The crowd at Friday’s event was loud and animated. Hundreds of student clubs and church groups stomped through the wet grass in herds, holding signs that read “Help Her Be Brave” and “Save the Baby Humans”—and most wearing matching neon hats or t-shirts. Students from St. Michael, a private school in Fredericksburg, Virginia, were cheering and chanting, “We are the pro-life generation!”

Quigley said this year has been an especially energizing one for pro-life Americans. In 2016, then-candidate Trump wrote a letter to pro-life leaders outlining four commitments: to nominate pro-life justices to the U.S. Supreme Court; to sign into law the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Act; to defund Planned Parenthood; and to make the Hyde Amendment, which prevents federal funds from being used for abortions, permanent law. This, Quigley told me, has been the movement’s working to-do list throughout the past year.

While Trump has accomplished item No. 1—he put Neil Gorsuch, a staunch conservative, on the bench—the other three tasks remain. But he has advanced a pro-life agenda in other ways. In his first three days in office, Trump reinstated a policy that prohibits foreign organizations that receive U.S. funds from providing or recommending abortions. In April, Trump signed legislation allowing states to deny federal funds to organizations that provide legal abortions, like Planned Parenthood. And this month, the Trump administration created a new office in the Department of Health and Human Services devoted to protecting health-care workers who object to participating in abortion procedures, among others.

These actions, coupled with his address at the march, solidify his commitment to the movement, Quigley said. “It’s not just the vice president that’s leading him,” she told me, referring to Mike Pence’s longtime opposition to abortion. “He’s affirmatively chosen this movement as his own.”

During the speeches portion of the rally, House Speaker Paul Ryan offered similar praise for Trump, after taking to the stage to cheers. “The pro-life movement is on the rise,” he said. “Truth is on our side!” (At almost the same time, a pair of birds—what looked like eagles—flew overhead through the cloudless sky, and everyone around me whipped out their phones to capture the symbolism.) “Can we thank God for putting a pro-life president back in the White House?” Ryan asked the crowd.

But Trump only recently aligned himself with the movement. In 1999, he told Meet the Press he was “very pro-choice” and supported partial-birth abortion. By the 2016 campaign, however, he was suggesting that women who get abortions should be punished—a statement he later retracted. This turnabout was believable for some in the pro-life movement. “Here’s the thing about Trump,” Quigley said. “He says he’s had a pro-life conversion. I don’t know his heart, but it looks to me like he absolutely has, that his position is genuine. But the fact is that at the end of the day, either way, he sees the political saliency of this issue.”