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Young people have been part of the anti-abortion movement since the 1970s. The annual March for Life in Washington, held around the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, now draws buses of students from around the country to what has transformed over the years into a festive youth-driven rally.

Clare Fletcher, 26, a teacher at a Catholic school in Illinois, has attended the March for Life at least 10 times. She grew up in a strongly anti-abortion home, influenced by the understanding that her adopted younger sister’s birth mother had pursued an abortion before giving birth.

The event, and the movement it represents, have always been “a source of joy and celebration of life and fun and community,” Ms. Fletcher said.

When she was a teenager, her father led a caravan of buses from Louisiana that she described as raucous road trips involving matching hats, flash mobs, tourist stops and silly songs. She can still sing from memory an anti-abortion parody of the Taio Cruz hit “Dynamite”: “Just wanna celebrate and be pro-life saying ayo, gotta pray-o!”

As a teenager active online, Lauren Marlowe had a hazy understanding that supporting abortion rights was what “nice” people did. But she was drawn to think differently in part because of advancements in ultrasound images. “Back then, when they looked at ultrasounds and thought it was a clump of cells, that was all they could see,” she said, referring to a phrase used by the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thompson in a famous 1971 defense of abortion.