by Ryan Welcenbach

I was groggy, as most teenagers are at five in the morning, on a Thursday, but ecstatic to leave for Washington D.C. that morning. Sure, the March For Life would be fun to do, but I was really just doing this trip to leave my parents for a couple of days and take a few welldeserved days off of school. I cared about abortion, I really did, just not that much that I would dedicate my entire life around it. The trip would be worthwhile spiritually, too; I could sense that because all we had for chaperones were priests from our school. We were about to fly out the Baltimore-Washington airport and head on down to Washington for the March For Life.

The flight over wasn’t spectacular or horrendous, it was just another domestic flight to the East Coast, mostly of businessmen angry at their bosses for either sending them to Milwaukee, or sending them to an airport centered right between Baltimore and Washington, but another half hour to either city. The weather was a pleasant change, though; it was about 55 degrees outside when we boarded the train to Union Station (there’s a Union Station in about every major city I have been to) in Washington. I had my anti-abortion sweatshirt on as our group wandered the halls of Union Station looking for a place to quell our hunger. Walking around, a man came up to me and asked if I wanted to get my picture taken with the President, a “pro-choice” politician. Intrigued, I walked over to scope out the place. They gave me a plastic hand, placed me in front of a greenscreen, and told me to look up and shake the plastic hand. I did, not knowing that a picture was being taken of me, with my defending life sweatshirt on, and President Obama. How could I not buy that picture as a souvenir? That was what I was in Washington for, to relieve all of my stresses.

We walked the short distance to our hotel where we all received anti-abortion signs, but a lot of us decided to play some card games and wait for our hotel room to be ready. We were told that downstairs there were speakers and a convention going on about how abortion is awful and yadda yadda yadda. We kept playing cards, bored with what was going on around us. Our rooms were ready an hour later so I and three other boys walked up to our room and camped out in there for another hour, waiting for the call to come down to the lobby and go to the Mass for Life at the National Basilica on the campus of the Catholic University of America. Bored with all the political shows on TV, two other boys and I decided we might as well head down to the convention and hear some people speak.

When we got down to the conference room, a man and a woman were standing at the podium. We sat down expecting boring talks about “children this” and “life” that. What we got were heart throbbing stories about women who had abortions, their gruesomely accurate depictions of how their abortions went, and tales about the depression that followed their murdering of their own flesh and blood. In every single talk, depression was a constant follower of abortion. Every single woman up on stage dealt with depression and many attempted suicide. Awkwardly, during all of these talks, a man stepped up to the podium, his eyes already welling up. This man began to talk of his wife’s suicide; she murdered herself because she could not stand that she murdered someone else. She thought she was saving her own life throughout this process, yet she not only took the life of an unborn child, but killed herself as well. The audience rose to its feet, clapping with tears pouring down faces, mine included. We all wished the man well as he walked off the stage. I never saw him again.

Collecting myself for the night ahead, our group traveled out to the Basilica and went to the National Catholic Youth Mass. Our group arrived two hours early, and got a place on the floor up against a wall. The mass began with a procession of priests that lasted for 45 minutes. The mass proceeded as usual with the Bishop and Cardinal from Houston- Galveston giving the Homily about abortion. The mass finished and the priests marched out and our group went back to the hotel for the night. The next day, at seven in the morning, we met again in the lobby, with the new people joining the trip going to the Verizon Center for a rally about abortion. The mass was excellent, and the Verizon Center is a magnificent arena, with the American right-hand-man to the Pope present and giving the Homily. That mass went pretty well, but I still didn’t feel that deep connection yet like all of the singing and joyful youth people at the mass obviously did feel.

The next and final part of our mission was to head to the March on the National Mall. I still didn’t feel that connection with abortion yet and really couldn’t wait to get home and take a nice long nap. I was given the job of taking pictures and making videos with Father Belmonte’s camera, but I didn’t expect to do much with it. When we immerged onto the mall, hundreds of thousands of people lined the sides of the mall and our group walked right down the middle of the street. I whipped out the camera and started videotaping our walk down toward the back of the group. Everywhere there were pro-life signs, from every corner of America. California was there, Missouri was there, Maine was there, and Tennessee was there. Everyone was united under one cause. That was the place where the issues really sunk into me. This issue is really important to millions of people that couldn’t make it to Washington that night. From every race and political background, we were all pro-life, believing that murder is illegal and killing an unborn baby is still killing a person. I felt connected at that one point, that this trip finally paid some dividends rather than just missing school. I felt a turning point there as I walked the streets of Washington on the day Roe v. Wade was passed, legalizing the murder of unborn children. You may not feel connected to abortion, but if you heard the voices of those women, haunted by their actions everyday, and if you heard the chants and cries to end abortion, there would be no stopping you to help out wherever you could. Get out there like I did and see what it’s all about. Go to a meeting about abortion and hear tales about the death and gore that come with abortion, and if you can, take your church, family, or yourself to Washington DC and support the pro-life movement.