Marchers distributed candles while waiting for a speech and a police escort to Calvary Memorial Church and Christian School, sponsor of the event.
“I’m out here to march for life,” said Marie Cutler, 11, a student at Calvary Christian School. She and her parents, Robert and Rita Cutler of Niagra, attend Saint Anthony of Padua Catholic Church in Southern Pines. “I’ve been to the march in Washington (D.C.) for the last two years.”
“More people should to be out here,” said Shirley Johnson, also a member of Saint Anthony’s and a resident of Whispering Pines. “First it’s abortion — then euthanasia. It’s time to take a stand.”
Johnson’s husband, retired Army Gen. Bob Johnson, 87, who attends the Church of Wide Fellowship, accompanied her to the rally.
The Rev. Dan Carr, 69, interim pastor at Calvary Memorial Church, wore an overcoat and held a Bible and a bullhorn as he spoke to the crowd.
“We get our ideas of life from the word of God,” Carr said, beginning his reading at Psalm 33:12. “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord … The eye of the Lord is upon them that fear him … to deliver their soul from death.”
After lifting his Bible and saying that America’s founding fathers “depended largely on this book,” Carr said, “We’re here to pay silent homage to 43 million babies — 4,000 died today…The most dangerous place for a child to be is in his mother’s womb… Hitler killed six million Jews, and I remember hearing when they said he must be stopped. One day America is going to pay, just as Nazi Germany paid.”
Carr expressed pride in still being a “part of this great nation” and asked his audience to pray, “as we join hearts and hands as a testimony to this city.”
Candle-bearers assembled behind a police car and walked east on East Broad Street, left on Pennsylvania (crossing railroad tracks), left on West Broad, and right on Indiana. Five youths led the marchers and carried a banner displaying the words “Moore County, NC for Life.”
Some vigil-keepers sang “Jesus Loves the Little Children.” A few women pushed strollers holding bundled infants.
The march ended at the field adjacent to Calvary Memorial Church on Bennett Street. Four thousand small flags dotting the field represented the number of babies aborted each day in the U.S., said George Schofield, 37, a Calvary Memorial Church member who led a dismissal prayer.
Bob Kirsling, 49, and his wife Patti, 43, of Southern Pines, talked as they walked to their car.
“We all should stand for the unborn, regardless of denomination,” said Patti Kirsling, who related that she was 11 years old when a blow to her head caused the onset of epilepsy. Her daughters, Rachel, 17, and Leah, 15, who also attended the pro-life march, do not suffer with epilepsy.
After Kirsling conceived her first daughter, her doctor, not knowing Kirsling’s epilepsy occurred as a result of an accident, asked her if she wanted to abort her baby. Kirsling said her doctor mistakenly thought the child might be born with epilepsy.
“That’s what opened my eyes to the abortion problem,” Kirsling said. “I now go to the marches in Southern Pines, Raleigh and Washington, D.C.”
