AWW-FLAMING-RIGHT!

Oh, how I wish I could have been there.

Washington (AP, April 25) - Abortion-rights supporters marched in the hundreds of thousands Sunday, galvanized by what they see as an erosion of reproductive freedoms under President Bush and policies that hurt women worldwide.

Amid the clamor of an election year, the throng of demonstrators flooded the National Mall. ...

Women joined the protest from across the nation and from nearly 60 countries, asserting that damage from Bush's policies is spreading far beyond U.S. shores through measures such as the ban on federal money for family-planning groups that promote or perform abortions abroad.

The rally on the National Mall stretched from the base of the U.S. Capitol about a mile back to the Washington Monument. Authorities no longer give formal crowd estimates, but various police sources informally estimated the throng at between 500,000 and 800,000 strong.

A half-million or more. My oh my that must have been something to see and would mark it as one of the biggest single marches this country has ever seen.

Personally, I'm not that concerned about Roe v. Wade being overturned. That is, I don't think an outright reversal is likely. First because, despite mythology to the contrary, the Supreme Court is not unaffected by the tenor of the times and such a decision would be very controversial and very unpopular: Even though a majority of Americans express personal discomfort with the idea of abortion, they still oppose outlawing it.

Second and perhaps more important, the Court is generally loath to outright reverse previous decisions and has pretty much done it under rather extraordinary circumstances, such as striking down "separate but equal" as a Constitutionally-acceptable principle. The fact that this Court has had more than one opportunity to strike down Roe but has declined to do so seems to back that up.

What I'm more concerned about is what's been happening: The gradual erosion not of the theoretical legal right to abortion but of real-world access to it. Notification requirements, waiting periods, additional record-keeping regulations, gag rules, mandated "counseling" which was nothing other than an attempt to force doctors to talk women out of abortions, all kinds of bureaucratic hindrances to obtaining the procedure that have to one degree or another found favor in the courts and that together threaten to reduce the right to abortion to an empty shell.

Kate Michelman, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, made the point well:

"The march is about the totality of women's lives and the right to make decision about our lives," she said.

And that extends far beyond the bounds of Roe v. Wade and is a struggle that will not be resolved in November.

Footnote: The DC police stopped giving estimates of crowd sizes when it finally became too notorious for downplaying the size of antiwar gatherings. If previous experience holds in the case of "informal" estimates, it's safe to say that over a million took part. Far f'ing out.

Update to the footnote: The march organizers, "using standard crowd estimate methods," came up with a figure of 1,150,000. They described the event as the "largest ever for women's rights rally in the nation's capitol." I think there are a couple of unnecessary qualifiers there.

I'll say it again: Oh, how I wish I could have been there.