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The Indiana Daily Student

March for Life unites IU and Purdue students

Emily Eherenman, Vice President for IU’s Students for Life, looks back in the midst of the crowd. More than 650,000 people were estimated to have been in attendance for the March for Life.

Only a week earlier, the Women’s March on Washington had brought more than a million people to Washington D.C.

Men and women protested and marched through the streets of the capital, and this past Friday and Saturday yet again demonstrators walked the streets in the March for Life, an event that even managed to unite pro-life advocates from IU and Purdue University.

The 2017 March for Life brought another week of united protesters into Washington, D.C., said IU sophomore and President of IU Students for Life Jenna Fisher. 

“We were able to build friendships and bonds with people over this issue,” Fisher said. “It’s really beautiful how the march does that.”

The march is an annual event which takes place around the anniversary of the 1973 Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion in the United States. This year the march brought approximately 650,000 people to Washington, D.C. Vice President Mike Pence spoke at the event and announced his support of the anti-abortion movement.

“Because of all of you and the many thousands who stand with us in marches like this all across the nation, life is winning again in America,” Pence said.

In 2016, Pence said he wanted to see Roe v. Wade “consigned to the ash heap of history” and has often advocated for stricter abortion laws in Indiana, where he was formerly governor.

She said the experience was amazing but it was different from past years because the march would be happening only a week after more than one million women had marched through the streets of that same city. Fisher said even though the Women’s March was a pro-choice movement she believes both movements are marching for the same concept of body autonomy.

Body autonomy relates to the free will of each individual to decide how to use their body. Fisher said the difference between her group and pro-choice organizations  is they acknowledge the rights of a fetus to have body autonomy from conception. 

Purdue University sophomore Megan Smith, the president of  Boilermakers for Life, a pro-life group at Purdue University, said she thinks pro-life advocates are the ultimate example of what it means to support body autonomy and to value human life.

“You’re valuable from the moment you exist,” Smith said. “If you don’t have life no other rights matter.”

Smith said the IU and Purdue students were able to come together, in between playful banter, because this issue was one that affected everyone in some shape or form. The unity they showed on the march was the “perfect picture," Smith said.

“We were on the bus, and we were just tearing each other up, but we all had this common goal," Smith said.

 Emily Eherenman, vice president of IU Students for Life and a sophomore, said she had been on the march several years now but with Pence coming out to speak she said she really felt the administration was listening to them for the first time.

“It was really good to know we were supported,” Eherenman said.

Smith echoed those statements and said having Pence there to support them was a great moment. She said during the election cycle she knew she could never vote for Hillary Clinton because Clinton supported legislation which would grant federal funds to women health centers which provide abortions.

Fisher also said her organization had the opportunity to visit the Holocaust Memorial Museum, and she compared the legalization of abortion to the Holocaust.

Smith said abortion and the pro-life movement are hot-button topics in the U.S., and she said she truly believed them to be the great issues of her generation.

“We should be talking about this every single day,” Smith said. “We should never shut up about it.”

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