SALT LAKE CITY — Age, color, race, language – even religious affiliation didn’t matter as a unified group of more than 300 people joined this year’s annual March for Life in Salt Lake City to protest abortion.
This year’s event, sponsored by Pro-Life Utah, was different from past events. Instead of an indoor presentation in the Utah State Capitol rotunda followed by a march around the Capitol, this year people gathered in the parking lots and surrounding areas of the Capitol early on the morning of Jan. 30 before queuing their vehicles for a car parade through Salt Lake City down to 9000 South in Sandy.
Participants bedecked their cars with pro-life flags, yellow and white balloons, signs in English and Spanish, and other decorations.
Among the participants were Susanne Mana and Cristina Woodberry from Pro-Life Utah, who decorated their van with an image of a stork carrying a baby.
Mana decided to participate in the event because of her mother’s legacy, she said.
“I was adopted and my mother chose to give me a chance for life, so I am very grateful,” she said.
Her mother’s decision was very difficult because she was a single mother, but “as hard as it was, she made a very smart decision giving me the opportunity to be here,” Mana said.
Woodberry participated in the event for the first time this year. She lost a baby last year after five months of being pregnant. A few weeks later she met Mana, “and I knew that meeting her wasn’t an accident; we are both here today because people need to know that they can do things to protect the babies, to give life a chance,” she said.
Because of the restrictions in place due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Vicky Pope thought she would have to miss the March for Life this year, but when she learned it would be a car parade, she wanted to participate, she said, because “we need to stop treating life like it means nothing. … We need to remember the sanctity of life.”
Also among the participants at the event were members of the Utah Knights of Columbus. The fraternal Catholic organization has always been very active in the pro-life area, and this year representatives from different councils in the state joined the car parade.
“It’s a crime that we have millions of babies been aborted,” said Dick Hall, Master of the 4th degree Knights and a St. Ambrose parishioner.
All the people need to raise their voices and protect the sanctity of life, from the womb to natural death, Hall said.
One day, “God’s going to ask me if I did anything to end this, and we, the Knights of Columbus, have raised money to donate two ultrasound machines [in Utah] and we are funding the third for the mobile van that is going to go around the state,” he said.
Ed Henkels, a member of the Cathedral of the Madeleine’s Knights’ council, decorated his car with a sign that read “Love Life, Choose Life.”
“Being united for the right to life is the ultimate justice. … We are all about justice, and the ultimate injustice is that the unborn are not allow to live,” he said, adding that seeing how people that day were united in a common goal was very inspirational.
“We need to unite against [abortion] and more, since there are so many united on the other side,” he said.
As the car parade made its way through the streets of Salt Lake City, participants listened to 1640 AM, which transmitted speeches and updates about pro-life work in Utah.
A similar event took place in St. George.
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