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WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump is the first commander in chief to address the annual March for Life event live via live video feed.
"Today, I am honored and proud to be the first president to stand with you at the White House to address the 45th March for Life," President Trump said.
He spoke with pro-life supporters via satellite from the Rose Garden at the White House.
"The March for Life is a movement born out of love," Trump told the audience. "Every child is a precious gift from God."
Jeanne Mancini, president of the March for Life, applauded the president's efforts to protect the lives of the unborn.
"Since his first day in office, President Trump has remained steadfast on his campaign promises to the pro-life cause and has actively worked to protect unborn," she said. "Over the past year, the Trump administration has significantly advanced pro-life policy, and it is with great confidence that under his leadership, we expect to see other pro-life achievements in the years to come."
Trump is the third sitting U.S. president to address March for Life, following George W. Bush's remarks via telephone in 2003 and 2004. Ronald Reagan also made telephone remarks back in 1987.
Vice President Mike Pence reiterated the administration's pro-life stance, saying, "This pro-life generation should never doubt we are with you and this president stands with you.”
More than 100,000 Americans are expected to travel to Washington, D.C. for this year's March for Life.
President Trump to Address Friday's 'March for Life' in DC
CBN News 01-17-2018
President Donald Trump will address the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C. live from the White House Rose Garden on Friday.
He will become the first sitting US president to speak during the event in the March for Life's 45-year history.
"Since his first day in office, President Trump has remained steadfast on his campaign promises to the pro-life cause and has actively worked to protect the unborn," Jeanne Mancini, the organization's president said in a press release.
"Over the past year, the Trump administration has significantly advanced pro-life policy, and it is with great confidence that, under his leadership, we expect to see other pro-life achievements in the years to come," she continued.
President Trump will headline this year's lineup of pro-life leaders speaking at the March for Life, including House Speaker Paul Ryan, Pam Tebow, Matt and Adrianna Birk, U.S. Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, U.S. Rep. Dan Lipinski, U.S. Rep. Chris Smith, Bishop Vincent Matthews Jr., and Sister Bethany Madonna.
More than 100,000 Americans are expected to travel from across the country to Washington, D.C. for this year's March for Life.
The theme of this year's March for Life is "Love Saves Lives."
“They’re all torn out,” he said, pointing to a page consisting only of tear marks whose residue reveals the side of a tank and soldiers posing on a Mercedes.
AT THE weekly antique flea market in Berlin, Christoph Kreutzmueller, a Holocaust historian and curator for the new permanent exhibition of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, picked up a Nazi-era family album at random from a book stand, fascinated not by the black and white pictures that were there ‒ but by those that weren’t.
“They’re all torn out,” he said, pointing to a page consisting only of tear marks whose residue reveals the side of a tank and soldiers posing on a Mercedes. The “war” page?
The album, however, opens with a picture of paradise: a German couple with their nude toddlers are picnicking in a lush forest. As for the rest, most photos have been rearranged, out of order.
“There’s the innocent reading that [the album owner] hated the war and didn’t want to think of it anymore,” Kreutzmueller said of the reason for the missing pictures. “The biased, ‘mean’ reading is that perhaps they showed murder. I think that he really didn’t want to think of war anymore because the remnants that you see are not of fighting.”
In another album from the same vendor (collected from an apartment liquidated upon the resident’s passing), photos are neatly organized and labeled. They, too, open with “paradise” ‒ a Nazi government-sponsored outing amid beautiful landscapes in May 1938. In October that same year, the month in which Germany began to deport its Polish Jews, the matriarch and patriarch celebrate their silver wedding anniversary. A few pages later, in 1940, the living room is newly adorned with a radio, the tool for Nazi propaganda nicknamed, “Goebbel’s Schnauze” (Goebbel’s snout).
Christoph Kreutzmueller views old albums (Orit Arfa)
“There’s another living room where you could see good old Adolf Hitler under the light bulb, so he’s lit,” Kreutzmueller said, noticing the tiny, mustached figure in the framed photograph on the wall.
Later, grooms appear in Wehrmacht uniforms at their respective weddings, and then from the war front. One son seemed to have sent a photograph from Russia in September 1941 ‒ Kreutzmueller surmised that he had just been awarded the Iron Cross.
According to photo-historian Sandra Starke, who co-curated the 2009 traveling exhibit on Wehrmacht photo albums, “Focus on Strangers,” the Nazi regime encouraged amateur photography, in part so Germans could record for posterity how nice life was under Hitler’s reign.
“They supported the camera factories, made the prices low, made competitions, courses, training, how-to books,” said Starke at her home in Berlin. She opened such how-to books whose guidelines included: avoid levity while wearing a Nazi uniform; capture various angles of the perfect “Aryan” profile; do not include portraits with “racially inferior” friends. During wartime, the men usually took the cameras to the battlefields.
HOW FAMILY photos from the Nazi-era are being maintained and kept today can give insight into how second to fourth generation Nazi-era Germans come to grips ‒ or not ‒ with possible family involvement in Hitler’s murderous, tyrannical regime. These two flea market albums represent two approaches to the past: torn and “untouched.”
According to Michaela Buckel, project manager for March of Life, an organization that includes descendants of German Wehrmacht soldiers and Gestapo and SS members who seek personal reconciliation with Nazi victims and their descendants, most German families keep albums in their homes ignored. Among some of her friends, portraits of grandparents hang in the living rooms, sometimes in Wehrmacht uniform.
“What you normally won’t find are family pictures in SS uniform,” Buckel tells The Jerusalem Report. “In that case, it’s more likely these photos are taken from the album, or the badges and insignia are blackened. Photo albums are rarely hidden. Often you just do not look at them.”
Most German families, Buckel says, often tell stories of their own “victimhood” ‒ air raids, fallen soldiers, prisoners-of-war.
“I’d say from experience that there is definitely a difference between how the national German government commemorates and memorializes the Holocaust and how individual families recognize the role their families played in the destruction/war,” she says. “Today, most people in Germany would agree with the statement that the Nazis were criminals and the Holocaust a genocide without comparison. But they will not likely link that to their own families. Because you learn about the Holocaust in history with all its atrociousness, you can’t link it to the great-grandfather whom you love and know as a kind man.”
March of Life was founded by Pastor Jobst Bittner of TOS Ministries, which in American terms is a Christian Evangelical ministry, based in Tübingen in southern Germany ‒ a city that once boasted a high concentration of avowed Nazi party members. Several years ago, Bittner encouraged his congregants to inquire into their family’s history during the Nazi era. With the Holocaust generation dying out, most families must rely on family albums for clues if they did not receive firsthand accounts.
UNTIL HE heeded his pastor’s call, Friedhelm Chmell, 40, felt indifference on obligatory visits to concentration camps.
“It never really touched my heart, so I never felt anything,” Chmell, a hospital nurse, said via Skype from his home in Tübingen. “I felt a little bit sorry, but it was nothing personal.”
As a young adult, Klaus Schock, 47, a March of Life member from a small village near Tübingen, never wanted to “touch” his family’s role in the war years.
“In Germany, normally in school, you go into detail about Nazi times and the Nazi regime, and about the Third Reich,” Schock said. “For me, it was like something that had nothing to do with my life. I was wondering why do we learn about this. It was a terrible time, so what? I wasn’t really interested.”
According to the oral history of Chmell’s family, his maternal grandfather worked at an army desk job, literally. Two pictures of him in uniform were assembled as part of a family album arranged by his uncle: one of him writing a letter at a desk and another of him posing on the balcony at his Antwerp office.
“I always saw this picture with this office and everything seemed so peaceful,” Chmell said. “We don’t want to see behind all these nice stories and pictures they gave us. My whole family didn’t ask further, ‘What did he really do?’”
With the support of his wife, but not his siblings, Chmell became a sleuth. His investigation led him to Antwerp, Belgium, where, through Google Street View, he scoured balconies from the vantage point of the skyscraper in the photo. He eventually found the building where his grandfather posed and soon learned what it had housed.
“During World War II, it was the main headquarters of the Deutsche Wehrmacht in Antwerp, and then I searched for what the Deutsche Wehrmacht exactly did there.”
His grandfather’s department was responsible for summoning Antwerp’s 20,000 Jews for deportation.
“When I found out this fact, it broke my heart,” Chmell said, teary-eyed. “For the first time, I could see the truth about my family. I always thought there was nothing bad in my family, and maybe my family never killed a Jew, but he was one of the main people responsible in this office and he’s responsible for 20,000 Jews. They went straight to Auschwitz.”
Klaus Schock, a physicist, decided, on Bittner’s call, to open the lids of boxes with albums, letters and even army medals that had been shelved in his grandparents’ home.
At first, when he asked his parents about his paternal grandfather’s service under the Nazi regime, they said, dismissively, that he had been a Nazi Stormtrooper (the paramilitary wing of the Nazi party) for a brief period. Documents and pictures revealed the facts: his grandfather enlisted in the stormtroopers in 1932 and then renounced his Nazi-party membership to become a professional soldier for the next 12 years.
His grandfather’s album from France could be mistaken for that of a vacation: he took photographs of the Eiffel Tower and other French landmarks that suddenly became the Nazis’ playground. But the war of annihilation and aggression was on full, organized display in the “Russia album.”
Via Skype, Schock opened the album and showed neat, labeled titles of images of dead Russian soldiers ‒ some in a ditch, some being hanged.
“I realized he must have seen a lot of things. Normally I’m a scientist and I’m more rational, but it shocked me.”
The grandparents of Chmell and Schock are no longer living, but Schock recalls his encounters with his grandfather as a young boy.
“As long as I’ve known him, he just lived in the house nearby together with my grandma, and so when I had to decide to go to the military or to civil service, he always wanted me to go the military, and he was a passionate soldier,” Shock said. “He never talked about, say, Nazi philosophy or ideology; but looking back, I would say he never regretted it, and I don’t think he realized what he really did, what kind of murdering he did.”
Their respective processes of coming to terms with their families’ history, rare among their peer group, have changed both their lives. Today, Chmell and Schock are staunch Israel supporters, fighting modern antisemitism as expressed in hostility toward Israel, propelled both by a sense of obligation they feel toward the Jewish people and their Christian faith.
March of Life members believe face-to face apologies by the descendants of Nazi perpetrators to Nazi victims, as opposed to national proclamations, could most effectively facilitate healing and reconciliation. In their marches across Europe, at sites of attempted Jewish genocide they often connect with Holocaust survivors and their progeny, but one of Chmell’s most meaningful encounters occurred spontaneously in Israel.
“In May, I was in Jerusalem and went on a tram, and met someone who was the same age as me. His grandparents were collected at Antwerp and sent to Auschwitz, and one of them survived. That is one reason why I could meet him, and we connected on WhatsApp and I said I’m sorry about what my grandparents did to your family. It was such a special moment.”
Schock believes he became a “softer,” more emphatic person. “Looking into my family’s past, it also revealed prejudice, racism and antisemitism inside of me. I realized that I am not better than my grandfather; I could have done the same things. That was shocking for me. But this opened the way that I could repent.”
He and his wife of seven years never wanted children ‒ until he visited Israel for the first time.
“Before the trip, I realized something must be wrong with me but I couldn’t figure out why I was so afraid to be a father. When I came back from Israel, suddenly all the fear somehow disappeared.”
Back at the flea market, inside the “untouched” family album, photographs become sparse after 1942 and virtually non-existent from 1943, the year in which Hitler’s downfall begins with his defeat at Stalingrad. The idyll disintegrates. A downed plane appears in September 1942. Women pose in front of an air raid shelter. Men are back home, holding canes, presumably injured. Finally, the end: a small boy standing in ruins, leaving no progeny, as it were, to safeguard the album and family legacy.
As their WhatsApp profile pictures, Chmell and Schock each proudly display family portraits ‒ their own family albums won’t be sold to the highest bidder at a flea market. Chmell loves taking family pictures.
“To show how I love my family, to show that our lives ‒ mine and my wife’s ‒ have been changed totally, to remember all our family past but also to say our kids belong to the new generation.”
March for Life attendees hopeful for new administration
Play Video1:57
As part of the 'March for Life,' thousands of abortion opponents from across the country gathered in D.C. and marched from the Washington Monument to the U.S. Supreme Court with renewed optimism from an administration expected to move forward with antiabortion policies. (Video: McKenna Ewen/Photo: Getty Images/The Washington Post)
March for Life: Pence speaks as thousands assemble at Washington Monument
March for Life: Pence speaks as thousands assemble at Washington Monument
Thousands of abortion opponents gathered in cold, blustery weather near the Washington Monument Friday and heard Vice President Mike Pence tell the annual March for Life that the Trump administration is determined to advance the fight against abortion.
The massive crowd, bearing flags, banners and placards, then flowed down Constitution Avenue, filling the street, and rallied at the Supreme Court building across from the Capitol.
“We will not grow weary,” Pence said in a ten-minute addresss to the throng at the monument. “We will not rest, until we restore a culture of life in America for ourselves and our posterity,” He said the administration is bent on ending tax-payer funding of abortion and abortion providers. And he said that “next week President Donald Trump will announce a Supreme Court nominee who will uphold the God-given liberty enshrined in our Constitution in the tradition of the late and great Justice Antonin Scalia.”
Scalia, a conservative associate justice of the Supreme Court, died last year.
“Life is winning again in America,” said Pence, who added that Trump asked him to speak at the rally. “That is evident in...the historic election of a president...who I proudly say stands for the right to life.”
Pence was the first U.S. vice president to address the march in its history.
Bundled against a stiff wind, marchers from around the country first descended on the northeast grounds of the monument.
Pence, who has called himself an “evangelical Catholic,” has long been a hero among antiabortion activists and as governor of Indiana signed what was considered some of the strictest laws on abortion.
Also addressing the crowd was key Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway.
“I am a wife, a mother, a Catholic, counselor to the president of the United States of America and, yes, I am pro-life,” she said.
‘Life is winning in America’: Pence speaks at March for Life
Play Video1:57
Vice President Pence said President Trump asked him to attend the March for Life and told the crowd that the administration will push forward policies they seek, including defunding Planned Parenthood. (The Washington Post)
“This is a new day, a new dawn, for life,” she said.
The right to life “is not a privilege,” she said. “Its is not a choice. It is God-given...This is a time of incredible promise for the pro-life, pro-adoption movement.”
“We hear you,” she told the crowd, which earlier had been chanting, “Kell-ee-anne! Kell-ee-anne!”
“We see you,” she said. “We respect you. And we look forward to working with you.”
This year, organizers hoped to see a surge of energy with the ascension of a president who is expected to move forward on antiabortion policies, including defunding Planned Parenthood and appointing an antiabortion Supreme Court justice.
“He’s pro-life,” Lynn Ray, coordinator of campus ministry at the Louisiana State University at Alexandria, said Friday as she stood on Constitution Avenue with a group from the university. “So that’s good for us.”
“Being that we’re Catholics, we’re very pro-life,” she said. “Every step we take, we take for an unborn baby,” she said. “We’re not persecuting anyone, of course, just marching for the babies.”
Madeline Runyan, 22, a senior at LSU, said she, too, was pleased with President Trump’s stance on abortion. “I’m very confident in what he’s doing to help this cause,” she said. “I’m really excited and optimistic.”
The rally began at around 11:45 a.m. Pence spoke shortly after noon. The march began at around 1 p.m., and the crowd moved east, past the Capitol, and toward the Supreme Court, where another large assembly had already gathered.
There were members of the clergy, as well as “Bikers for Life.”
Many marchers were in school and church groups, carrying flags, banners, posters — and a life-size cutout of Pope Francis. They sang, chanted and prayed. The vast majority was white.
Dan Kehoe didn’t see the march as a political statement, but a religious one.
The 34-year-old from Taos, Mo., was a chaperone on his daughter’s eighth-grade Catholic Church trip. They took a Greyhound bus for 22 hours for what they called a “pilgrimage” to Washington.
He saw news coverage of last week’s Women’s March on Washington and thought that was a political march about women’s issues. This, he said, is “completely different,” and is not about women’s rights, but human ones.
“It’s not just a woman’s choice, it takes two to make a child,” he said.
More than 200 people made the trip from his central Missouri church community with him, most of them children. He said he voted for Donald Trump, and is happy with his presidents performance so far.
“If the younger generation doesn’t speak up now, who will?”
Large groups are common at the march, characterized by matching hats or shirts.
One block-long mass of 200 teenagers from 15 churches and three Catholic high schools filled five charter buses, but was only part of a 500-strong group from the Archdiocese of Mobile, Ala.
“Remember, we are guests in this city and we’re going to be respectful,” called Adam Ganucheau, 30, has he and other youth leaders handed out 200 boxes Subway sandwiches. “We are pilgrims; we do not litter.”
The size of the group is typical, said Ganucheau, who has attended more than a dozen of these marches since 2001. But he senses an extra electricity.
“It’s historic that these kids will be able to say they heard and saw the vice president,” he said as the throng began to move, sandwiches in hand.
Ganucheau said he was glad to have an antiabortion administration take office, although there are parts of the Trump agenda that concern him.
In addition to opposing abortion, Ganucheau said his faith also led him to support equal wages, equal pay, a welcoming immigration posture and other progressive social causes.
“Being Catholic is more than being conservative or liberal,” he said. “We believe in treating all people with respect.”
Earlier, Jeanne Mancini, president of the March for Life, listed her four demands for Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress:
● Appoint an antiabortion justice to the Supreme Court.
● Make the Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funding for many abortions in the United States, into a permanent law rather than the one-year provision that has been extended each year from 1976 to the present.
● Pass a law banning abortion nationwide after 20 weeks of pregnancy.
● Stop all federal funding for Planned Parenthood unless the organization were to somehow stop performing abortions.
The gathering came a week after Trump’s inauguration and followed last Saturday’s vast Women’s March on Washington.
Asked about the Women’s March, Ray, of Deville, La., said:
“I’m all about women’s rights, except when it comes to the baby. I believe — it’s my opinion — but I believe a baby is a gift from God, and once the baby is a gift from God, it’s no longer your body, but there’s another body within. And that body has a right also.”
When march attendee Brianna Roberts, 21, of Reading, Pa., met her birthmother two years ago, she was upset to hear that relatives wanted the woman to abort her.
Her mother was 20, already had one child, and was getting by on food stamps, Roberts said. But when her mother went to a clinic seeking an abortion, she was told she was too far along for the clinic to perform one.
Her birthmother placed Roberts for adoption. “She did the right and responsible thing,” Roberts said.
Roberts said she did not vote because she didn’t like either Trump or Clinton, but she is optimistic that Trump will advance anti-abortion policies.
“I thought this was going to be a really big year for policy change,” she said.
Francis Leung, 18, a college student from Naples, Fla., said he has attended the March for Life with his parents almost every year since “I was a little kid” in a stroller.
Now, at 18, six feet tall and a college freshman, he stood in the throng of demonstrators and grinned, saying, “I always look forward to it.”
Leung said he grew up in a devoutly Catholic family and has been hearing a strong anti-abortion message from his parents for as long as he can remember. His nine siblings -- eight of whom came to Washington with him this week -- have heard it, too.
“It’s a great movement, because it’s simple,” said Leung, a student at Ave Maria University in Florida. He was referring to the annual the March for Life. It’s simple, he said, because “every unborn child has a right to life.”
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Like his brothers and sisters, Leung said, he was home-schooled. And a central theme of his education was this: “When two humans come together and produce a child, when they create a baby, that’s like, really, really big -- it’s the most important thing in the world. Procreation. It’s what human beings were put on Earth to do.”
The first March for Life was held one year after the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 that recognized a right to abortion nationwide. Subsequent marches have been held on or near the Jan. 22 anniversary every year since.
On Friday, the marchers chanted, “Hey, hey, ho ho, Roe v Wade has got to go!”
Today hundreds of thousands of pro-life Americans are expected to rally in Washington, D.C., for the annual March for Life.
And if previous years are any indication—the mainstream media will turn a blind eye.
Networks like CNN and MSNBC are more than happy to provide wall-to-wall coverage and above-the-fold headlines for so-called "nasty" women. But they have no interest in giving equal access to hundreds of thousands of pro-life women—the defenders of the unborn.
The three broadcast networks covered the women's march 129 times more than they did the 2016 March for Life, Newsbusters reports. Shameful.
The Mainstream Media would have you believe that pro-lifers are religious fanatics—fringe lunatics. But in fact, most of those marching in the streets today are young millennials—college-educated.
They wear skinny jeans and knit caps and drink chai tea. They are computer engineers and attorneys—young men and women who have seen firsthand the scourge of the abortionists.
They have seen the cruel atrocities committed by Planned Parenthood—funded by our tax dollars. Blood money.
They went to the polls on Election Day to cast their vote for a man who promised to defend the unborn.
And today they march—for the more than 59 million little boys and little girls slaughtered since Roe v. Wade became the law of the land.
They march to send a message to the world—that all lives matter.
They march to remember an entire generation of doctors and writers and scientists—wiped off the face of the earth.
They march in solidarity against the abortionists—selling the body parts of their victims at auction to the highest bidder.
They are Catholics and evangelicals, Pentecostals and Protestants, Jew and Gentile—marching arm-in-arm to end this modern-day holocaust. It's a holocaust the mainstream media has deemed unworthy of coverage.
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After years of hiding in the shadows, this year's March for Life is stepping into the spotlight, thanks to support from the President and a campaign aimed at stepping up media coverage.
Tens of thousands of women are expected to participate in Friday's march in Washington, D.C. The annual event celebrates life and protests abortion and the 1973 Supreme Court decision, Roe v. Wade, which legalized it.
In a show of support from the administration, Vice President Mike Pence will address the thousands of pro-life at the march this Friday. Pence's address is historic, as this is the first time a Vice President will ever speak at the March for Life event.
“Honored to meet with pro-life leaders tonight,” Pence tweeted Thursday. “I look forward to addressing National [March for Life] on Friday.”
Pence will be one of two Trump administration officials to address the crowd in the nation’s capital. Senior advisor Kellyanne Conway will speak at the March for Life and President Trump even promoted the event in a Wednesday interview with ABC's David Muir.
The president turned the tables on the anchor, who asked the President if he could hear the voices from last Saturday's Women's March on Washington at the White House. That march attracted hundreds of thousands of women but repulsed many pro-life women when it removed a pro-life group from its partner list and actively promoted its pro-abortion agenda.
The president told Muir that he didn't hear the women at the Saturday march but pointed Muir to the March for Life (which opposes abortion) saying "you're gonna have a large crowd on Friday too, which is mostly pro-life people." Trump added "and they say the press doesn't cover them."
Muir looked unsure and responded that he didn't want to compare crowd sizes. "What they do say," Trump repeated, "is that the press doesn't cover them."
A new study shows that the president is right and that the mainstream media normally gives scant coverage to the March for Life, especially when contrasted with the coverage that it gave to the Women's March Jan. 21st.
Katie Yoder of NewsBusters reports that the ABC, NBC and CBS broadcast networks covered the Women's March 129 times more than they did the 2016 March for Life.
Yoder says the three networks spent a total of one hour, 15 minutes and 18 seconds on coverage of the Women's March. However, they only gave 35 seconds to covering the 2016 March for Life. In 2015, only CBS mentioned the March for Life, giving it just 15 seconds.
The Alliance for Fair Coverage of Life Issues, a group of conservative and pro-life organizations, is calling on the media to cover pro-life issues. In a statement released this week the alliance noted "this year, ABC, CBS and NBC have no excuse to silence these pro-life voices. The networks heavily promoted the Women's March on Washington, helping boost its attendance."
The alliance may get its wish this year, given the high-level support from the Trump administration and growing public awareness of media bias.
*CBN neither supports nor opposes any candidate for public office.
