Abortion-rights supporters deliver message to Wash.

The group varied in age, race, gender, religion and sexual orientation.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
WASHINGTON -- Hundreds of thousands of abortion-rights supporters rallied Sunday on the National Mall, railing against what they described as a dozen years of government backsliding on the issue of reproductive freedom for women in the United States and around the world.
The huge throng, many clad in hot pink or purple-and-yellow T-shirts, marched along the city's broad avenues, passing its historic monuments, before cramming the Mall for a four-hour rally that featured Hollywood celebrities, leaders of the sponsoring organizations and icons of the feminist movement.
The rally, called the March for Women's Lives, served as an election-year challenge to the policies of the Bush administration. But it also had a higher aim -- to reset the debate about abortion rights and health issues for women after a decade in which abortion opponents have gained steady momentum both in Washington and in state legislatures around the country.
"Know your power and use it," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., encouraged the crowd. "It is your choice, not the politicians'."
Wide range
The demonstrators -- from across the United States and 57 other countries -- crossed lines of age, race, gender, religion and sexual orientation. The concerns they voiced extended beyond the issue of abortion to health-care access, AIDS prevention, birth control and civil rights.
"It's unbelievable we even have to come here and do this," said Gabrielle Davis, 42, a law professor at the University of Toledo, who drove all day Saturday from Ohio with five other women, encountering cars full of others heading to the same destination. "I felt like the goal was accomplished, like the civil-rights movement. But it wasn't."
The turnout was among the largest seen in a city with a fabled history for such gatherings. Authorities no longer offer official crowd estimates, but various police sources informally estimated the throng at between 500,000 and 800,000 in the mile-long stretch of green space between the Capitol and the Washington Monument.
Along Constitution Avenue, abortion-rights opponents lined the sidewalks, standing on chairs and shouting into hand-held megaphones as the marchers passed.
Though the crowd was orderly -- "No. 1 rule: Don't engage," one woman reminded her companions -- there were occasional angry exchanges. Police in riot gear were stationed along the route, with steel barricades separating the marchers from the sparse but determined line of abortion-rights opponents.
Message to politicians
"This is the biggest march in the long and glorious history of the women's movement," feminist writer Gloria Steinem, who founded Ms. Magazine in the early 1970s, told the marchers. "We are going to transform and take back this country one more time."
The event was billed as nonpolitical, but the anti-Bush sentiment was palpable.
Signs exhorting politicians to "Keep Your Laws Off My Body" and proclaiming "My Body, My Choice" bobbed along the parade route, which passed in view of the White House. President Bush was not home.
Speakers at the rally on the Mall criticized Attorney General John Ashcroft for seeking medical records of women in defending a law Bush signed last year banning a medical procedure that opponents call "partial-birth abortion."
The roster of speakers included comedian Whoopi Goldberg and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. A volunteer choir from Pittsburgh kicked off the event with a rendition of "If Men Could Get Pregnant, What Changes We Would See."
Police reported few arrests. Sixteen abortion opponents were held for refusing to leave an area designated for the marchers; in a separate episode, a man was arrested for throwing an ink-filled egg as the marchers passed by.