Despite the arctic chill that enveloped the nation’s capital on Jan. 24, participants in this year’s March for Life were warmed by a spirit of measured optimism.

And the pro-life actions initiated by the newly installed Trump-Vance administration during its first week were a substantial contributor to this positive perspective.

Both President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance voiced their full-throated support for the marchers’ pro-life cause. Vance addressed them personally, and in his videotaped remarks Trump declared, “In my second term, we will again stand proudly for families and for life.”

More importantly, the president and vice president’s words were matched by concrete action.

One day ahead of the March for Life, the president announced the pardon of 23 pro-life advocates who were convicted of Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act violations during his predecessor Joe Biden’s term of office. Controversy surrounds some of Trump’s other recent pardons, as well as those dispensed by Biden in the final days of his own outgoing presidency.

No such concerns should attach to Trump’s FACE Act clemency, however. The pardoned pro-lifers were clearly the victims of a Department of Justice that under Biden was determined to advance abortion rights by any means available, no matter how unjust.

Going forward under the new administration, peaceful pro-lifers won’t be prosecuted in this manner because the Trump DOJ has released a directive limiting future FACE Act enforcement to “extraordinary circumstances” involving cases where death, injury or serious property damage occurs.

It can also be hoped that, in concert with the Republican-controlled Congress, Trump will push for a total repeal of this Clinton-era legislation. That’s the only way to ensure it will never again be wrongly weaponized to jail the peaceful pro-life demonstrators at abortion facilities who strive to awaken hearts and minds to the destructive realities associated with legal abortion.

On the day of the March for Life itself, Trump rolled out additional substantive pro-life measures. Most prominently, these included an executive order reinstating the Mexico City Policy that prohibits any taxpayer funding of foreign organizations that provide and promote abortions. An accompanying executive order committed the administration to full enforcement of the Hyde Amendment, the congressional measure that prohibits direct federal funding for abortions domestically.

While Trump’s policy moves on immigration and the death penalty have opened up fault lines with Catholic leaders, the new administration’s initial pro-life forays garnered praise from the U.S. bishops.

“I am grateful for the strengthening of policies that protect us from being compelled to participate in a culture of death and that help us to restore a culture of life at home and abroad,” Bishop Daniel Thomas of Toledo, Ohio, the chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ pro-life committee, said in a Jan. 26 statement.

The Trump administration’s opening moves also traveled some distance towards easing widespread pro-life concerns about Trump’s campaign-trail statements that he would not support a national 16-week limit on abortion or halt distribution of the abortion pills that now constitute a majority of U.S. abortions and are being mailed into states with bans on most or all abortions.

Those remain serious concerns, to be sure. But what has happened to date represents a promising beginning for Trump’s second term, with respect to the pro-life file.