The March for Women and for Life in Mexico City, Oct. 3, 2021. / David Ramos/CNA

Mexico City, Mexico, Oct 4, 2021 / 17:29 pm (CNA).

More than 300,000 people participated in a march in favor of women and of life in Mexico City on Sunday, with more than 1 million total in associated marches across the country.

For the Oct. 3 march in Mexico City, the crowd gathered outside the National Auditorium and marched for more than a mile to the Independence Monument.

They chanted in favor of women and the defense of life from the moment of conception.

Posters and slogans also highlighted criticism of the members of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation, who in September made two decisions in favor of legalizing abortion and restricted the right to conscientious objection of health professionals.

At the monument the participants listened to testimonies and messages.

On stage, a doctor performed an ultrasound on a mother 38 weeks pregnant, allowing the participants in the march to hear the baby’s heartbeat.

​​The coordinator of the march, Marcial Padilla, shared his testimony with his wife Mayela Sepúlveda and their 9-year-old daughter Ana Paula, who has a “very severe brain injury.”

“She can’t take care of herself, she needs everything from us,” they said.

“She is just as vulnerable as when she was a baby before birth or newborn,” they recalled, highlighting that “we have learned that love for a sick child can be infinite.”

While “some might think that Ana Paula is worthless, or that her life has no meaning,” they pointed out, “it is exactly the opposite.”

“That does not mean that it is easy or that it does not cost us work,” but they stressed that Ana Paula’s life “is wonderful by itself.”

Also present at the march was Mayra Rodríguez, a pro-life leader who formerly worked at a Planned Parenthood in Arizona.

Rodriguez, said that “I was the director of the largest abortion clinic in the state of Arizona.”

“What I saw there is what has me standing here with you today,” she added.

Rodriguez told the crowd how she reported several “incomplete abortions,” such as the case of a doctor who “left the head of a 14-week-old baby, which he referred to as garbage, inside the mother’s womb, without caring if that woman would die the next day from an infection.”

Lianna Rebolledo, a Catholic speaker and pro-life leader, recalled that she was kidnapped and raped at age 12, and became pregnant.

Rebolledo regretted that many think that rape “have already destroyed a girl’s life, that no one is going to love her, that she is no longer worthy, and that she should abort the baby.”

“But you know what, that’s a double victimization,” she stated.

In her case, she noted, “Fortunately the fact that they told me that I was pregnant changed my life,” despite the fact that doctors advised her to abort.

“Even as a 12-year-old girl, you ask yourself: Will getting an abortion take away the fact that I was raped? Will I forget the trauma? No, right?”

For Rebolledo, “the greatest gift that life has given me, that God has given me, has been my daughter.”

“She, at four years old, told me, ‘mommy, thank you for giving me life’,” she pointed out.

Speaking with ACI Prensa, CNA’s sister publication in Spanish, Rodrigo Iván Cortés, president of the National Front for the Family, said that “Mexico marched, Mexico stood up, Mexico did not give up, Mexico showed it is in favor of life, in favor of women, in favor of the family, in favor of fundamental freedoms.”

“Let the three powers of the union listen to us: executive, legislative and judicial,” he said, at the “federal, state and municipal” levels.

“Let them listen loud and clear: we do not want more deaths, we want more life, we do not want them to legalize the crime of abortion, we want them to protect the pregnant woman and the baby that she carries within her,” he said.

Furthermore, he said, “we don’t want them to redefine the family but to support it.”