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ROME, April 9, 2014 (LifeSiteNews.com) – While the annual March for Life in Washington, DC has been a regular feature of US political life for 40 years, and now numbers in the hundreds of thousands, the idea is just starting to catch on around Europe. Most recently it has reached all the way to the far south of Italy where 2,000 people marched in a demonstration against abortion in Palermo, Sicily April 5.

On their Facebook page, the Life, Family and Education Forum warned participants to expect “a real downpour,” unusual for April in Sicily. Nonetheless, the rain did not deter the “people of life” who, the group said, “cheerfully crossed the city center in support of the non-negotiable principles … that should underpin a society worthy of man.” 

The parade was headed by an empty stroller with a sign saying, “I wanted to be there too,” offered “in memory of the six million Italians who did not come to life since the entry into force of Law 194 which legalized abortion.”

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The event was organized around the 33rd annual Day for Life, set by the Catholic Church, and included a round table public meeting discussing “the frontiers of bioethics,” “health and life” and “the biolaw to biopolitics” and other topics. In the evening the meeting was followed by a Mass followed by a concert of the “Pallavicini Chorus” with students from local schools.

The event was organized mainly by the Life, Family and Education Forum with support from 70 religious and lay organizations as well as the municipality of Palermo. Spokesman Diego Torre said, “We believe that the time has come to shout loud and clear, ‘live life and down with the culture of death.’”

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“Local and national institutions,” Torre said, “can no longer ignore the claims of this popular movement. The people of life will continue to fight, at all levels, to have laws that respect the lives and protect the family.” 

One of the speakers at the end of the march, Lea Vanella, the mother of ten children, said, “In some pregnancies some doctors tried to convince me to interrupt them for the possibility of conceiving a sick child. Other times I was told that I was risking my own life. I did not want to listen and now live happily with my ten children, all in good health. Health care facilities should contribute to life, not abortion of innocent creatures.” 

Her husband, Enzo Piston, added, “We are the paradox in Italy. The State penalizes large families rather than supporting them. After the third child there is no additional money.”

Andrea Lavelli, writing in La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana, said that more and more such demonstrations are needed. “In the face of natural values ​​that are subverted, laws that trample fragile and needy human life, in the general silence of the media and institutions, it is increasingly necessary to send messages and strong evidence, once again on what is most obvious and natural in the world: the value of family and the preciousness of all human life from conception.”

And the idea is catching on. Marches for life are being established in some unexpected corners of heavily secularized Europe, including Brussels, the home of the European Parliament, Berlin, Warsaw, GdanskBratislava and Paris, where the march grew to 40,000 this January.

The exponential growth of the March for Life in Rome has surprised even organizers, who last year expected 20,000 but got 40,000.

For information on attending the March for Life in Rome, and the pro-life conference organized by LifeSiteNews.com click here