SUNDAY, APRIL 5, WAS A DAZZLING, WINDY SPRING DAY IN WASHINGTON, D.C., and well over a half million women, men and children—most in sunglasses, many in the historic purple and white of the suffragist movement—came wearing their hearts, and their anger, on their sleeves and on the placards they carried, emblazoned with the defiant slogans of their cause: JUST SAY ROE, NO GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION IN OUR WOMBS. With 200,000 more people than the 1989 rally to protect abortion rights, this was a crowd to overwhelm even the most jaded of people counters. Several hundred activists from the Hollywood Women's Political Committee, including Molly Ringwald, Jane Fonda and Jill Eikenberry, flew in to join up with New York's Creative Coalition, Grandmothers for Choice, Rockers for Choice, the National Republican Coalition for Choice, and just plain passionate people from all over the country who are determined to elect prochoice politicians to Congress and state legislatures—and who know that in this election year the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade is under attack in both the Court and in George Bush's White House. A mini-counterdemonstration by about 200 Right-to-Lifers was nearly overlooked in the spirit of the day. Said prochoice actress Morgan Fairchild: "When people get scared, they get off their rears. We may be marching the rest of our lives. If that's what it takes, that's what we'll do."
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