Throng packs Washington to support abortion rights

While the march was not explicitly partisan, the president was a frequent target.

[AP photo] Attendees fill the National Mall during Sunday's rally, organized by a coalition of seven women's and civil liberties groups, including the National Organization for Women and the American Civil Liberties Union.

[AP photo] A smaller group of antiabortion protesters gathered along part of the route.

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WASHINGTON - Abortion rights supporters marched in the hundreds of thousands Sunday, galvanized by what they see as an erosion of reproductive freedoms under President Bush and foreign policies that hurt women worldwide.

The huge crowd marched slowly past the White House, chanting and waving signs like "My Body Is Not Public Property!" and "It's Your Choice, Not Theirs!" then filled the National Mall, turning it into a sea of women, men and children.

People 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.

The rally stretched from the base of the U.S. Capitol about a mile back to the Washington Monument. Some estimates of the number attending varied from 500,000 to 800,000, but organizers estimated the crowd at 1-million. Authorities no longer give formal crowd estimates.

It was the first large-scale abortion rights demonstration in Washington since a 1992 march, which drew 500,000, according to the National Park Police.

Carole Mehlman, 68, came from Tampa 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 socially conservative positions.

"The desire to control reproduction is the mark of authoritarian governments around the world and, unfortunately, it's ours, as well," she said.

Democratic Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York, referring to the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, said the administration is "filled with people who ... consider Roe vs. Wade the worst abomination of constitutional law in our history."

Organizers set up voter registration tables; supporters of John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, who supports abortion rights, handed out stickers. The event was not overtly partisan but denunciations of Bush set the tone from the stage and the ground.

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 counterdemonstration.

"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.

Karen Hughes, an adviser to Bush, appeared on CNN on Sunday to provide a counterpoint to the anti-Bush sentiment on the Mall. She praised the president on his "very strong record for women," saying he has employed more women in senior-level positions than any other presidential administration.

She also said that abortion rights activists were moving against what she said was popular momentum in favor of antiabortion policies.

"I think that after Sept. 11, the American people are valuing life more and we need policies to value the dignity and worth of every life," she said. "President Bush has worked to say, "Let's be reasonable, let's work to value life, let's reduce the number of abortions, let's increase adoptions.' And I think those are the kinds of policies the American people can support."

At the march, police arrested 16 people from the Christian Defense Coalition for demonstrating without a permit and another antiabortion 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 and Cybill Shepherd.

The demonstration, called "March for Women's Lives," was organized by a coalition of seven women's and civil liberties groups, including the National Organization for Women, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Black Women's Health Imperative, the Feminist Majority, NARAL Pro-Choice America, the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health and the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. The march was also endorsed by more than 1,400 other groups, including unions and religious and health care organizations.

Many abortion rights leaders say that abortion rights are more imperiled than they have been since 1992, when the Supreme Court was considering a case that could have overturned Roe vs. Wade.

Although the Roe case still anchors abortion rights, some states have imposed waiting periods, requirements that girls under 18 notify their parents and other limits that have closed abortion clinics or discouraged doctors from performing abortions.

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.

Bush also has signed a ban on so-called partial-birth abortion, which critics say is so vague that it could outlaw many types of abortions performed after the first trimester, and could keep doctors from performing procedures they believe are in the best interest of the woman's health.

- Information from the New York Times and Los Angeles Times was used in this report.

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