I Marched
It was a lot easier to get up and out of bed at 4:45am on a Sunday morning than I had thought it would be. I guess I was already excited to go. By 5:15 I was ready, and by 5:30 my boyfriend Carlos and I were at 59th Street and Lexington meeting our NOW-New York group.
Carlos and I slept most of the way down. When we woke up it we were told that our bus was only 20 minutes away from D.C. We pulled in to the parking lot around 10, and our bus captain Julie collected our money for the D.C. Metro cards. She said that we did not all have to stick together, so once we had our cards Carlos and I ran off on our own.
By this time, Carlos had already gotten tons of compliments on his t-shirt: "A Man of Quality is Not Threatened By A Woman For Equality". As we boarded the train, a group of old ladies pointed to him and told each other about the shirt and told Carlos that he was their hero.
Because of the size of the crowd, the Metro took almost an hour - for what we had heard was a 20 minute ride - to get to the March site. We arrived at the actual March kick-off site around 12:30 and made our way through the crowd to the front of the rally by the morning stage, where people were still speaking and performing. All along the enormous lawn were piles of NARAL, NOW, Planned Parenthood, and Feminist Majority signs for anyone to take, so I took a NOW sign with the logo on it and a pink Feminist Majority sign with the phrase "Stop the War on Women".
As we walked towards the front of the rally by the Washington Monument, it started to dawn on me just how large this thing really was, and how diverse the marchers were. Women of every color and sexual orientation and age and religious and political belief were there. Black, white, Hispanic, Native American, and Asian women, American and foreign women, straight women and lesbians, little girls and very old women, mothers and daughters and grandmothers all together, Republicans and Democrats, Catholic, Muslim and Jewish women, women in enormous groups with matching t-shirts, women on their own, women with men, cheerleaders and punks, hippies and yuppies, WASPs and businesswomen, soccer moms and belly dancers, young college women and doctors in lab coats, med students with signs proclaiming "Future
Abortion Provider", screaming angry ranting women and laughing smiling singing women, women who had been rallying for women's rights for 50 years and women at their first rally, soon-to-be-mothers with signs that read "Pregnant and Pro-Choice". And there were plenty of men there as well, also representative of the entire human spectrum of life. Gay men with t-shirts that said things like "Flaming Feminist" and "Just Another Gay Man For Choice", fathers with their toddler sons, husbands, brothers, and boyfriends of every color imaginable, every lifestyle imaginable, every religious belief and political hue and nationality with signs and t-shirts in many languages, a man with a sign that said, "Keep Bush Out of My Daughters" and another with a sign that said, "Keep Your Laws Off My Fiancé", Orthodox Jews with a sign that read, "Rabbis for Choice".
Some of the other signs and t-shirts we saw that I found particularly amusing or memorable, or things we heard yelled out:
"I am not a baby machine!"
"Blondes for choice - it's a no-brainer!"
"If you cut off my reproductive rights, can I cut off yours?"
"If you don't like abortion, get a vasectomy!"
(Held by a very old lady) "My body, my choice!"
"It's not too late to abort George Bush!"
"What's next, Halliburton making wire hangers?"
A poster with a photo of Bin Laden next to one of Bush that said, "Both oppress women!"
"Barbara should have had an abortion!"
"Just say NO to sex with pro-lifers!"
And plenty of signs with simply a drawing of a wire hanger with a bar across it, some with the added phrase, "Never again!"
Of course there were tons of Bush puns, including the ubiquitous, "The only Bush I trust is my own!" Some more Bush puns:
"George gives Bush a bad name!"
"Hey Ashcroft, regulate your Bush, not mine!"
"One Bush in the pants is better than two in the White House!"
"Worry about Laura's Bush, not mine!"Almost as soon as we started marching we came across some anti-abortion counter-protesters. As the day wore on we discovered various kinds of counter-protesters, although they were still not nearly as diverse and enormous a group as ours. The first group we came across were surrounded by mounted police and screaming at us with bullhorns. One of them held a gigantic banner, bigger than himself, that said, "God Hates You! Sodomites! Abortionists! Drunkards!"
Our screams of "CHOICE! CHOICE! CHOICE! CHOICE!" drowned out that first group, even with their megaphones.
I was amazed at the energy and attitude of our group. Despite our numbers, there was never any pushing or shoving or nasty looks or infighting. Strangers smiled at me even as I accidentally stepped on their toes or smacked them with my signs, and I smiled at strangers even as they accidentally bumped into me or poked me with their elbows. We chanted together and laughed together and supported one another as we took turns yelling at the anti-abortionists. What surprised me the most was how the men in our group yelled the most and the loudest at the anti-abortionists.
The second group we encountered was the "I Regret My Abortion" group. This was made up of mostly women holding signs that said things like, "Real feminists don't kill babies" and "Abortion is bad for women". I yelled at them once, after a man screamed directly at me, "What if you mother had aborted you?" What I should have screamed back was, "My mother is pro-choice!" What I actually did yell back, off the top of my head, was, "Your mother should have had an abortion!"
At one point in the March we turned a corner, and I saw exactly how big we really were. We looked like a river of people and signs flowing through the street, with plenty of marchers taking a break on the sides to take photos or eat or cheer us on. As my shoulders started to ache with the stress of holding up my signs, Carlos and I would flow to the middle of the street so I could hold my signs down and rest my arms. But there was constant chanting, and I always joined in as loudly as I could:
"This is what democracy looks like!"
"Hey hey! Ho ho! George Bush has got to go!"
"One, two, three four, kick Bush and Cheney out the door! Five, six, seven, eight, don't forget to lock the gate!"
"What do we want?" "CHOICE!" "When do we want it?" "NOW!"As we encountered more and more anti-abortionists, we began this chant, louder than all the rest:
"Pro-life, that's a lie! You don't care if women die!"
The next group we encountered was the praying-and-holding-up-photos-of-dead-babies group. They yelled at us mostly the usual "wicked ways", "Jesus hates you", "baby killer", etc. I hoisted my signs back up high and yelled to anyone I could, "What I do is none of your business!" and "You can't tell me what to do! You can't make choices for me!"One man had the audacity to nod his head at me and yell back, "Yes I can!"
Carlos, in his only chant or yelling of the day, hit back with a loud and angry, "NO YOU CAN'T!"
As the lines of anti-abortionists stretched on, folks from our group left the March itself and stood behind them so that for every one of them there were three or four of us.
The anti-abortionists were fairly quiet. Some had bullhorns and screamed at us about our eternal damnation, and Carlos said he saw some priests praying for us, but mostly they stood there and looked at us.
As we marched along, I shouted at the women anti-abortionists, "Shame on you women! Shame on you!" Then, just for fun, I shouted at some of the men, "Don't worry, I'll never have YOUR babies!" One man held up a sign that read, "NOW - National Organization of Witches." I wanted to scream at him, "This is why you don't have a girlfriend!" but as soon as he saw my NOW sign he hid his face behind his own until I passed. I stared at him and sucked in my breath, ready to yell, should he have emerged, but he didn't, so I didn't get to yell at him. Some of the other anti-abortionists hid behind their signs as well.
A few of the anti-abortionists held signs that attacked not just abortion, but birth control in general. One woman held a sign that said, "Birth control pills make women sick," to which I screamed at the top of my lungs, "I'm on the Pill, do I look sick to you?" A lot of women held signs that said, "Abortion kills women", to which I shouted back, "Wire hangers kill women!"
What made me the happiest was when a group of Catholic pro-choice marchers held their signs up right in front of the rosary-and-prayers anti-abortionists and yelled things like, "Jesus gave me a choice!"
Some of the anti-abortionists held signs with photos that compared abortion to the Holocaust or to 9/11. Others held up their children with signs that said, "Would you kill me, too?" What most of these people didn't realize was that we weren't marching so that we could all run out and have abortions. We were marching for the right to choose for ourselves whether to have them or not, should that decision become necessary. We also marched for women's health care all over the world. We marched for better sex education in schools (which would help decrease the need for abortions in the first place), more funding towards research for women's diseases, better access to reproductive and pre-natal care for women who can't afford it or don't have it in their communities, a ban on gag rules that prohibit clinics from informing pregnant women that abortion is even an option, and over the counter birth control pills and morning after pills. But, to these anti-abortionists, all these things boil down to the idea that we are all baby killers.
At the end of the March, Carlos and I sat on the dirt road by the side of the lawn. Although I missed hearing Hillary Clinton and Gloria Steinem speak, I had the honor and privilege of hearing Sarah Wedding speak - the lawyer who, at just 26 years old, argued Roe vs Wade in front of the Supreme Court in 1973, and won us all the right to choose what we do with our own bodies. She got a standing ovation. She talked about how nervous she had been, and how walking up the steps of the Supreme Court had reminded her of the footsteps of the Suffragists.
At 3:30 Carlos and I trekked back to the bus. Our bus left D.C. around 5:30 and pulled in front of Bloomie's at 9:30. A group of well-dressed young men saw us and asked if we had just come back from the March, and we said yes. One of them said, "Good for you!"
Tired, wound up and stinky, I had just enough energy to go home to shower and go to bed. The last thing I said to Carlos before I fell asleep was, "I was just like the Suffragists today, and Gloria Steinem." And then I dreamed about the March.
For more information, contact:
Catholics for Choice
Feminist Majority
The Global Alliance for Women's Health
The National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL)
The National Organization for Women (NOW)
Planned Parenthood
Women's Environment and Development Organization (WEDO):
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