By LifeSiteNews – January 15, 2025

Tens of thousands of pro-lifers are scheduled to attend the 21st Annual Walk for Life West Coast as the event enters its third decade, with speakers including Ryan Bomberger, Sister Deirdre ‘Dede’ Byrne, Kelly Lester, and Rev. Clenard Childress Jr.

SAN FRANCISCO (LifeSiteNews) — Some 50,000 pro-lifers, along with a LifeSiteNews reporting team, are scheduled to attend the 21st Annual Walk for Life West Coast in San Francisco on January 25. The featured speakers for this year’s rally will be Ryan Bomberger, Sister Deirdre “Dede” Byrne, Kelly Lester, and Rev. Clenard Childress Jr. 

Bomberger was conceived in rape and adopted at six weeks of age. He grew up in a multiracial Christian family with 12 siblings, 10 of whom were adopted. A writer and media commentator, he and his wife Bethany founded The Radiance Foundation, a nonprofit organization that promotes pro-life and pro-family issues.

A retired U.S. Army colonel and surgeon who served in Afghanistan, Sister Dede Byrne is a member of the Little Workers of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. She addressed the 2020 Republican National Convention and is known for her bold witness against abortion.

Lester’s painful earlier life included being molested as a child and raped as a teen, along with homosexuality, pornography, and prostitution. She also worked in the same facility where she had her own first abortion. Today, Lester is a wife and mother of six children who shares her experience of God’s redemptive grace through media articles and work with pro-life ministries. 

Rev. Childress was featured in the PBS Frontline documentary “Anti-Abortion Crusaders inside the African American Abortion Battle.” He is the founder of Life Education And Resource Network (L.E.A.R.N.) Northeast as well as BlackGenocide.org. 

Childress has spoken at nearly every Walk for Life (WFL) West Coast and is considered the “cleanup hitter.” He typically gives the rousing final address from the stage in front of San Francisco’s City Hall, motivating the massive crowd before it embarks on the 1.8-mile course down Market Street to the city’s waterfront.

The inaugural event in 2005 was “without question” the most challenging, WFL co-chair and founding member Eva Muntean told LifeSiteNews. Singing hymns and carrying pro-life banners, the 7,500 attendees were confronted by 3,000 pro-abortion protesters in an organized counter-rally against the Walk. 

Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris, then the mayor and the district attorney of San Francisco, respectively, “marched against us and ginned up the opposition to a fury,” Muntean recalled. “It was so bad that the more mainstream opposition, like other politicians and Planned Parenthood, distanced themselves from those opposing us.”

Muntean added that the San Francisco police “love us” and “kept everyone safe, as they have every year.” 

The number of participants doubled to around 15,000 for the second Walk in 2006. The protesters’ ranks decreased to less than 500, but many sought to offend pro-life families from the sidewalks with shouted obscenities and indecent behavior. There were black-clad anarchists with covered faces and even a plot that was foiled by police to bombard attendees with “balloon bombs” filled with a ketchup-water mixture.

Beside the bay at the end of the procession, the 300 police officers who had maintained a buffer zone between the peaceful marchers and the aggressive protesters received a spontaneous standing ovation.

The number of abortion supporters who turn out to oppose the Walk has shrunk to a few dozen in recent years. News coverage eventually improved, with the WFL website calling 2018 the year “we cracked the media blackout.”

Media outlets “have been co-opted by reality,” Muntean said. “We had to go around them to get our story out at first, but the magnitude of the Walk forced them to take notice. You can hide from the truth, but you can’t hide from the traffic” that results when the rally shuts down the city’s main thoroughfare on one Saturday each January.

It’s tough to name favorites among the dozens of previous speakers, as the most prominent and effective pro-life activists over the past 20 years have appeared on the WFL stage. Many of their talks are available on the Walk’s YouTube channel.

At the 2019 event, seven pregnant mothers took the stage and held microphones to their bellies, enabling the audience to hear the tiny heartbeats of their unborn children. Two of the women, former Planned Parenthood employees Abby Johnson and Patricia Sandoval, were also speakers that year. Four of the mothers returned to the stage with their healthy babies the following year.

Kathy Folan recounted in 2020 how she became pregnant after being raped as a college student in 1990 and later gave up her six-day-old son Nathan for adoption. Nathan Sullivan then joined his birth mother onstage, telling the crowd that people who oppose abortion except in cases of rape “are talking about me and people like me!” 

Christi Hockel Davenport, a woman with Down Syndrome, spoke about the value of her life and every life in 2022. 

“I hope you will remember this about me: I may not be as smart as some people, but I know that being smart isn’t always what makes people happy,” Davenport said. “And what makes people happy is loving and being loved. And when it comes to loving, people who have Down Syndrome are truly exceptional. We are badly needed in this world.”

This year’s Walk for Life will take place less than a week after the inauguration of President Donald Trump, whose reelection was heartily embraced by most pro-lifers. Trump is not perfect on life and other moral issues, but his opponent Kamala Harris made taxpayer-funded abortion without limits the centerpiece of her failed presidential campaign. 

The event’s organizers “do not care who is in the White House, who is in the state house, or who is in the doghouse,” according to Muntean. “What matters is the individual soul. That’s our real field of operation.”

That focus reflects the Walk’s mission “to change the perceptions of a society that thinks abortion is an answer … (and) to change hearts hurt by the violence of abortion.”

Christine Guzman has attended 18 of the 20 Walks for Life. She will travel to San Francisco on a bus from her Catholic parish in Sacramento on January 25, following morning Mass and a sendoff including coffee and donuts.

“There have been many wonderful speakers over the years,” said Guzman, noting that Rev. Childress “has been very good in encouraging and firing up the pro-life crowd. The women from Silent No More who have shared their testimonies tell the truth about how abortion impacts the mothers and their families as well as their babies.”

She said Walk for Life West Coast remains vital as it enters its third decade because “seeing so many people coming together, especially young people, gives all of us hope for the future. It also gives us added courage to go back to our own communities and witness for life at Planned Parenthood and other abortion facilities.”   

Robert Jenkins is a pseudonym for a Catholic writer living in Sacramento, California.