Sharon Ketchum went with her daughter to the nation’s capitol to spread the word of God, as she believes it, and to call for an end to abortion in the country.

While such a protest has clear political implications for the law and how it affects others, she described it as more of an emotional journey for her. It was a chance for her to bond with her 16-year-old daughter, Katelyn, who was attending the March for Life for the second time.

“This was a pilgrimage for my daughter and I,” Ketchum said. “Hearing the speakers, witnessing how many people feel the same way we do, it was a needed boost to our faith.”

The March for Life is an annual rally opposing women’s legal right to abortion as decided by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade ruling in 1973. This year, the speakers included Vice President Mike Pence. The event came the weekend after nearly 500,000 women marched in Washington in protest of President Donald Trump and in support of women’s rights -- including access to abortion.

Ketchum and her daughter, who live in Wentzville, Missouri, left on Wednesday in a caravan of chartered buses taking thousands of St. Louis-area students to the march. The night they arrived in D.C., the group attended a program in which an energetic priest put on a show in the style of late-night talk show host Jimmy Fallon. He even did a lip-sync competition with a nun.

“The kids just loved it,” Ketchum said. It got more serious when they heard from Melissa Ohden, a well-known speaker among anti-abortion activists. She speaks about her experiences as a survivor of her birth mother’s attempted abortion.

The next day, they marched from the Washington Monument to the steps of the Supreme Court building. Ketchum’s group found other students from Missouri, and they chanted: “We love babies, yes we do, we love babies, how about you?”

Thousands of teenagers and college students attend the march each year, but the discussion about abortion starts much younger for some. Ketchum said her children probably learned about it in fifth or sixth grade, when their parochial school begins teaching about puberty. Children learn about the various ways a fetus can be aborted and the church’s stance against it.

Ketchum said the ultimate goal is to end all abortions, including in the case of rape or incest, because she believes life begins at conception. This raises difficult questions, such as what to do with all the embryos created and stored for IVF treatments, but Ketchum says the larger issue is about the consequences of individual decisions.

“I don’t think it’s man’s decision that we can scientifically manufacture a baby,” she said. “It’s God’s will.”

The abortion rate in the U.S. has dipped to its lowest level since the Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 decision that legalized the procedure nationwide, according to a study released by the Guttmacher Institute. In 2014, 19 percent of pregnancies in the U.S., excluding miscarriages, ended in abortion.

About 926,200 abortions were performed nationwide in 2014, the report found, compared with 1.06 million abortions in 2011.

Better birth control access and use is a key to the declining number of abortions, said Megan Donovan, a senior policy manager at the Institute, in news reports about the study.

Ketchum said that with her own children, she wants to focus on the importance of chastity, making moral decisions and responsibility.

“Don’t ask me what I believe on contraception,” she said. “That’s not what I want to talk about. I didn’t go on this trip for the politics. I went on it because I knew it would be an awesome experience with my daughter.”

Her daughter agreed, saying that having her mother attend with her was the most meaningful part of the march. Katelyn also said seeing the large crowd of people standing up for the same issue as her was a favorite moment.

The day after the march, their group gathered in front of the White House to pray for the country and its leaders. Ketchum felt an overwhelming feeling of warmth. She said she voted for Trump because she feels it is what God wanted her to do based on Trump’s stated anti-abortion position.

“I’m trusting Trump and his administration will do what they say,” she said. “We’ll just have to wait and see.”

Ten-year-old Lucia del Pilar interrupted the audiobook she and her mother listened to as they cruised across the country in a hybrid Highlander. The car speakers played Gail Collins’ book, “America’s Women: 400 years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines,” which tells the stories of the women who have shaped our nation.

Lucia spoke up when she heard Anne Hutchinson’s name. She had learned about Hutchinson in her fifth-grade classroom.

“When we were talking about the colonies, she was in the workbook,” Lucia said. “She was one of the only women on the list.” Hutchinson was an outspoken leader and midwife who challenged the established New England Puritan patriarchy. She was tried, convicted and banished from the colony for her religious dissent.

It was fitting car talk for a mother and daughter participating in their first march, a female-led protest against the new president of the United States. Jessica del Pilar, 38, of Clayton, Missouri, took her daughter out of school for two days to travel to the nation’s capital for the Women’s March on Washington. Crowd counts estimate 500,000 people marched in D.C. -- more than triple the estimated attendance of the inauguration itself. Nationally, it is said to have been the largest protest in American history, with political scientists estimating between 3.3 to 4.8 million people participating in towns throughout the country.

But del Pilar had no idea how it would turn out when she decided to drive 800 miles to D.C. with her daughter. During the election cycle, she said, every issue felt polarized to such an extreme. After Donald Trump won and del Pilar saw the reports of violence by some of his supporters, she wanted to do something. His cabinet appointments only affirmed her resolve.

“I think it’s very important for people to understand (that) his supporters don’t represent the whole country,” she said. “I don’t want to be complacent in this moment. I don’t want to pull back or hide or just be hopeful that everything will be OK.”

Having grown up in Denver and lived in D.C., she also felt a little isolated, away from family -- a transplant from blue cities to a red Midwestern state. They made plans to meet up for the march with del Pilar’s sister and aunt, along with a friend traveling from California, who was also bringing her young daughter.

Del Pilar wanted to impart a simple message to her daughter: “It’s time when we need to show that we are going to stand up for what we believe in.”

Lucia made her own signs. One said, “I refuse to be silent.”

On the day of the march, they headed to the Metro station at 8 a.m. It was full of people, and their train only became more packed at each stop. They were letting people out in waves. The attendant had a bullhorn and was chanting, as well.

“It was so positive,” del Pilar said. She and her daughter met the rest of their group and found a space near the stage. The crowd around them swelled. Neither had ever been in a crowd so large before. She watched her daughter listen to speakers like Madonna, Ashley Judd and Gloria Steinem talk about women’s rights and equality. There were times the entire crowd was dancing, and times they were pushed together by the crush of people.

A little before 3 p.m., they started marching toward the White House. When some marchers chanted, “What does America look like?” others responded, “This is what America looks like!”

Lucia was taking it all in.

Del Pilar’s husband texted her while they marched, “I’m so glad you are there.”

She said that if she’d been looking for a larger community that shared her values of liberty and justice for all, she rediscovered it that day. That evening, they huddled around the table, amazed at the aerial images of marches from around the country.

On the drive home to Missouri, she and Lucia listened to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me,” a personal and political history of race in this country written as a series of letters to his teenaged son.

They are still processing the events of the weekend.

The march was the beginning of the story for them -- a renewed start of political engagement; a source of inspiration that will continue to push them forward.

Participating in it was like reading the introduction to an epic anthology, del Pilar said. Until you read the entire book, you don’t truly understand it.

“This thing has yet to be written,” she said.

When Lakeena King’s mom would get home from work, she would snoop in the kitchen garbage. She would spy the candy wrappers or chip bags, and it was on.

“I told you I didn’t want those girls eating chips. Why did you give them those chips?” she would ask her mother.

“Those girls have to eat what they want,” King’s grandmother would say. If asked about the vegetables in the trash, Granny blew off her daughter’s concerns. “If they don’t want to eat that stuff, they don’t have to.”

Nearly every night it was the same argument.

“It would be really funny to watch them argue about what we ate,” King said.

By third grade, King was already getting a little heavy like her mom, although her younger sister took after their grandmother -- she could eat whatever she wanted and stay as thin as a rail. And, boy, they ate what they wanted with Granny.

Twinkies with vanilla ice cream, soda, chips – their grandmother would sneak them whatever snacks they wanted.

Her mom would question her when she got home: “Are you hungry? What did you eat?” King would try to lie about it, but her mom would have already seen the evidence in the trash. She often tried to explain to her daughters that snack foods were a reward, and not to be eaten all the time.

“Granny would say, ‘No, snacks are what you eat,’“ King said with a laugh. Her weight didn’t bother her too much in grade school. She was surrounded by a lot of people who loved her and supported her, and many people in her family were overweight, too. She started noticing it more when they would go shopping for school clothes in middle school. Or when she realized that she ran slower than the other kids.

King, now 27, works as a nurse and also attends beauty school in St. Louis. When she crossed over 200 pounds, she knew it was time to change.

She joined a gym and hired a personal trainer. She worked out hard in the gym, but she told her trainer that her biggest problem was going to be with food. Her trainer started teaching her how to eat healthier.

The first place that dietary change happens is not the kitchen. It’s the grocery store. So King’s trainer went grocery shopping with her. She taught her how to cook a variety of vegetables, like cauliflower, greens and squash, in a way that she would actually enjoy eating them. King started adding a lot more vegetables into her diet, and the weight started coming off.

But fast food was her weakness. She talked to her boyfriend and asked him not to eat it in front of her. Sometimes, they would take a different route home to avoid passing by certain fast food places.

She said she doesn’t blame her grandparents for her weight struggles.

“They just wanted to see their grandbabies happy,” she says.

But oftentimes, those who love us the most can be the ones who sabotage our food choices. Whether it’s a spouse, parent or grandparent, learning to work around that relationship can be the most critical part of improving your family’s diet. Setting boundaries with an enabler may be the one thing that helps sustain lasting change.

King said improving the presentation and seasoning of vegetables she had been served as a child would have made her more likely to eat them.

“I didn’t want to eat them because they didn’t taste good,” she said. It makes sense. Her tastes had been influenced by the heavily spiced, deep-fried food her grandmother enjoyed eating. She is continuing to work on improving her diet and losing weight. I asked her how she might handle the same situation with an indulgent grandparent when she has children.

“I think I would react the same way my mom did,” King said. “But I definitely would feed them before we go see her, so they don’t eat as many snacks. If that won’t work, they just wouldn’t see Granny as much.”