There were several full size buses.  The parking lot was jammed.  Teens and their parents were all over the place.  It was cold and dark, 6:00 at night.  It was the parking lot of St. Mark’s Catholic Church in South St. Louis County.

The buses were gathering the young participants who would be participating in the March for Life in Washington, DC.  And this was only one meeting spot in one part of the St. Louis metro area.  Other meeting places saw similar groups of hundreds of young people packed and ready to go.

The bus our daughter Kerry got on headed first west to Sacred Heart in Valley Park, Missouri, where a large rally was held that lasted until the 11th hour, then east, to Washington DC, where the largest civil rights rally is still being held at this time every year and ignored by the main stream media.

At 8:00 am this morning, Kerry texted us that she had gotten no sleep and that they were now in Columbus, Ohio, eating breakfast at a Cracker Barrel, “The same one we at ate on our last family trip and I got sick and threw up,” she reminded me in the text.

Thousands of buses filled with hundreds of thousands of young people descending on a president who promises to make “civil rights” his biggest goal, while he kills religious freedom, destroys marriage and the family, and zealously fights for the slaughter of the innocent.

George Weigel writes today in First Things

The pro-life movement is getting younger while the pro-“choice” opposition is graying. What really alarms the pro-Roe forces in American politics about the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., is not just the impressive numbers: it’s that the marchers get younger, every year. And that youthful vitality is not limited to one cold January day in the nation’s capital; there are new pro-life organizations among younger physicians and attorneys. All of which suggests that the pro-life movement is American civil society at its robust and self-revitalizing best.

As my daughter Kerry and others will tell you, there will be sleeplessness and sickness and sacrifice on the road to the capital of a nation that murders its young  – but the road is paved with hope as long as the young who have survived continue to tread it for justice and for life.