March for Life Comes to Kodiak

Kayla Desroches/KMXT

A march on Saturday will give pro-life community members the opportunity to show their solidarity. The march has been going on since 1974, one year from the date that Roe v Wade made abortion legal across the United Sates.

One of the Kodiak organizers, Jill Bull, said that ruling sparked the annual January 22 march.

“There was just a group of women who felt very much that they were in support of human right that extended into the womb, and not that it was something separate, and since then it’s kinda become a judgment-free organization for people who feel that they want to support all human life.”

The march has been going on for years, and Bull says it’s in no way a reaction to last weekend’s Women’s March, which took place the day after inauguration.

The D.C.-based Women’s March on Washington grew into a global movement, and many pro-lifers felt excluded. While the march welcomed all people in support of equality, one of its primary principles as listed on its website was reproductive freedom and the legal right to abortion.

Organizers of the Kodiak-based march strove to make the local event as open and unifying as possible, and Bull says on the national scale, many of the other ideas behind the women’s march serve as common ground for people of all political and religious views.

For instance, the “pussyhats” women knitted to wear on the day of the Women’s March.

“The Women’s March, the hats that they wore were very much in retaliation to what our current president said, and pro-life women also don’t accept that kind of language, so to feel like they were not part of something that they also felt strong for maybe made people feel they weren’t welcome.”

The March for Life will be this coming Saturday, a few days after the event’s official date, and marchers will meet at 11:00 a.m. at Coon Field.