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Protesters march past the United States Supreme Court during the Women’s March in Washington on Saturday, October 2, 2021 (AP Photo / Jose Luis Magana)
WASHINGTON (AP) – The first women’s march in the Biden administration headed straight for the steps of the Supreme Court on Saturday, as part of nationwide protests that have drawn thousands to Washington to demand continued access to abortion in a year when conservative lawmakers and judges have put it in jeopardy.
Protesters took to the streets surrounding the courthouse, shouting “My body, my choice” and loudly cheering to the beat of the drums.
Before setting off on the march, they gathered in a square near the White House, holding up signs that read “Take care of your own womb”, “I love someone who has had an abortion” and “L ‘ abortion is a personal choice, not a legal debate, “among other messages. Some wore t-shirts that read simply” 1973, “a reference to the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, which legalized abortion for generations of women. American.
Elaine Baijal, a 19-year-old student at American University, said her mother told her she came to a march for legal abortion with her own mother in the 1970s. “It’s sad that we still had to fight for our right 40 years later. But it’s a tradition that I want to carry on, ”Baijal said of the walk.
Organizers said the Washington march was among hundreds of abortion-themed protests across the country on Saturday. The protests came two days before the start of a new term for the Supreme Court that will decide the future of abortion rights in the United States, after judicial appointments by President Donald Trump bolstered the conservative control of the high court.
“Shame, shame, shame!” chanted protesters as they passed the Trump International Hotel on their way to the Supreme Court. Some booed and waved their fists in front of the Trump monument.
The day before the march, the Biden administration urged a federal judge to block the country’s most restrictive abortion law, which has banned most abortions in Texas since early September. This is one of a series of cases that will give the country’s divided high court an opportunity to uphold or overturn Roe v. Wade.
Texan law motivated many protesters and stakeholders.
“We’re going to keep giving it to Texas,” Marsha Jones of the Afiya Center for Black Women’s Health Care in Dallas promised the Washington crowd. “You can’t tell us what to do with our bodies anymore! “
Alexis McGill Johnson, president of Planned Parenthood nationwide, spoke of women being forced to drive countless hours across state lines – sometimes multiple state borders – to end pregnancies in the weeks that followed the entry into force of Texas law.
“The timing is dark… but that’s why we are here,” Johnson told the crowded crowd in Freedom Square and the surrounding streets. With the upcoming Supreme Court mandate, “No matter where you are, this fight is at your doorstep right now.”
In Springfield, Illinois, several hundred people gathered in Old State Capitol Square. Among them were the maids of Illinois, wearing red dresses and white caps reminiscent of the subjugated women from Margaret Atwood’s novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” and carrying signs reading “Mind Your Own Uterus” and “Mother By Choice” .
Brigid Leahy, senior director of public policy for Planned Parenthood of Illinois, said that just two days after the Texas restrictions went into effect, Planned Parenthood saw the first women from Texas come to Illinois for the procedure, and others have since followed.
“They’re trying to figure out how to pay for a plane ticket, gasoline, or a train ticket, they may need a hotel and a meal,” Leahy said. “They have to find time off from work, and they have to find child care. It can be a real struggle. “
With a sign saying ‘Not that yet’ attached to a hanger, Gretchen Snow of Bloomington, Illinois, said: ‘Women need to be safe and they don’t have to worry about how much money they have to be in. security.”
On the West Coast, thousands marched through downtown Los Angeles for a rally in front of City Hall. The demonstrators chanted “Abortion on demand and without excuse: only the revolution can set women free!”
Kayla Selsi said she carried the same sign she held on the last three women’s marches. He said, “If only my vagina could shoot bullets, it would be less regulated.”
“Unfortunately, I can’t take that sign off,” Selsi said. “Women’s rights are being taken away, and it strongly affects lower class women. “
“I feel safer in California as a woman, but Texas is obviously going in one direction and it scares me that other states may follow the same path,” she said.
In New York City, Governor Kathy Hochul spoke at rallies in Seneca Falls and then in Albany. “I’m sick of having to fight for the right to abortion,” she said. “It’s a law made in the nation and you don’t take it away from us right now, not now, ever.” “
Speaking to protesters at the Arizona State Capitol in Phoenix, Democratic state representative Melody Hernandez said abortion enemies encouraged by recent developments in Texas and in the Supreme Court would not prevail.
“An overwhelming majority of Arizonans, Americans, support everything we’re here for today,” Hernandez said. “And don’t let anyone fool you, we are the majority. We are made… of people from all walks of life, ethnicities, parties, nationalities. “
At an unrelated event in Maine, Republican Senator Susan Collins called Texas law “extreme, inhuman and unconstitutional” and said she was working hard to make Roe v. Wade the “law of the land”.
She said she was working with two Democrats and one Republican, and that they were “reviewing” the language of their bill. Collins declined to identify his colleagues, but said the legislation would be introduced soon.
One opponent of women’s access to abortion called the theme of this year’s march “macabre”.
“What about equal rights for unborn women? Tweeted Jeanne Mancini, president of an anti-abortion group called March for Life.
The Women’s March has become a regular event – albeit interrupted by the coronavirus pandemic – since millions of women traveled to the United States and around the world following Trump’s inauguration in January 2017. Trump endorsed the punishment of women for having abortions and made the appointment of conservative judges a mission of his presidency.
With the sun beating down in Washington on Saturday, Ramsay Teviotdale of Arlington, Va. – who, when asked her age, said she was “old enough to remember when abortion was not legal” – was one of the few to wear the hand-knitted pink wool caps that distinguished the 2017 Women’s March.
Without Trump as the central figure against whom to rally women of various political persuasions, and with the pandemic still strong, organizers spoke of hundreds of thousands of participants nationwide on Saturday, not millions of 2017.
Teviotdale said that doesn’t lessen the urgency of the moment. “That Texas thing can’t hold up. It’s the thin edge of the corner, ”she said.
Security in the capital was much lighter than at a political rally a few weeks ago in support of Trump supporters jailed in the Jan.6 uprising. No fencing has been placed around the U.S. Capitol, with the Capitol Police Chief saying there was no suggestion that Saturday’s rally would be violent.
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