Protesters Gather in All Fifty States to Defend Abortion Rights

In response to Texas’s newly enacted six-week abortion ban, the Women’s March organized nationwide rallies on October 2.

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Shortly before the Rally for Abortion Justice began last Saturday, October 2, more than 100 people, most of them people of faith, gathered in Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., to welcome the Sabbath and testify to the morality of reproductive choice. National Council of Jewish Women board president, Dana Gerson, called it “turning faith into action.” 

In addition to Torah readings, supplication, and song, the Reverend Lyvonne P. Briggs read a two-page prayer. It read in part:

We hold in our bodies the oppressive restrictions

that force us into a future we did not choose . . .

We long for the liberation of our collective body—

interdependent and gloriously embodied in our

sacredness and strength,

our will toward freedom and thriving for each and all.

The march drew tens of thousands to Washington, D.C., and to more than 650 cities across the nation, to denounce Texas’s ban on abortion after six weeks of fetal gestation (called SB 8) and copycat legislation now being considered by lawmakers in several states.

The protestors carried signs that ranged from the profane (“If I wanted the government in my uterus, I would fuck a Senator”) to the predictable (“Keep abortion legal” and “Abortion is health care.”) Some dressed as black-robed “Justices” bearing the image of the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg with the words, “We are Ruthless now. Act accordingly.” 

The diverse crowd was primed for action. Most came for reasons that were deeply felt.

Protest attendee Josie Thomas of Silver Spring, Maryland, for example, described the day as “very powerful and very personal. I got pregnant in 1967. I was nineteen and couldn’t get an abortion, so I had the child and gave him up for adoption,” she told The Progressive.

Likewise, Denver resident Lora Clark’s reason for traveling to Washington, D.C., was also personal. “My twenty-seven-year-old daughter lives in Texas, and these laws are not okay,” she said. “My daughter deserves the same rights over her body as a man has over his.”

Others came to the march and rally to express political rage.

“These laws are about controlling women,” remarked Cathryn Carroll, a resident of Washington, D.C. “Anti-abortion and conservative lawmakers have been restricting women for too long. I needed to speak out.”

Reproductive rights were the linchpin of the day, but speakers also linked abortion to issues of racial inequity, heteronormativity, LGBTQIA+ equality, voting rights, poverty, and the disproportionate impact that abortion restrictions have on low-income people, especially if they are Black or Brown.

Rachel O’Leary Carmona, executive director of the Women’s March, reminded rally-goers that, “a few weeks ago, we watched in horror as the Trump Supreme Court took a sledgehammer to our right to abortion in a state that has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the United States.” She then pledged ongoing activism to push back against restrictions and policies that make it as difficult to have a child as it is not to. “This is day one of a renewed fight to end a politicized, perverse attempt to regulate our bodies,” she said. 

Dr. Jamila Perritt, president and CEO of Physicians for Reproductive Health, laid out the centrality of abortion to healthy families and personal fulfillment. “Abortion is safe, essential, normal, and necessary,” she began. “Abortion is an act of love. The majority of people seeking abortion are already parents. That is why we have to support the provisions of the Build Back Better Act that protect maternal health and expand childcare availability.”

Anna, a youth leader from the Dallas-based legal support group Jane’s Due Process whose last name is omitted for privacy, reminded the crowd that long before SB 8, roadblocks and obstacles made abortion inaccessible for youth and poor people. “In Texas, teens under eighteen need parental consent to get an abortion,” she began. “I was seventeen when I got pregnant. My parents did not live in this country, so I had to go before a judge—a stranger—to prove that I was mature enough to have an abortion. The process took two weeks. If SB 8 had been in effect, I would not have been able to get my abortion, and Jane’s Due Process could have been sued for helping me. No one should have to go before a judge for permission to end a pregnancy. No one should stand in our way, whether we want birth control, Plan B, or an abortion.”

The Reverend Erika Forbes followed Anna and was met with loud applause when she told the crowd that “we will fight until Hell freezes over, and then we will fight on the ice.” 

Indeed, like all marches and rallies, The Rally for Abortion Justice inspired the protesters and fired

them up for the long fight ahead. It also did more than this, urging the crowd to take immediate, concrete action in support of those seeking abortions. Among the recommendations: pushing for legislation to protect choice at the state and federal levels and creating or supporting existing abortion funds that help finance reproductive health care for those without sufficient  financial resources to pay for it.

Many speakers hammered the need for constituents to pressure their Senators to pass the EACH Act,  legislation that would allow Medicaid to cover the cost of abortion in all fifty states, and the Women’s Health Protection Act, to make abortion “a statutory right, free from medically unnecessary restrictions that single-out abortion and impede access.” Both bills have already passed in the House.

The mix of personal, political and practical information galvanized the crowd. But before they marched to the Supreme Court building, emcee Cristela Alonzo, a comedian and actor whose mother emigrated to the United States from Mexico after fleeing domestic abuse, told the crowd that she had been raised to believe that “change for the common good was inevitable.” Now, like the hundreds of thousands of protesters who took to the streets  on October 2, she knows better.

“SB 8 not only takes away our choices, but it can take away our lives,” she said. “All we want are the rights we’re supposed to have in a country that tells us that everyone is equal.” 

For more information about the ongoing fightback against SB 8 and other anti-abortion bills, contact the Women’s March.