Thousands march down Market Street for 16th annual anti-abortion event

SAN FRANCISCO - Thousands of opponents of legal abortion marched in San Francisco Saturday during the 16th annual Walk for Life West Coast rally.

The event began with a rally at the San Francisco Civic Center Plaza, and the march took place on Market Street from the Civic Center to the Embarcadero Plaza. The event, police said, remained peaceful.

"You are the generation that is going to do it," said the Rev. Clenard Childress Jr., the New Jersey-based founder of BlackGenocide.org, who had spoken at the first San Francisco Walk for Life event in 2005. "Abortion and Roe v. Wade's days are numbered."

The January timing of the annual Walk For Life is a nod to the anniversary of the Roe vs. Wade U.S. Supreme Court decision that, in 1973, legalized abortion.

Among the other speakers Saturday afternoon was Father Frank Pavone, director of the anti-abortion Priests for Life, and Portland Archbishop Alexander Sample, who gave the invocation at the start of the rally. "We pray the day would come soon that we would not have to gather together like this," he said.