March for Life, Partnered with Georgia Life Alliance, Announces Speakers for the 2025 Georgia March for Life 

Despite the arctic chill that enveloped the nation’s capital on Jan. 24, participants in this year’s March for Life were warmed by a spirit of measured optimism.

And the pro-life actions initiated by the newly installed Trump-Vance administration during its first week were a substantial contributor to this positive perspective.

Both President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance voiced their full-throated support for the marchers’ pro-life cause. Vance addressed them personally, and in his videotaped remarks Trump declared, “In my second term, we will again stand proudly for families and for life.”

More importantly, the president and vice president’s words were matched by concrete action.

One day ahead of the March for Life, the president announced the pardon of 23 pro-life advocates who were convicted of Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act violations during his predecessor Joe Biden’s term of office. Controversy surrounds some of Trump’s other recent pardons, as well as those dispensed by Biden in the final days of his own outgoing presidency.

No such concerns should attach to Trump’s FACE Act clemency, however. The pardoned pro-lifers were clearly the victims of a Department of Justice that under Biden was determined to advance abortion rights by any means available, no matter how unjust.

Going forward under the new administration, peaceful pro-lifers won’t be prosecuted in this manner because the Trump DOJ has released a directive limiting future FACE Act enforcement to “extraordinary circumstances” involving cases where death, injury or serious property damage occurs.

It can also be hoped that, in concert with the Republican-controlled Congress, Trump will push for a total repeal of this Clinton-era legislation. That’s the only way to ensure it will never again be wrongly weaponized to jail the peaceful pro-life demonstrators at abortion facilities who strive to awaken hearts and minds to the destructive realities associated with legal abortion.

On the day of the March for Life itself, Trump rolled out additional substantive pro-life measures. Most prominently, these included an executive order reinstating the Mexico City Policy that prohibits any taxpayer funding of foreign organizations that provide and promote abortions. An accompanying executive order committed the administration to full enforcement of the Hyde Amendment, the congressional measure that prohibits direct federal funding for abortions domestically.

While Trump’s policy moves on immigration and the death penalty have opened up fault lines with Catholic leaders, the new administration’s initial pro-life forays garnered praise from the U.S. bishops.

“I am grateful for the strengthening of policies that protect us from being compelled to participate in a culture of death and that help us to restore a culture of life at home and abroad,” Bishop Daniel Thomas of Toledo, Ohio, the chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ pro-life committee, said in a Jan. 26 statement.

The Trump administration’s opening moves also traveled some distance towards easing widespread pro-life concerns about Trump’s campaign-trail statements that he would not support a national 16-week limit on abortion or halt distribution of the abortion pills that now constitute a majority of U.S. abortions and are being mailed into states with bans on most or all abortions.

Those remain serious concerns, to be sure. But what has happened to date represents a promising beginning for Trump’s second term, with respect to the pro-life file.

“In my second term, we will again stand proudly for families and for life,” Trump said in an address that aired hours ahead of schedule. “We will protect the historic gains we have made and stop the radical Democrat push for a federal right to unlimited abortion on demand.”

Vice President JD Vance, who attended in person, then delivered remarks to the crowd in Washington, his first since Inauguration Day at the start of the week.

While Trump has taken a more nuanced stance toward abortion policy since Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization threw the issue back to the states in 2022, he pledged in his virtual address to continue backing families and the anti-abortion cause more generally.

“Thanks to your tireless work and devotion across five decades, that historic wrong was set right three years ago,” Trump said, referring to Roe v. Wade. “I was so proud to be a participant. Six courageous justices of the Supreme Court of the United States returned the issue to the state legislatures and to the people, where it belongs.”

Several women who regret having an abortion — and men who regret that their unborn child was aborted — spoke in front of the steps of the United States Supreme Court during the 2025 March for Life on Friday, Jan. 24.

One of those women, Laura Brown, told CNA she suffered “deep depression, anger, [and] suicidal thoughts” after having an abortion. She said she obtained an abortion after getting pregnant from a married man and “my sole focus [was] on hiding it.”

“I was intensely ashamed [of] what I had done,” Brown, who is from Wisconsin, said.

Brown, however, found redemption through God.

“Finally God spoke through that pain and he lifted me out of that depression and he told me I wouldn’t be alone if I followed him,” she said.

Brown offered a message for women who are in difficult pregnancies: “Your circumstances right now are just right now — abortion is forever and you deal with that forever; it doesn’t go away.”

She encouraged women in those situations to either “raise your child or find an adoptive family.”

The speeches were organized by the Silent No More Awareness campaign, which encourages women and men to be vocal with their stories if they regret having or encouraging an abortion.

Janet Morana, one of the organizers of the Silent No More Awareness campaign, told CNA that “many babies have been saved” by women telling their stories. She said the stories also “help other women” who regret their abortions to seek redemption.

“The Lord is here to forgive them,” Morana said.