Pro-abortion activists gathered in Washington, D.C., Saturday on the one-year anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that overturned Roe v. Wade.
“Without abortion access, women and girls, and people who are assigned female at birth, they are going to be dying,” Olivia Anderson said at the Women’s March Day of Action rally.
Anderson, 20, is an intern in D.C. and says she views abortion as being critical to “bodily autonomy.”
“Women have to have this ability to choose in order to fully go forward in life, whether that is choosing to have a child or choosing to not have a child,” Anderson told The Daily Signal.
Marjorie McKee, 57, traveled from Raleigh, North Carolina, to attend the rally because “women have lost rights that I grew up with and it is horrible, and we have to reinstate reproductive rights for women.”
The rally began outside Union Station before the crowd marched several blocks to the Supreme Court shouting chants such as “who’s body? Our bodies,” and “2, 4, 6, 8, separate the church and state.”
“I just think this is so important,” Angela Corey said. Corey, 75, traveled to D.C from Boston for the rally because there was no march taking place in her city.
“In Massachusetts, we have a governor that’s taking care of things as much as possible, but you go down in the south where the people [who] are the poorest, the least educated – they’re the ones who are being affected the most. They’re supposed to be so Godly,” Corey said. “I don’t get it, I don’t get it at all.”
The rally and march drew hundreds of people, but Corey said she “expected a lot more people, I expected like a 100,000.”
Like Corey, many of the pro-abortion protests held signs expressing their pro-abortion views.
As Women’s March speakers took to the stage during the rally, Nicki Markman wandered through the crowd with small pieces of paper bearing former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton’s home address and encouraging those present to write to Clinton and “let her know that she is destined to be our first woman president.”
Asked whether she was concerned if distributing Clinton’s address would endanger the former secretary of state, Markman said she has driven up to Clinton’s house herself and “there are secret service all [over].”
Following the leak of the Supreme Court’s draft option of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, pro-abortion activists obtained the home addresses of the court’s conservative justices and protested outside their homes regularly. Authorities did not arrest protesters despite the law forbidding protests outside the home of a judge or justice in an attempt to influence a ruling.
Shortly before the Women’s March gathered for its event Saturday, pro-life advocates held the “National Celebrate Life Day” rally about three miles down the road at the Lincoln Memorial. Pro-life activists and leaders such as former Vice President Mike Pence, Live Action President Lila Rose, and Dr. Alveda King, niece of Martin Luther King Jr. and founder of Alveda King Ministries, challenged the crowd to continue to fight for life for the unborn.
“We demand equal protection for pre-born children,” Rose said to the crowd.
Since Roe was overturned, hundreds of thousands of babies are alive today who otherwise would have been aborted, according to Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. About half the states across America have taken action to pass laws protecting the unborn over the past year. States such as Alabama, Idaho, and Oklahoma have banned abortion in nearly all cases. Lawsuits are preventing pro-life laws from taking effect in places like Florida, Iowa, and Ohio. States like Alaska, New Jersey, and Vermont, meanwhile, allow abortion during all nine months of pregnancy.
“I believe the cause of life is the calling of our time,” Pence, who is running for president in 2024, said to the crowd during the pro-life rally.
“We can never bring back those 62 million American lives whose voices were never heard in this world, but are heard in the next,” Pence said. “With your renewed compassion and devotion, we can someday soon give all the American people, born and unborn, a new beginning for Life.”
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