St. Philip’s Church in Bemidji Holds Annual March for Life

The St. Gianna’s Pro-Life Group at St. Philip’s Church in Bemidji held its annual March for Life event this past Saturday. Every year the march is open to the public, and they start in front of the Beltrami County Courthouse and make their way around downtown.

The group gathers and starts off with an opening speech and then takes off, raising many different anti-abortion signs. The several-block march takes place every January and usually has over 100 attendees. Due to subzero temperatures this year, there were fewer marchers than average, but well over 700 people braved the cold to support their cause.

“On a day like this, doesn’t it just warm your heart that people care enough about life to come out at any time?” said St. Gianna Pro-Life Committee Member DJ Bakken. “It is just a public awareness thing to keep in everyone’s mind that abortion is still in our society and we’re trying to protect innocent life from conception until natural death. For far too long in our society, it’s been a commonplace idea that abortion is okay and generations have been raised with that fact. And we just need to keep it in people’s minds and get them to think about the reality of what abortion actually is.”

Different March for Life events are held all around the country every January, which is the anniversary month of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision which legalized abortion in all 50 states. Roe v. Wade itself was overturned in 2022 following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson’s Women’s Health Organization decision, which held the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion.