D.C. rally on rights fills Mall
Protesters hit Bush over women's health
WASHINGTON -- Hundreds of thousands of abortion-rights advocates swarmed the National Mall yesterday in what some said might have been the largest women's rights rally in history.
Angered by what they said were the Bush administration's attempts to roll back abortion rights, protesters traveled from around the country -- and from overseas -- to chant anti-Bush slogans and hold signs in support of abortion rights.
US park police declined to give an estimate of the crowd, but the rally filled the entire mile-long expanse of the National Mall from the Capitol to the Washington Monument and spilled onto adjacent streets. Organizers said the crowd exceeded 1 million.
Gloria Steinem, the feminist writer and activist, called the march ''the biggest in the history of the women's movement in this country."
The last large-scale abortion-rights march was in 1992. Then considered one of the biggest political demonstrations in the Mall's history, it drew 250,000 to 500,000 people -- fewer, by most estimates, than yesterday's rally.
The 1992 protest came as the Supreme Court was poised to restrict Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 decision that made abortion legal nationwide, by allowing states to require waiting periods and to require women seeking abortions to notify their husbands. Fear that Roe vs. Wade could again be in danger was a theme of yesterday's march, as organizers warned that Bush, if reelected, could appoint an antiabortion Supreme Court justice and tip the scales in favor of overturning the decision.
Abortion-rights advocates also voiced concern about the Unborn Victims of Violence Act -- which refers to a fetus as an ''unborn child" and ''a member of the species homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb," -- and the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, which criminalizes a specific medical procedure that had been used most commonly in the late second trimester, both signed into law by President Bush.
The march comes as the war in Iraq and national security issues have dominated national attention and much of the agenda in the presidential race.
Activists hoping to bring domestic issues back into the public spotlight passed out blue stickers that read ''Women for Kerry."
A group of young people in Boston College T-shirts chanted slogans in favor of abortion, standing near signs that read ''Catholics for choice," according to several people who attended the rally.
About 1,000 antiabortion protesters spread themselves along Pennsylvania Avenue, holding photos of fetuses and signs saying abortion is murder as abortion-rights advocates marched from the Mall. Confrontations between the two sides were emotional, but largely peaceful.
A few blocks down the street, Randall Terry, president of the antiabortion Society for Truth and Justice and founder of the Operation Rescue, stood atop Freedom Plaza and -- with the help of loudspeakers -- told marchers they should be ashamed: ''Remember, Adolph Hitler had big crowds in the 1930s."
In front of the White House Visitors Center, Mary Kay Brown of Pittsburgh held a 5-foot-tall color photo of a fetus under the banner ''8th Week of Life."
Brown, a 41-year-old emergency room nurse, said she felt compelled to make the five-hour bus ride to make sure yesterday's rally wasn't completely one-sided. ''We're outnumbered," she said. ''But it's important to be here. I've seen too many women hurt by abortion."
Brown was indeed outnumbered as a sea of people, many wearing the same pink color as the Planned Parenthood stickers, streamed down Pennsylvania Avenue. Fathers walked with babies on their backs, grandmothers held signs, and teenage girls passed out fliers. . Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, was greeted with roars of support as she urged women to get involved in the political process.
Celebrities, including Ashley Judd, Lisa Gay Hamilton, Julianne Moore, Susan Sarandon, Moby, and the Indigo Girls, also voiced their support as did former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean.
President Bush was at Camp David during the protest, and Senatory John F. Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, was campaigning in Iowa. On Friday, he addressed an abortion-rights rally. .
Actress Whoopi Goldberg brandished a wire coat hanger, a symbol of self abortions, as she stood on a stage in front of the US Capitol.
''There is a whole generation of people who don't know what that is," she said. ''This is what we used, and never again will this be the choice of any women in this world."
Organizers, which included Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America and a host of other groups, decided to broaden the theme from abortion rights to include other issues. Poor women's access to reproductive health care, getting insurance to cover birth control, expanded funding for family planning, and support for gay marriage were other themes yesterday.
Many participants were high school and college students.
Buses from Boston Common pulled in before sunrise, a couple of them filled with students from area universities, including Northeastern and Lesley.
The rally drew so many people that the rest stops on Interstate 95 were still clogged with buses and cars late into the night, said Kara Fink, a 29-year-old attorney from Providence, R.I. who was interviewed by telephone.
''I think the rally was so big precisely because people have a lot of concerns about how this administration has dealt with women's rights issues. I have a lot of concerns about rights people fought for 30 years ago being whittled down," Fink said.
Material from Associated Press was used in this report. Farah Stockman can be reached at fstockman@globe.com. 