Vice President J.D. Vance addressed pro-life activists in Washington, D.C., at the annual March for Life rally.

VICE PRESIDENT J.D. VANCE: Good morning, marchers. How we doing? It’s great to be with you again. It was my very first speech as Vice President of the United States was the March for Life last year and I’m proud to be back with much better weather this time around. Now, some of you may remember that in my remarks last year, I told you all one of the things I most wanted in the United States of America was more families and more babies. So, let the record show you have a Vice President who practices what he preaches. Usha and I announced this week that we’re expecting our fourth and it will be our third baby boys, so we’ll take whatever prayers you can give. We certainly need them. And when I was here last year, I had one other piece of advice for this group and that was very simple, to be joyful in your advocacy. And looking out at this crowd today, it seems like you took that suggestion very well to heart because I see joyful people. I see grandmas. I see parents. I see beautiful little kids with incredible green hats. Now, did you all dress like that so that if you lost yourselves, you could find everybody? Okay, that’s a good plan. I’m going to take that advice back home. The theme of this year’s March for Life, as most of you all know, is that life is a gift. And I know for me personally, this year, there is so much to be thankful for. I’m grateful to my own family, for my beautiful wife Usha, and that God has given us the miracle of new life again. I’m grateful for this movement, for the truth that is on our side, and frankly, I’m thankful for the technological breakthroughs that have allowed us to affirm and protect life. Things like 3D ultrasounds that didn’t exist just a few short decades ago. Things like the new medical technologies that have saved the lives of countless premature babies. But let me today say that I am especially grateful for all of you, even the ones with Michigan hats, and there are a couple of you out there. For the thousands of men and women and children, for the church groups, the school groups, the grandparents and the toddlers, and everyone in between who braved this chilly Washington afternoon. All of us, all of us in the Trump administration from the president on down, we thank you for your prayers, we thank you for your perseverance, and we thank you that for today, we are all marching for life. I know a lot of us heard from the president just before this, so you know that he loves and cares deeply about this movement, and it’s why he has fought for the pro-life cause and why we do it in this administration, and it’s why three years ago, we cannot forget, he delivered and his Supreme Court justices delivered the most important Supreme Court decision of my lifetime. Because with the Dobbs decision, what we did, what the president did, what the Supreme Court did, was put a definitive end to the tyranny of judicial rule on the question of human life. He shattered a 50-year culture of disposability, one that treated human life as expendable the moment that it became inconvenient, and he empowered our nation and our movement to build a culture of life from the grassroots up. And over the last year, I gotta brag a little bit, our administration has worked very hard to lead that effort and to pick up the pieces to clean up the wreckages of five decades of bad policy on the question of life. It’s an amazing crowd. Our vision, our vision is simple. We want life to thrive in the United States of America. We want Americans, every American from all walk of life, to have happy, healthy children, and we want them to raise those kids with confidence that their kids are going to do well and grow up in safety and prosperity, that they’ll have access to good jobs, great schools, safe streets, and warm houses in which to raise their kids. And we want all of our American families to be able to do it with the confidence that their nation will stand with them just as they have stood with the United States of America. Now, you all know this very well, that building a culture of life requires persuasion. And that’s what’s so different about this moment compared to the moment that was dominated by the Supreme Court for 50 years. We’re not trying to argue to the Supreme Court anymore, we’re trying to argue to our fellow citizens that we must build up that culture of life. And as you know, that effort is going to take a lot of time, it’s going to take a lot of energy, and it’s going take a little bit of money. And that’s why we’re here, because you know that. We’re marching for life because we want our wonderful fellow Americans, even if they don’t disagree with us, to know that life is worthy, it is worthy of protection, and that is why we march today. So let me tell you something very simple. Under this administration, again, from the President of the United States to the Vice President, you have an ally in the White House. Now, some of our work over the last year has been very straightforward and very easy. We started by undoing the evils we saw under the previous administration. Like, for example, throwing priests and grandmothers in prison for praying outside a clinic, that’s over. We stopped it. Where the previous administration mandated taxpayer funding for abortions, including travel costs across the entire government, this administration ended it. And over the past year, we built steadily upon the victories of the President’s first term. We have secured religious freedom in the United States of America once again, that was important. We have ended the censorship of Christians, Jews, and other Americans of faith who are punished simply for following their faith in public life. We have expanded conscience protections for health care workers and defended faith-based foster care and adoption. We gutted Biden-era rules and ensured that no nun, no nurse, no pharmacist, and no physician has to check their faith and their values at the door of their workplace. And under the last administration, under President Biden and congressional Democrats, the power of government, we know, was marshaled against us, against our faith, against our families, and most importantly, against the most vulnerable. That stopped with the Trump administration and it is not coming back. Just this week, just this week, we took action to force Illinois into compliance with the Weldon Amendment and stopped making health care providers refer for abortions. That was a big one. And as the President knows better than anybody, if we want to convince more Americans to choose life, we must also choose policies that make family life possible. So we’ve done that as well. With the Trump accounts, we started at the very beginning of life, investing in every new American child from day one onward. We stood with parents by boosting the child tax credit as well, because no family should be penalized for choosing to have kids. In fact, we ought to be rewarding for families for choosing to have kids. And when Usha and I were having the debate about whether we were going to have a fourth kid, I said, honey, we’ve got an expanded child tax credit and we’ve got the Trump accounts. We’ve got to take advantage of this stuff. We’re restoring homeownership for real families. And you may not think this is connected to the pro-life cause, but when we ensure that real families, moms and dads, instead of Wall Street, have access to American homes, we help create that important culture of life. And the thing that I’m perhaps the most proud of is that we have been responsible stewards of your tax dollars on this question of life. And so just yesterday, this administration launched fraud investigations into Planned Parenthood affiliates. For millions of dollars in PPP loans that were unlawfully received and unlawfully forgiven by the Biden administration, you should not be able to get fraud and use taxpayer money for abortion. It’s that simple. At many other departments, we’ve reinstated a ban on the use of fetal tissue in federal research. That’s another big one. And this is something we’re so proud of. We’re returning accountability to our foreign policy as well. Under Joe Biden, it was the policy of the United States to export abortion and radical gender ideology all around the world. That is what they did with your tax money. They would relentlessly bully developing countries into parroting their far-left views. But under President Trump’s leadership and with our great Secretary of State, we believe that every country in the world has the duty to protect life. And that it’s not our job as the United States of America to promote radical gender ideology, it’s our job to promote families and human flourishing. Now, that’s why we’ve completely realigned U.S. foreign aid and turned off the tap for NGOs whose sole purpose is to dissuade people from having kids. It’s why we rejoined the Geneva Consensus Declaration to promote maternal health and strong families all over the world. And it’s why we speak up when other nations throw pro-life and pro-family advocates in prison for silent prayer, which we’ve seen way too much. But it’s got to stop. And today, our administration is proud to announce a historic expansion of the Mexico City policy. We’re going to start blocking every international GO that performs or promotes abortion abroad from receiving a dollar of U.S. money. Now, we’re expanding this policy to protect life, to combat DEI, and the radical gender ideologies that prey on our children. And with these additions, the rule will now cover every non-military foreign assistance that America sends. All in all, we have expanded the Mexico City policy about three times as big as it was before, and we’re proud of it because we believe in fighting for life. And a lot of you may know that under the Biden administration, they used Medicaid and other programs to launder your tax dollars into abortion money all over the United States of America. And with the help of our Republican majorities in Congress, with the working families tax cuts, we stopped that practice once and for all. It’s illegal now, exactly as it should be. Let me just say, my friends, that we have to be clear. We cannot be neutral. Our country cannot be indifferent about whether its next generations live or die. Because, think about it, what ultimately gives meaning and life to the United States of America, this is not a new question. Every civilization has been forced to answer it. You march today, we march today, because you have an answer to this question about what kind of civilization we are, and about what kind of civilization we’re going to become in the future. I read an article some time ago. It was about classic archaeology, of all things, and one particular piece of information has haunted me. That one of the telltale signs of an ancient brothel in the pagan world was that you’d always find a large number of baby skeletons nearby. A lot of baby skeletons. And those bones predominantly belonged to boys. Because, unlike little girls, those boys would be of no use to the future adults who were running those brothels. Now, this is shocking to us, because we grew up in a Christian culture and were formed by religious values. Even those of us who aren’t particularly faithful, it’s a shocking thing to hear. But we have to remember that in the ancient pagan world, discarding children was routine. From the skeletons in brothels to the child sacrifice of the Mayans, the mark of barbarism is that we treat babies like inconveniences to be discarded rather than the blessings to cherish that they are. But the inheritance of our civilization is something else. The fact that as scripture tells us, each life is fearfully and wonderfully made by our Creator. The March for Life, my friends, it’s not just about a political issue as important as all this politics stuff is. It is about whether we will remain a civilization under God, or whether we ultimately return to the paganism that dominated the past. Today, the far left in this country tells our young people that marriage and children are obstacles, that it’s irresponsible, even immoral, because of climate change or some other reason, to encourage our young people to raise a family. They tell us that life itself is a burden. But we here at this march, we know that it’s a lie. We know that life is a gift. We know that babies are precious because we know them and we love them and we see the way that they can transform our families. We know that family is not just the source of a great joy, but it’s part of God’s design for men and women, a design that extends outward from the family to our neighborhoods, to our communities, and to the United States of America itself. And we know, we here know, that treating everyone with dignity isn’t always easy. It’s not always convenient, but it’s the right thing to do. We know that the people telling our young men and women that discarding family and children is a form of liberation, we know that those people are telling a lie. And so to our fellow Americans, we march in part to serve as a witness. To our fellow Americans, we say you’re never going to find great meaning in a cubicle or in front of a computer screen, but you will find great meaning if you dedicate yourself to the creation and sustenance of human life. Now I must address an elephant in the room, and I’ve heard the guy over here talking about it, a fear, a fear that some of you have that not enough progress has been made, that not enough has happened in the political arena, that we’re not going fast enough, that our politics have failed to answer the clarion call to life that this march represents and that all of us, I believe, hold in our hearts. And I want you to know that I hear you and that I understand. There will inevitably be debates within this movement. We love each other, but we’re going to have open conversations about how best to use our political system to advance life, how prudential we must be in the cause of advancing human life. I think these are good, honest, and natural debates, and frankly they’re not just good for all of you. They help keep people like me honest, and that’s an important thing. But I think all of us also have to remember that we are commanded to let not our hearts be troubled, because I look at this crowd and I see young people for whom Dobbs is the only world they’ve ever known. And I see people with just a little bit more gray in their hair. Who for 50 years toiled to live in a country where questions of life would be answered by we the people, rather than tyrants and rogues. All of us have heard their stories. They’ve heard of the movement betrayed of taking one step forward, and then two steps back, and then three steps forward after that. They know stories of heartbreak and of triumph. Some of them I’ve known very personally from ballot issues that I fought very hard for, some of which have gone the right way, and some of which have gone the wrong way. And I remember friends of mine who spent their entire lives fighting for the unborn without ever seeing the victories that have accumulated in recent years. My friends, I’d ask you to look where the fight for life stood just one decade ago, and now look where it stands today. We have made tremendous strides over the last year, and we’re going to continue to make strides over the next three years to come. But I’m a realist. I know that there is still much road ahead to travel together. Take heart. Take heart in how far we’ve come, but don’t lose sight of why we march. And so long as you are out there marching for life, I hope you know that the Vice President of the United States will march with you. God bless you all, and thanks for having me.

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