WASHINGTON - Abortion-rights supporters marched in huge numbers yesterday, roused in this election year by what they see as an erosion of reproductive freedoms under President Bush and foreign policies they say hurt women worldwide.
Political agitation suffused the gathering, the largest in favor of abortion rights since an estimated 500,000 assembled in 1992. The target: Bush, like-minded officials in federal and state government and religious conservatives.
Speaking beyond the masses to policy-makers, Francis Kissling of Catholics for a Free Choice declared, You will hear our pro-choice voices ringing in your ears until such time that you permit all women to make our own reproductive choices.
Women joined the protest from across the nation and from nearly 60 countries, asserting that damage from Bush's policies is spreading far beyond U.S. shores through measures such as the ban on federal money for family-planning groups that promote or perform abortions abroad.
Authorities no longer give formal crowd estimates but said the crowd was hundreds of thousands strong. The Washington-area commuter train system alone carried 138,000 passengers yesterday morning, three times as many as the previous Sunday.
Carole Mehlman, 68, came from Tampa, Fla., to support a cause that has motivated her to march for 30 years, as long as abortion has been legal.
I just had to be here to fight for the next generation and the generation after that
she said. We cannot let them take over our bodies our health care our lives.
Advocates said abortion rights are being weakened at the margins through federal and state restrictions and will be at risk of reversal at the core if Bush gets a second term.
Know your power and use it
Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California, House Democratic leader, exhorted the masses. It is your choice
not the politicians'.
And feminist Gloria Steinem accused Bush of squandering international good will and taking positions so socially conservative that he seems - according to Steinem - to be in league with the likes of Muslim extremists or the Vatican.
Democratic Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York, referring to the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, said the administration is filled with people who disparage sexual harassment laws
who claim the pay gap between women and men is phony ... who consider Roe v. Wade the worst abomination of constitutional law in our history.
Organizers set up voter registration tables; supporters of John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, handed out stickers. The event was not overtly partisan but denunciations of Bush set the tone from the stage and the ground.
The throngs gathered by the Washington Monument for opening speeches and set off along Pennsylvania Avenue, looping back to the Mall near the Capitol. They moved slowly, bottlenecked by their own numbers.
A much smaller contingent of abortion opponents assembled along a portion of the route to protest what they called a death march. Among them were women who had had abortions and regretted it; they dressed in black.
Tabitha Warnica, 36, of Phoenix, said she had two abortions when she was young. We don't have a choice. God is the only one who can decide
she said.
Police used barricades and a heavy presence at that site to keep it from becoming a flashpoint. Both sides yelled at each other as the vanguard of the march reached the counter-demonstration.
Look at the pictures
look at the pictures
shouted abortion opponents, holding up big posters showing a fetus at eight weeks.
Lies
lies
marchers shouted back.
Police arrested 16 people from the Christian Defense Coalition for demonstrating without a permit and another anti-abortion protester for throwing ink-filled plastic eggs at rally signs.
Celebrities familiar to the abortion-rights movement led the parade, among them Whoopi Goldberg, Kathleen Turner, Cybill Shepherd and media mogul Ted Turner.
There is a religious and moral superiority and arrogance that so many
