COLUMBIA — The annual Stand Up for Life March and Rally, led by the Honor Guard of the Knights of Columbus, will be held Saturday, Jan. 12. It marks the 29th consecutive year of South Carolinians standing up for the rights of unborn children.
Wanda Franz, Ph.D., president of the National Right to Life Committee, will be the featured speaker. The Florence Baptist Temple Choir and Orchestra will provide the music. The theme of this year’s march and rally is “Without the right to life, there are not other rights.”
“Our charge as pro-lifers,” Franz said in press information, “is nothing less than to confront, reject and subvert the culture of death and replace it with God’s culture of Life.”
Franz is a developmental psychologist and a professor of child development in the division of Family and Consumer Sciences at West Virginia University in Morgantown, W.V. She has been involved in the right-to-life movement since 1971 when she began speaking to student groups on fetal development. She has been president of the National Right to Life Committee since 1991.
Franz also serves as president of the Association for Interdisciplinary Research in Values and Social Change. She has spoken on abortion and euthanasia across the United States and around the world in Australia, New Zealand, Poland, Colombia, Sweden, Russia, Egypt, Italy, and the Czech Republic. She has been profiled and quoted in a wide range of publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, U.S. News and World Report, and The Washington Times. She has appeared on numerous television and radio programs, including National Public Radio, “The MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour,” “CBS This Morning” and NBC’s “Today.” She hosts the National Right to Life daily radio commentary, “Pro-Life Perspective,” which airs on more than 200 outlets nationwide.
Lineup for the march begins at 11 a.m. on Greene Street in front of the University of South Carolina Russell House. The march steps off at 11:30 a.m. and proceeds to the north steps of the Statehouse on Gervais Street. The rally begins at noon.
The annual Stand Up for Life March and Rally is sponsored by South Carolina Citizens for Life and the University of South Carolina Students for Life.
For more information, contact the South Carolina Citizens for Life office in Columbia at (803) 252-5433.