In criticizing Notre Dame’s decision to give President Obama an honorary doctorate of law degree Sunday, Lacy Dodd asked the crowd to look at the little girl in the bright yellow dress standing next to her on stage.

Dodd said she learned she was pregnant three months before she was to graduate from the University of Notre Dame in 1999. The man with whom she conceived wanted to her to have an abortion, telling her that Catholic opposition to abortion is “just dining room talk,” she said.

“This precious child standing next to me is our witness to life,” Dodd told several thousand people gathered in the campus’s South Quad area Sunday. “She is here because I did not cave in to the pressure and rhetoric around me when I learned I was pregnant.”

Mary Logan, 9, smiled out at the crowd.

Dodd, now a board member at a Charlotte, N.C., crisis pregnancy center, was one of seven speakers at the rally organized by ND Response, a coalition of students that formed to oppose Obama’s honorary degree. The crowd, predominantly middle-aged and older adults, could watch the speakers on stage or by looking at a large video screen off to the right.

One speaker was a surprise. In protest, Bishop John D’Arcy of the Fort Wayne-South Bend Roman Catholic Diocese, had planned to stay away from campus Sunday. But he changed his mind after seeing the “sincerity and dignity” of protesting students at a prayer vigil at the Grotto on Saturday night, he said.

“I found myself saying in recent weeks that this is a sad time, and there are no winners, but I was wrong,” D’Arcy told the crowd. “There are heroes, and all of you here today are heroes, and I am proud to stand with you.”

After the rally, D’Arcy explained to the Tribune why he changed his mind about attending the rally.

“I thought, as a bishop, not to be present ... would not be the proper use of my authority,” D’Arcy said. “Invite him to speak here but don’t honor him. This is about a Catholic university giving an honor to someone who, in his history, has done many things against the unborn child.”

The enthusiastic audience frequently stood, clapping and cheering loudly during the speeches. Some held red balloons bearing the words, “Choose Life.”

Joanne Brown and Pat See drove six hours from Ohio to attend. Neither has ties to Notre Dame.

“We have 12 children and 30 grandchildren between us, so obviously we feel strongly about the sanctity of life,” Brown said.

See said one of her daughters, Julie, was born 43 years ago with Down syndrome. Julie needed emergency surgery to connect her stomach and intestines, or she would have starved to death, See said. At the time, many parents were choosing not to have the surgery performed, but See said she never gave it a second thought.

“We were very distressed by the fact that Obama was invited and bestowed with this honor,” Brown said. “That basically said they are condoning his feelings. You either follow the teachings of the church or you don’t, and one of the teachings of the church is the sanctity of life.”