The march also drew the largest counterdemonstration organizers say they have faced. A group of protesters, many with faces covered, forced their way into Westminster Cathedral during the opening Mass and had to be physically removed; organizers reported that arrests followed. Along the route to Parliament Square, masked counterprotesters trailed the marchers with loud hailers, chanting to drown out pro-life speakers.
Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, the march's co-director, said organizers met "certainly more opposition" than in previous years. Archbishop John Wilson of Southwark addressed the crowd at the march's conclusion. "We want to say today that human life matters, that every life matters, from first moments of conception to natural death," he said, "and we're doing that joyfully, with great confidence and with great love." Fourteen of the fifteen bishops walked the full route and offered a closing blessing at Parliament Square.
Strip away the loud hailers and the arrests, and what remains standing on both sides of that square is a disagreement over one old claim: that the smallest human being, unseen and unborn, already carries the full weight of a life made by God.
A Claim Older Than Westminster
Ten thousand people do not walk three miles through a hostile crowd for a slogan. They walk for a conviction — that the child not yet born is not a clump of possibility but a person, already known, already named, already loved by his Maker before anyone else laid eyes on him. That conviction did not begin in a cathedral in Westminster. It began before the world did.
"Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations." (Jeremiah 1:5)
God said that to Jeremiah, but He was not describing a special exception. He was describing how He makes every man. The Psalmist said much the same:
"For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother's womb." (Psalm 139:13)
My friend, that is not poetry dressed up to win an argument in the street. That is the plain testimony of the God who cannot lie, and it settles the question the marchers and the counterprotesters were shouting past each other about. The womb is not a waiting room where personhood is decided by a vote or a due date. It is a workshop where God is already at His labor, knitting together a soul He intends to keep.
That is why the bishops walked, and why so many ordinary men and women walked behind them, undeterred by masks and megaphones. Somebody has to say, in a culture grown weary of saying it, that a life is a life from its first moment — not because a church declares it, but because the God who made the church declared it first, long before Westminster had a cathedral to be disrupted in.
The masked protesters who forced their way into that Mass believed they were shouting down an outdated institution. They were, whether they knew it or not, shouting at the God who formed them, too, in a womb of their own, before they had done anything to earn His notice. He knew them before they knew themselves. That is grace older than any grievance, and it does not run out because a man raises his voice against it.
There is room at the foot of that truth for everyone in that crowd — the marcher with the placard and the protester with the loud hailer alike. The gospel does not ask a man to win the argument in Parliament Square before it will have him. It asks him to come as he is, formed and known and sanctified by a God who was at work on him before he ever drew breath, and to trust the Christ who died so that the life God knit together might be saved, not merely defended.