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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 drew thousands in Washington DC and other cities to demand maintaining access to abortion in a year when conservative lawmakers and judges have put it in jeopardy.
Several thousand women filled a place near the White House for a rally before the march. They held up signs that read “Take care of your own womb”, “I love someone who has had an abortion” and “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, who legalized abortion for generations of American women.
Elaine Baijal, a 19-year-old student at American University, took photos of her cell phone with her friends and their signs at the start of the event. She said her mother told her she had come to a march for legal abortion with her own mother in the 1970s.
“It’s sad that we still have to fight for our rights 40 years later. But it’s a tradition that I want to carry on, ”Baijal said of the walk.
Organizers said the Washington march would be one of hundreds of abortion-themed protests across the country on Saturday. The protests come 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 Donald Trump tightened conservative control over the United States. court.
The march is part of a “fight to guarantee, safeguard and strengthen our constitutional right to abortion,” Rachel O’Leary Carmona, executive director of the Women’s March, said in a statement. “And this is a fight against Supreme Court justices, lawmakers and state senators who are not on our side – or are not acting with the urgency that this moment demands.”
The march comes a day after 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 in a series of cases that will give the country’s divided High Court an opportunity to uphold or overturn Roe v Wade.
Texas law was at the center of the debate.
“We’re going to keep giving it to Texas,” Marsha Jones of the Afiya Center for Black Women’s Health 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.”
Speaking at an unrelated event in Maine, Republican Senator Susan Collins called Texas law “extreme, inhuman and unconstitutional” and said she was working to make Roe v Wade “law” from the country”.
She said she was working with two Democrats and another Republican, and that they were “checking” 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 in the aftermath of 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.
Without Trump as the central figure against which to rally women of various political persuasions, and with the pandemic still strong, organizers speak of hundreds of thousands of participants nationwide on Saturday, not millions of 2017.
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