Several hundred anti-abortion activists gathered outside Colorado Springs’ abortion provider Monday morning at the start of the annual Rocky Mountain March for Life.
The event is held in January to mark opposition to the 1973 Roe V. Wade Supreme Court decision, which legalized abortion in the U.S.
"We're praying for an end to abortion and also in memory of all the lives that have been lost in the last 46 years," said Mary Simmons with the Catholic Diocese of Colorado Springs.
Father Joe Dygert, a theology teacher at St. Mary’s Catholic High School in Colorado Springs, sung hymns while he walked with the procession headed by altar boys and a priest.
"We're walking also with those who can't yet walk because they haven't yet been born but are simply in their mother's womb," Dygert said.
The march moved from Planned Parenthood to the Corpus Christi Catholic Church for mass and lunch.
In response to a request for comment on Monday’s protest, Whitney Phillips, a spokesperson with Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains said:
"Patients are a top priority. We are deeply committed to providing the full spectrum of sexual and reproductive health care, including abortion care, no matter what. Bottom line: reproductive care is health care, and health care is a human right."
While abortion rights activists took part in Women's Marches around the country this past weekend, the close timing of both protests is coincidental.
Abortion could become an issue in the state legislature this year if Democrats use their new majority to try to protect access to the procedure in the face of an increasingly conservative U.S. Supreme Court.
