
positive a fetus is "not alive" - it's that they're not sure.

When
I was a young fire-breathing college feminist in the early 70's, we didn't see
abortion as a melancholy private decision-it was an act of liberation. By
choosing abortion, a woman could show that she was the only person in charge of
her life, and bowed to no one else's control. But this formulation turned sour
as the grief felt by post-abortion woman began to accumulate. The flip side of
autonomy is loneliness, and for many women, their abortion decision was linked
to emotional abandonment.

And then there was the advent of
ultrasound technology, enabling live images of a baby moving in the womb. In
1989, word went round the pro-life movement to order the tape of pollster
Harrison Hickman's presentation at that year's NARAL convention. On it he said,
"Nothing has been as damaging to our cause as the advances in technology which
have allowed pictures of the developing fetus, because people now talk about
that fetus in much different terms than they did 15 years ago. They talk about
it as a human being, which is not something that I have an easy answer how to
cure."

So there are some reasons to think that the abortion
question has not been settled, but has merely gone underground. That might be a
necessary step. It has to go away so that it can be rediscovered, and seen in a
fresh light.

I don't expect that reconsideration soon: my Boomer
generation will never see abortion as anything other than the wise and
benevolent gift we bestowed on all future generations. We still control the
media, the universities, and so forth, and it will take time for all of us to
topple off the end of the conveyer belt.

But the time is coming
when a younger generation will be in charge, and they may well see abortion
differently. They could see it, not as "a woman's choice" but as a form of
state-sanctioned violence inflicted on their generation. It was their brothers
and sisters who died; anyone under the age of 36 could have been aborted (and
somewhere around a fourth or a fifth of all pregnancies, in fact, are aborted).
A younger generation might feel a strange kinship with the brothers and sisters,
classmates and coworkers, who are missing.

And I'm afraid that, if
they do see things that way, they aren't going to go easy on my generation. Our
acceptance of abortion is not going to look like an understandable goof. The
next generation can fairly say, "It's not like they didn't know." They'll say,
"After all, they had sonograms." And they may judge us to be
monsters.

Maybe that won't happen. Maybe future generations won't
think twice about abortion. But even we who have grown sick of talking about it
still harbor some doubts. In particular, people who think of themselves as
defenders of the weak and the oppressed must have many a quiet moment when they
wonder, "How, in this one issue, did I wind up on the side that's defending
death?"

There's a lot of ambivalence out there, and a lot of
unspoken grief too, I think. So you never know. Pro-choice may have won the
day-but sooner or later, that day will end. No generation can rule from the
grave. When that time comes, another generation will sit in judgment of ours.
And they are not obligated to be kind.********Frederica Mathewes-Greenwww.frederica.com