March for Women's Lives
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My sister hadn't been to Washington, D.C. before, so I wanted to take her around and show her a few of things. We did a little bit of touring the day before the march. We run into this very nice group that were actually out doing on-the-street interviews. They were the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. |
If women don't stand together, we will lose our rights because there are people working to do that. And if we don't work to get our rights, then we're responsible for what happens to us. |
They asked us why we were coming to the march. And had a camera going behind us that we didn't know about when we were talking to them. They are a group of religious organizations that have come together to work for reproductive rights for everyone. We really liked talking to them. They were a nice group of people. I'm pleased that there's a voice, a religious voice, on the other side of the ProLife people. They say, "We believe in God, but we also believe that women have a right to choose and define their own destiny."
Then Sunday morning, the day of the march, we got up early and had a little
bit of breakfast. After that, we set out in our rental car and drove from
the Annapolis area to the very first Metro stop. We had gone on the Metro
the day before and got our tickets ahead so we wouldn't have to deal with
the machines on Sunday. It's a good thing we did that because when we came into the
Metro it was jammed packed with women getting their tickets and getting on
the train. (An article by Robin Toner in The New York Times, April 25th,
titled "Huge Crowds in Washington for Abortion-Rights Rally" reported that
the city's subway, which registered 320,138 riders from 7 a.m. to 5
p.m., compared with 133,448 during the same period last week, and many
protestors didn't travel to the demonstration by subway.)
We started our trip at the end of the Metro line. By the time the train left, it was packed completely with women and their signs. I actually took some pictures on the train of these women with their signs all getting together and talking all the way. Lots of women got on at the third stop. We looked out the window into the parking lot and it was filled with, probably, a hundred big buses that had brought all these women to the station.
Somebody said we should probably get off at the Smithsonian exit, so we all
go to the Smithsonian exit, and, my gosh, the station in the Washington, D.C. Mall
-- if you've never been there -- is way underground. So you go up a few
escalators and then you have have to go up this huge escalator which goes
straight up to the street level. It's very deep. It took us over a half
an hour just to get out of the Metro station because there were so many
people in there. We were just doing our little tiny steps, you know,
tu tu tu tu, to where we could get out of there.
| We came out of the Subway which opens almost into the Mall area -- we got there at about 10:30 -- and the area was already solid with people. |
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One of the things I'd like to point out here that I was really impressed by and that's the number of men that had come to the march with their companions and their wives and their girl friends. I was really pleased to see that there were so many men there. |
| And all ages of people. It wasn't just a woman's march. It was families. They had their pets there carrying their little flag and labels and saying they were pro-choice, too. It was a gathering of everybody. It wasn't just women. |
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Many organizations came and you could tell who they were, they were all so well
organized that they had their own T-shirts and their own colors. If you
look at any of the pictures in the paper -- I wasn't able to get up high
enough to get any pictures of the crowd and all the signs -- but you can
see that it's just a kalidoscope of all different colors. This happened
because the groups worked so hard to get everything ready that they all had
their own signs. They had their own identity. They had their own phrases.
The colors were just awesome. You could tell the groups just by the colors
of their T-shirts. So, colorwise, it was just a beautiful presentation.
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