I’ve been writing about abortion — not “life” or “choice” or “reproductive justice” or whatever euphemism is in vogue — for almost four years and last weekend I finally attended the National March for Life in Washington D.C. Anti-abortion activists have been making annual pilgrimages to D.C. since 1974, demanding an end to what they see as the great evil of our time, amidst a multitude of lesser evils, a daily stream of man-made horrors beyond our comprehension.
As an issue, abortion is probably one of the most polarizing in American politics. As my colleague Logan Davis noted in his Aug. 28, 2024 column, “opposition to abortion is a load-bearing column of the Christian right’s political identity, and a powerful adhesive keeping millions of right-wing evangelicals glued to the Republican coalition.”
With the 2022 Dobbs decision, the efforts of decades of political activism by Christian conservatives finally bore fruit: Roe v. Wade, which provided federal protections for abortion, was overturned. Conservative states, like Texas and Idaho, with abortion trigger laws immediately banned surgical abortion. It was a once in a lifetime victory for anti-abortion activists, but it put Republicans in the position of the dog who caught the car. Without Roe, hardline abortion abolitionists could now put even more pressure on moderate conservatives to ban abortion and to charge abortion patients and providers with murder, while Democrats had an electoral lightning rod to galvanize voters. Three years after the end of Roe the anti-abortion movement is still marching for life, and I’m tagging along.
I grew up in Virginia, but I haven’t been back since my dad died. My flight lands a few hours before I can check into my hotel, so I make a visit to Arlington National Cemetery. I visit the grave of our company executive officer from my first deployment to Iraq. He was killed by vehicle-bourne improvised explosive device in the Anbar Province about two weeks into Operation Phantom Fury. The sea of white headstones stretching to the horizon can be overwhelming, too much to really comprehend. The graves for combat deaths are ordered somewhat chronologically, so you can read the progress of the war, my first man-made horror, by reading the headstones. One emblazoned with “Rangers Lead the Way” from 2002, the early days of the Global War on Terror. The XO’s plot is in an island of graves, overwhelmingly Marine Lance Corporals, from November, 2004. A somber reminder of death before the weekend of life.
The next day I’m up early for March for Life Action’s Capitol Hill Club breakfast. Technically a separate entity, for tax purposes, March for Life Action is the political arm. For $500 anti-abortion donors get a generic hotel breakfast with members of Congress. Twenty-two U.S. Representatives, or 4% of the House of Representatives, addressing maybe 50 people. The price tag for the event is wild — it’s a third of my mortgage, half my monthly grocery budget, a car payment, two months of utilities, etc. — but I shouldn’t be surprised. In 2024, March for Life’s form 990 showed a revenue of $2.14 million for their 50c3, and $93,426 for their 501c4. A quick Google search shows the man sitting next to me in the back of the room is a prominent D.C. lawyer. I recognize Rep. Jeff Crank’s (R-CO) faith advisor, Jeff Anderson, and Fr. Stephen Imbarrato of New Mexico standing with a Catholic bishop I can’t identify.
The Congressmen, and one Congresswoman, give quick one-minute speeches. They all kind of say the same thing. Post-Roe, the big target is medication abortion, which is available through telehealth and via the mail, allowing patients in states with restrictions to continue to access abortion. Many of them admit, frankly, that the fall of Roe and the laws passed in red states haven’t really changed their bottom-line. There were more abortions in 2025 than there were before Dobbs.
While anti-abortion policy has failed in its stated goal of ending, or at least reducing, abortion, it has arguably made women and pregnancy more dangerous. According to a Feb. 20, 2025 report from ProPublica, “the rate of sepsis shot up more than 50% for women hospitalized when they lost their pregnancies in the second trimester.” In 2024, Texas woman Josseli Barnica died from an infection after a miscarriage at 17 weeks, which doctors were unable to treat due to the presence of a fetal heartbeat. Idaho lost 35% of its obstetrician-gynecologist physicians between the implementation of numerous strict abortion bans in 2022 and December of 2024.
While Republicans are quick to blame medication abortion administered via telehealth and received by mail, many patients continue to seek surgical abortions. Those patients in states like Texas and Idaho are forced to travel to states like Colorado to access abortion. This delays access, moving pregnancies further along and increasing complexity and risk.
It’s not as if the people sitting in the elephant room at the D.C. Capitol Hill Club are unfamiliar with intricacies of abortion.
“I lived up with a girl, and I had her kill our baby,” U.S. Rep. Randy Weber (R-TX) told the group. “I’m a victim of abortion.”
U.S. Rep. Kat Cammack (R-FL) even experienced firsthand the difficulty of navigating Florida’s anti-abortion laws during her ectopic pregnancy. She blamed pro-abortion activists and tried to semantically distance herself from medical reality.
“Life of the mother, miscarriages, and ectopics — those are not abortions,” she insisted. Her contention is that those situations aren’t abortions in the moral sense. She’s distancing herself from those profligate unwed mothers, not realizing that the uterus makes no such distinction.
This isn’t unusual in anti-abortion spaces. Many of the most vehement women in the anti-abortion world describe themselves as “post-abortive mothers,” and express genuine sorrow and distress at their past decision. For one of my first stories for Colorado Times Recorder, I watched a video where the executive director of a Teller County pregnancy center described how Jesus visits her with her two aborted children from heaven. Former Colorado Rep. Richard Holtorf, who regularly called his political opponents “Godless heathens,” had himself paid for an abortion as a younger man.
After the breakfast I walk over to the rally space. On the way I pass the U.S. Department of Labor building, which these days is draped in a three-story American flag, flanked by banners of President Donald Trump and Teddy Roosevelt. It is, as the kids say, a vibe.
During the breakfast, a number of speakers commented on the growing number of Gen-Zers flocking to the anti-abortion movement and conservatism in general. The crowd at the March for Life rally is certainly younger. A majority of the people inside the fenced security area are part of some school group or another. They all wear beanies emblazoned with their respective school— Saint So and So Catholic School, Holy Such and Such — and carry Turning Point USA signs.
Being a reporter, or generally being perceived as not part of the in-group, at these kind of events — predominantly Christian — is always a trip. You’re seen as fertile ground for evangelism. When I was presenting as a transsexual, pastors loved to talk to me. A sinner to be won to the banner of heaven. I’m still relearning the ins and outs of male fashion, but in D.C. Republican circles a pair of chinos and a quarter-zip does a lot of heavy lifting, but the “press” patch on my jacket gives me away. A girl who tells me her name is Esther — “for such a time as this” — engages me in a conversation, asks me what I think of the event. I tell her its like all the other anti-abortion events I’ve covered, but bigger. She asks if covering abortion has changed my perspective on it.
Of course it has. You spend years observing a group, listening to their speakers, going to their events, talking to them, trying to understand their perspective and then articulate it for an audience that is ostensibly on the opposite end of the spectrum, and your own perspective is challenged. Neitzsche warned, “If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”
Last spring, when I was in Denver reporting on House Bill 1312, the trans rights bill, I ran into KNUS radio personality Jeff Hunt. We’re often at the same events, and I think everyone in conservative politics in Colorado knows who I am at this point. He told me, “You keep hanging out with us and we’re going to rub off on you.”
I wouldn’t put it in those terms, but as I told Esther, I’ve certainly developed a much more nuanced perspective on politics and its actors and agents. I wonder if the same is possible for conservatives? Colorado conservatives rail about the liberal media bias, mostly about me, but I see very few conservatives doing the kind of work we at the Colorado Times Recorder do from their perspective. It’s a lot of opinion and hyperbole. Even Hunt’s presence at liberal events is simply man on the street “gotcha” interviews of whoever he can get to talk to him. Of course, a month after our exchange at the 1312 event, Hunt gets kicked in the back while streaming by anti-ICE protester Aidan Schachterle. While I’ve been asked to leave and denied entry to a few conservative events, sometimes by dudes with guns, I’ve never been assaulted.
Christian band Sanctus Real takes the stage, and I leave the security area amid a chorus of “whoa-oh-oh”s. As I’m walking out, against the current of people trying to get in, I run into a few members of white nationalist group Patriot Front, talking to folks in line and handing out flyers. They see my camera and “press” patch and quickly pull up their masks and don sunglasses. The main Patriot Front contingent is east of the rally space — a phalanx of blue and khaki and American flags, securing the existence of their people and a future for white children.
For those of you who don’t know, a quick google search of my name — either one — will tell you all about my history of anti-fascist activism. I spent two years of my life fighting groups like Patriot Front. My focus was mainly on the Proud Boys, the Traditionalist Worker Party, and Identity Europa, but these groups often have overlapping memberships. As one group collapses under the weight of doxxings or scandals, a new one pops up. It’s been that way since the days of the Silver Shirts and the German American Bund, and I’m not sure that’s going to change any time soon.
While I’ve come to rethink and regret my calls for violence against the far-right, there are still plenty of people committed to resisting these fascist movements. There are protesters with banners drawing attention to Patriot Front’s founder’s ties to the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally and the group’s penchant for Nazi salutes. Founder Thomas Rousseau is swarmed by a handful of press types. Whatever he is saying is drowned out by a protester with a megaphone blaring circus music on loop.
Patriot Front have been regular attendees of the National March for Life, and in some ways are kindred spirits. Like March for Life, they’ve won, but don’t know what to do now. Much of Trump’s domestic policy is being guided by White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security advisor Stephen Miller, who is decidedly their guy. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is violently enacting their policies. The day after their appearance in D.C., another activist is killed by ICE agents. The Overton window has shifted such that the white genocide conspiracy theory, or “the great replacement,” a major talking point for Rousseau, is not just common among members of the Republican party, but has just become a part of American politics at the most basic level.
“Native-born Americans are under siege by an illegal invasion of tens of millions of illegal immigrants, so I fully support ICE and their actions,” said Colorado Springs City Councilor Dave Donelson during a Jan. 13 meeting.
Like the single-income families with three or more children who make up much of the national anti-abortion movement, but are notably absent from the $500 donor breakfasts, the “ethnonationalists” and “identitarians” of Patriot Front are simply preaching to the choir these days, and are paying monthly dues to Rousseau to do so. Their main activism, aside from pop-up demonstrations like the kind at the March for Life in D.C., is trying to set up a robust enough parallel economy to protect themselves from the consequences of doxxing.
After a few minutes taking in the spectacle of Patriot Front, I move through the growing crowd. I pass Seth Gruber, noted anti-abortion activist, filmmaker, and founder of the White Rose Resistance, lecturing some teens on how theirs is a “masculine” movement. I’ve got an admittedly fraught relationship with masculinity, but many of those in conservative politics take their neuroses in the opposite direction. A guy in the rally area was holding a sign that read “Feminized men are responsible for abortion.” During the donor breakfast, HHS Assistant Secretary for Health and Head of the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, Adm. Brian Christine quipped, “I am the upgrade from Rachel, or Richard Levine, for the last few years. Thank you, God.” Rep. John McGuire (R-VA), made sure to introduce himself as a Navy SEAL veteran, just in case anyone wasn’t sure what the trident on his lapel was for. There are just a lot of dudes being bros in the movement to end abortion, or at least the movement to raise funds for the 501c3s and c4s.
The March for Life, and anti-abortion activism in general, is clearly a very Christian endeavor. At the national level it comes across as very Catholic — the rally area full of priests and nuns shepherding beanie-clad high school students across the National Mall. Colorado’s events are often very Protestant, particularly nondenominational and charismatic. The prayer for this year’s March for Life was given by Orthodox Bishop Irinej Dobrijević of Washington-New York and Eastern America for the Serbian Orthodox Church’s Diocese of Eastern America.
“As we prepare to depart in peace, mindful of your command to be perfect as our heavenly father is perfect, so also may we strive to be a perfect community of your love,” he told the crowd. “Grant us to reaffirm a society whose culture is based on human dignity, the awareness of your image in humankind, and the realization of your likeness, and thereby the dignity of life itself. For such a culture is a true communion of people who act thoughtfully and strategically, placing their minds in their hearts.”
Orthodox Christianity has received press attention recently for its growth and the influx of converts — which I should disclose includes me, yes, really — in recent years. New York Times reporter Ruth Graham focused on connections of some converts to far-right politics, while the Associated Press presented a more accurate, in my experience, perspective on the recent growth of the church.
Outside of the rally space, past the throngs of people bearing Gruber’s White Rose banners, away from Vice President J.D. Vance and Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), a group of about 200 people gather under the banners of Orthodox Christians for Life. Metropolitan Tikhon, Archbishop of Washington, Metropolitan of All America and Canada, Primate of the Orthodox Church in America, leads those gathered in a service of supplication, asking, “Be merciful O Lord, to those who, through ignorance or willfulness, affront thy divine goodness and providence through the evil act of abortion.”
In a brief homily, the Metropolitan distinguishes Orthodox anti-abortion efforts from the other denominations represented at the March for Life. “We’re, in a sense, a small group here,“ he said. “There’s a lot of other people. Maybe louder than us with more powerful microphones and more, you know, hymns that are more — Protestant. We have a unique offering that our hymns, our singing, our witness, our prayers, I think our theology, is something that everyone around us can benefit from, not just the government and the civil authorities, though we hope we touch their hearts as well, but everyone else that is in this city and in the city that we all come from.”
The march itself begins shortly after, and is in many ways anti-climatic. A long walk past a Supreme Court that already overturned Roe.
