Pro-life rally attracts growing crowd to pray at Cemetery of the Innocents

A small group of people in Cape Girardeau huddled together in biting cold Monday to pray on the 34th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision making abortion legal.

A larger group filled four buses that left St. Vincent de Paul Church Saturday to go to Monday's pro-life rally in Washington, D.C. Those who could not go along gathered instead at the Cemetery of the Innocents on Mount Auburn Road near Highway 74 to show their support.

The two groups were linked not only by commitment but by cell phone. About a half hour before the march in Washington was to begin, one of the local participants there told Sara Bohnert of Perry County that this year's march was bigger than ever before.

"The pope sent a representative to the march," Bohnert repeated to the group at the Cemetery of the Innocents from the phone transmission. "That's the first time that happened."

Support for repealing Roe v. Wade appears to be growing, Bohnert said. For the last three years, only three buses took local supporters to Washington. This year, she said, 10,000 people attended a Mass at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington Sunday, according to one of the local marchers on the phone from Washington.

Local participants came and went throughout the two-hour vigil at the Cross Memorial Monday, some coming during their lunch hour.

"We're not here for numbers," said Jeanette Dohogne, who works at a women's crisis center. "We're here for a respect for life, to support life and to support the march in Washington."

The group also came to pray for the 43 million abortions performed nationwide since the passage of Roe v. Wade.

"That's 4,400 daily," Bohnert said. "It's the greatest holocaust."

They also prayed for the women who are facing unplanned pregnancies, for women who have had abortions, for the people who counsel women to end their pregnancies, and for the doctors and nurses who perform abortions, sometimes against their will, said Myrna Etheridge of G&M Etheridge Ministries Inc., of Sikeston, Mo.

The group also prayed for the original participants in the case that led to the Supreme Court ruling.

The group prayed for not only an end to what Mark Renaud of Perryville, Mo., called "embryocide" but for a respect for all life: for embryos grown solely for research and for people like Terri Schiavo who died after her feeding tube was removed while she was in a persistent vegetative state.

lredeffer@semissourian.com

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