Abortion foes march, cheer Trump ruling
Federal officials warned state’s abortion coverage requirement could result in loss of federal funds
Thousands of anti-abortion activists converged in front of San Francisco City Hall on Saturday for the annual Walk for Life in a festive mood, the day after federal health officials declared illegal a California rule that requires private insurers to provide abortion coverage.
The march, in its 16th year in San Francisco, protests the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion nationwide. On Friday, President Donald Trump became the first U.S. president to speak at the march in Washington, D.C., where it has been held for more than four decades.
“The momentum is on our side,” Frank Pavone, director of Priests for Life, told a cheering crowd Saturday.
Since Trump’s election, nearly 200 anti-abortion federal judges, including two Supreme Court justices, have been appointed, Pavone noted. “Each year we’re seeing more and more pro-life laws,” he said.
Jessica Munn, chair of San Mateo Pro-life who has attended the march in San Francisco every
year, handed out literature and plastic models of fetuses at different stages of development while attendees milled around.
“This is one major way to educate people,” Munn said, adding that she can talk to people individually and counter what she sees as misinformation about abortion in the media and popular culture.
She said that the antiabortion movement is growing in the country, but that she wasn’t overly optimistic about the recent news that private insurers in California might not be required to cover abortions.
“It sounds wonderful,” she said. “But we’ll see what happens in California.”
Several people held up signs representing various churches and religious groups in attendance, with some saying, “Choose life” and “I am the pro-life generation.” Before the speakers started, informational tables set up in Civic Center Plaza distributed literature about contraceptives and abortion, and sold T-shirts, including some designed like the Starbucks logo that said “choose life.”
After several speakers addressed the crowd — which was described by some attendees as the second-largest anti-abortion gathering in the country after the one in Washington, D.C. — the group began marching down Market Street toward the Embarcadero. A handful of abortion-rights protesters stood alongside the largely peaceful walk. There were no official crowd estimates, but organizers said it was larger than in previous years, filling several blocks of Market Street at a time.
Charter buses brought people from throughout the state, including dozens of students from Thomas Aquinas College in Ventura County. More than 100 members of the Vietnamese Martyrs Parish in Sacramento made the trip to the Bay Area, most of them in two large charter buses, according to organizer Dzung Hoang.
“We feel energized now that big government, especially the president, is listening,” Hoang said.
About 50 people came from St. Lawrence the Martyr Parish in San Jose, including Tim Crews, president of the San Jose chapter of the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal organization.
“It’s obvious we have a position on this and we see things moving in the direction we would like to see, which is putting an end to legal abortion,” Crews said.
He was surprised over how big the turnout was, with attendees covering large swaths of the plaza.
“This is a much more peaceful one than we had a number of years ago,” he said, adding that previous marches had more aggressive confrontations with abortion-rights activists.
Dolores Meehan, cofounder of Walk for Life West Coast, said she’s been happily surprised with how much Trump has focused on anti-abortion causes; she said she didn’t vote for him in 2016 because she didn’t think he would follow through on the issue. Now, she said, there’s momentum going into the 2020 elections, after which activists anticipate that one or more U.S. Supreme Court seats could become vacant.
“I think that the issue is finally coming to a head, and I think that’s appropriate,” Meehan said. “It’s a very serious issue. It should make people upset.”
In 2014, California’s Department of Managed Health Care required that all health insurers in the state cover elective abortions in all their plans. That led to a pair of complaints and, on Friday, a notice of violation from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights.
California’s requirement violated the Weldon Amendment, according to the Office for Civil Rights. The amendment, in part, bars states receiving federal funds from requiring that health care plans pay for abortions. The state has 30 days to address the notice or risk losing federal funds.
“We are putting California on notice that it must stop forcing people of goodwill to subsidize the taking of human life, not only because it’s the moral thing to do, but because it’s the law,”
Roger Severino, director of the civil rights office, said in a statement Friday.
California’s strong abortion-rights stance in the past may have served as a business advantage, according to Lisa Hammann, co-founder and chief executive of Rhia Ventures. The firm invests in startups working on contraceptives and reproductive health.
According to a study by the firm, 61% of women would hesitate taking a job based in a state that has tried to restrict access to abortion. Hammann said she encourages businesses to make sure their insurance covers reproductive health treatments, including abortions, and to be vocal about the issue if they want to be competitive in their hiring.
“It’s not really a ‘should,’ it’s a ‘why wouldn’t you?’ Women make up half of the workforce in this country,” she said. “In the fight for talent, you want to make sure your company is in a state women want to move to.”
By age 45, the study says, 99% of women have used contraceptives and a quarter have had an abortion.