The March for Women's Lives

By Winnie Varghese

In 1992, I marched in Washington for choice.

In 1992, I was about to turn 20, in college, and excited to be involved in a national march. In 1992, I didn't know who had organized this march, why, what strategic purpose it served, or who made the shiny sign I was carrying.

I also didn't really believe the right to reproductive health services was seriously threatened. I was a college-aged woman whose friends talked and worried about reproductive health issues: everything from lesbian women on “the pill,” to regulating incapacitating menstrual cramps, to young women away from home dealing with unplanned pregnancy in the first year of college. This was the daily talk on the dorm floor of a women's college in the American South, and reproductive health continues to be the daily concern of women, young and old, gay, bisexual and straight.

This year I am about to turn 32 and went to Washington to march for choice as a priest and chaplain on a college campus, aware that the Bush administration has declared a war on choice. A woman's right to make medical decisions about her reproductive system is under threat. The only marching I've done in the years in between have been gay pride, anti-war, anti-police brutality, and anti-globalization, with younger and more diverse marchers. The language of resistance I know is of global capitalism, empire building and the police state. These movements have been dismissed by the established Left and the media as small, insignificant, violent, and disorganized.

Sunday, April 25, 2004, 1.15 million men and women converged on the mall in D.C. to support a woman's right to make choices for her own body. In helicopter views the march clearly packed the Mall between the Washington Memorial and the Capitol building. This was unthinkable to Washington insiders. Placed next to pictures of the undercounted Million Man March – whose organizers had estimated at 800,000 to one million, to date the largest gathering on the Mall – the March for Women's Lives is clearer hundreds of thousand more.

It was the largest march in the history of the United States, or as DJ Moby said, “in the history of the universe.” If that energy and mobilization were simply a show of support for women's freedom under the law, that would have been plenty, but speaker after speaker and sign and chant and t-shirt said loudly and with great humor, that we were there for regime change – speaking of the Bush administration.

This was a march that illustrated the rage at the war in Iraq, the lies of this administration, the state of the economy, the Patriot Act, and now, the misleading “partial birth” abortion ban. It challenged the Justice Department's attempts to subpoena women's medical records from Planned Parenthood clinics around the country – in some cases, all records – to intimidate women and their health care providers. . .

This was a march that illustrated the rage at the war in Iraq, the lies of this administration, the state of the economy, the Patriot Act, and now, the misleading “partial birth” abortion ban. It challenged the Justice Department's attempts to subpoena women's medical records from Planned Parenthood clinics around the country – in some cases, all records – to intimidate women and their health care providers into our current government's range of acceptable family planning choices. This is an administration that remains to be convinced that birth control of any kind is not equivalent to abortion. This is the administration that cut health care in poor communities internationally in its first weeks in office, by cutting funding to all international programs supported by USAID that distribute prophylactics or offer abortion.

The march on April 25 was as diverse as it was and as large as it was because anti-globalization and anti-war movements have been growing in the last decade. We are not the apathetic generation we are accused of being, rather, we are a generation – and there is a generation of adults younger than me – that refuses to not make the connections between all of the systems of deceit, oppressive power and hegemony that violate human dignity all over the planet.

April 25 demonstrated for all of us who demonstrated and all who watched that the Left is alive and well. It is multi-generational, multi-cultural, multi-racial, multi-faith, and includes people of all genders and sexual orientations; and the take-home message was clear: this November, VOTE.

The Rev. Winnie Varghese is the Episcopal chaplain at Columbia University in New York City. She is a contributing editor to The Witness and is involved with the church's 20/20 initiative and numerous other programs focused on growing the church with an inclusive ethos. Winnie may be reached by email at wsvarghese@aol.com .