Watching the coverage of the Women’s March this week has affected me in a way I didn’t expect. I have grown up in a world where protests and demonstrations for certain causes are often highly publicized by the media. I am used to the images—the rage, the costumes, the signs, the loudness of it all. But the Women’s March felt different to me. There were many loud and crass voices—like Madonna—but there were also so many, many ordinary looking people there. These women looked like the people across the aisle in the grocery store. They were moms and grandmas. They looked like people I could be friends with.  They looked like me, but we couldn’t be more different.

It seems to me that the great sisterhood of women, who reached out to others in kindness and cared about the rights of all people weaker than them, is no more.

The Women’s March was held for numerous issues. All of them had to do with great uncertainties about our new president and what types of policies he will create. But where the organizers of the march fell on the abortion issue was made abundantly clear when they barred the pro-life group New Wave Feminists from attending, saying: "The Women’s March’s platform is pro-choice and that has been our stance from day one.”

Some estimates have come in saying that the Women’s March could have been the largest gathering of people in multiple locations in the history of the United States. There were 500,000 in D.C, 750,000 in Los Angeles, 250,000 in New York City and many more in other locations. Those three cities alone add up to more than a million people, the majority of which are women, who are willing and proud to march for a pro-abortion platform. Let me rephrase that: More than a million of these beautiful ladies, who could be the lady buying laundry detergent next to me at Target, are marching for the legal ability to have their own babies murdered in a medical facility. It is beyond ironic that the ugliness of one man’s campaign and the indignity of his words and actions could spur so many to feel that they must march against him, while the pro-abortion platform they support is the epitome of brutality and injustice.

I remember growing up in the 80s and 90s there was the idea that the more women spoke up and engaged with the culture, we would have a kinder world. I think that idea is at the heart of the Women’s March. The presidential campaign was unkind, and the direction of the president seems unkind. Women sense there is something different happening. They are marching because there is a feeling that we may enter into a rougher, uglier and more divisive time in the days ahead. I feel that, in general, many women do want a gentle and kind world. Unfortunately, the noble desire for kindness and gentleness is completely overshadowed by the lie of abortion as a human right.

Human rights are things that improve the lives of all humans. Human rights that only help certain humans, while harming others, are not human rights at all. This is why there is so much concern for the disabled, refugees and minorities. God made and loves every person equally. To say that all unborn babies have no inherent right to live is to take away their human rights. They are younger than us, they cannot speak, and they do not have our abilities. These facts do not mean that we can brutally kill them at will. Instead they mean that they deserve greater protection and greater support. Yet to over a million American women this week, the weakness of the human baby in utero was stomped upon, taken advantage of, and the concept of a better world because of women was made a mockery.

Seeing the Women’s March has changed me. I used to believe in the goodness of women. I used to believe that our gentleness and perceptiveness could improve the world. It is heartbreaking to me that by some estimates 1 in every 100 American women attended one of these marches. It seems to me that the great sisterhood of women, who reached out to others in kindness and cared about the rights of all people weaker than them, is no more.

"But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God—having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people. They are the kind who worm their way into homes and gain control over gullible women, who are loaded down with sins and are swayed by all kinds of evil desires, always learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth" (2 Timothy 3:1-7, New International Version).