A pro-life group, Students for Life, protested federal funding of abortion giant Planned Parenthood by displaying 196,543 baby socks at the U.S. Capitol Wednesday. Lawmakers were working on the federal budget at the time.

Students for Life collected the socks through their #SockIt2PP campaign and placed them on the lawn as a reminder of how many lives are taken by abortion through Planned Parenthood each year. Planned Parenthood reported that in 2013 their doctors performed almost 330,000 abortions.

Starting a Conversation

Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life, told The Blaze that the point of the demonstration was to “get people to talk about this issue.” She also wants to send a message to Congress that “We elected you to defund Planned Parenthood, and we want it done now.”

Hawkins said the demonstration gave her an opportunity to talk to people about abortion. “I was changing kids’ minds on the street. People were just walking by, and I would say, ‘Every sock represents one baby Planned Parenthood aborts,’ and people’s mouths were dropping. … One kid came back and said, ‘Can you say that again?’ So it’s a huge reminder that these are babies, and that’s not even all of them.”

.@BenSasse tells #sockit2pp that "the first thing we're trying to do is persuade our brothers and sisters to look at the gift of life." pic.twitter.com/C7c6RZkOv9

— Kate Scanlon (@kgscanlon) April 26, 2017

‘A Devastatingly Large Number’ of Abortions

Sen Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) thanked the group for the display. He agreed that the number of abortions is “a devastatingly large number,” and that these kinds of demonstrations are needed to get people to think about the magnitude of lives lost. “[The pro-life movement] is about celebrating human dignity and talking about the gift of life.”

Tom Perez’s statement  Friday that all of those in the Democratic party must support abortion didn’t sit too well with Sasse. He called it “bizarre.”

“So I looked at the guy’s Twitter when he was making those comments this weekend and I noticed that the top of his Twitter feed says he ‘fights for the little guy,” he said. “And I started thinking about, who are the most vulnerable among us?” Sasse then tweeted an image of a 12-week fetus to show Perez that the baby is “a special little guy.” Even though the image “was science,” Sasse still received a backlash of readers calling his tweet propaganda.

Some of the socks at @Students4LifeHQ's #sockit2pp rally pic.twitter.com/hgPPVcXSgm

— Kate Scanlon (@kgscanlon) April 26, 2017

Students for Life will continue to display the socks in future protests. When finished, they will donate them to crisis pregnancy centers. 

The display was emotional for some. One young woman spoke about the baby she chose to keep after considering an abortion. A former Planned Parenthood manager spoke too. She told the crowd that “there should be little feet in all of these socks.”