Massive crowd rallies in D.C. in support of abortion rights

By Cameron W. Barr and Elizabeth Williamson
The Washington Post

	MARIO TAMA / GETTY IMAGES Demonstrators pass the White House yesterday in the March For Women's Lives, a massive gathering for abortion rights.
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Organizers of the March for Women's Lives said they had drawn 1.15 million people, making it the largest abortion-rights gathering in history.

Police would not issue an official estimate, but some veteran commanders said the crowd was the biggest since the 1995 Million Man March, which independent researchers put at 870,000 people.

Metropolitan Police Chief Charles Ramsey would say only that he thought the march had met and perhaps exceeded its organizers' expectations. Their march permit was for as many as 750,000.

Celebrities, from entertainers to politicians to activists, lent their shine to the event. Actors Cybill Shepherd and Whoopi Goldberg attended, as did singers Ani DiFranco and Moby. Feminist icons Patricia Ireland and Gloria Steinem were there, as were former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and billionaire Ted Turner. So was NAACP Chairman Julian Bond.

"If all we do is march today," Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., told the crowd, "that will not change the direction this country is headed under this administration.

"There were 50 million women in our country eligible to vote who did not vote in the 2000 election," she said. When you go home, between now and the election, I want you to start asking people around you if they're registered to vote."

Several blocks away, Jay Rhodes of Alexandria, Va., held a sign equating abortion with the Holocaust. He shouted sarcastically, "Keep murder legal" when marchers challenged his views. "It's very hostile," said Rhodes, 52, who said he came to join counter-protesters who lined part of the march route. "There's a lot of anger on both sides."

Parks Marion, 19, a sophomore at Guilford College in North Carolina, recalled his mother dragging him through the same streets during a 1992 abortion-rights rally. Then, he complained about the walk. Yesterday, he marveled at "just the sheer number" of people. "It's overwhelming and it's wonderful."

"This has been the largest march for reproductive rights, the largest march for women's rights and the largest march of any kind in this country," said Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women.

Organizers sought to transcend the polarizing issue of abortion, portraying the event as the work of a coalition to improve women's access to reproductive education and health care worldwide. But the dominant themes were two: Again and again, march participants vowed that abortion was here to stay — and that Bush had to go.

	AP Demonstrators fill the Mall at yesterday's rally. Activists from nearly 60 countries participated. Organizers called it the largest abortion-rights gathering in history.

Bush did not return from Camp David in the Maryland mountains until late afternoon. The White House issued a statement: "The president believes we should work to build a culture of life in America, and regardless of where one stands on the issue of abortion, we can all work together to reduce the number of abortions through promotion of abstinence-education programs, support for parental-notification laws and continued support for banning partial-birth abortion."

Earlier, Jeanne Clark, spokeswoman for the Feminist Majority, one of the groups behind the march, said that when President Clinton was in office, women thought his veto could protect them. Now, she said, growing concern about Bush administration initiatives has prompted women to march anew.

The previous major abortion-rights rally on the Mall took place in April 1992, seven months before Clinton was elected.

In 2001, shortly after taking office, Bush barred the government from funding international organizations that use money from other sources to provide abortions or information about terminating a pregnancy. Earlier this month, he signed a bill that made it a federal crime to harm or kill a fetus during the commission of another federal crime.

That law defined an "unborn child" as "a member of the species homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb," alarming abortion-rights advocates, who challenged the bill in three different federal courts even before Bush signed it.

Concerned about what they saw as an erosion of rights, the Feminist Majority joined NARAL Pro-Choice America (formerly known as the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League), the American Civil Liberties Union, Black Women's Health Imperative, the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, the National Organization for Women and Planned Parenthood Federation of America to fight it.

Holding a fly swatter that said "Stop Bush," Carmen Barroso, a New York-based regional director of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, called the day a "mobilization against the war against reproductive rights and reproductive health."

Sandra Kauffman watched with tears in her eyes as four lawyers approached the stage; they had argued cases before the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of abortion rights. "It's been a long fight. It's incredible to see," the D.C. resident said.

Material from Knight Ridder Newspapers is included in this report.

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