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Marchers react to one of many luminaries who spoke during the rally on the Mall in this view looking west toward the Washington Monument from the Third Street stage. (Photograph by: Bill O’leary — The Washington Post )

Cameron W. Barr and Elizabeth Williamson, Washington Post Staff Writers, report:

Hundreds of thousands of people filled the Mall and marched along Pennsylvania Avenue yesterday to show their support for abortion rights, loudly identifying President Bush as the leading enemy of “reproductive freedom.”

Organizers of the March for Women’s Lives said they had drawn 1.15 million people, which would make it the largest abortion rights gathering in history. “This has been the largest march for reproductive rights, the largest march for women’s rights and the largest march of any kind in this country,” said Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women.

Police would not issue an official estimate, but some veteran commanders said the crowd was at least the biggest since the 1995 Million Man March, which independent researchers put at 870,000 people. D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey would say only that he thought the march had met and perhaps exceeded its organizers’ expectations. Their march permit was for as many as 750,000.

Celebrities, from entertainers to politicians to activists, lent their shine to the event. Actors Cybill Shepherd and Whoopi Goldberg attended, as did singers Ani DiFranco and Moby. Feminist icons Patricia Ireland and Gloria Steinem were there, and so were former secretary of state Madeleine K. Albright and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.). Billionaire Ted Turner was there. So was NAACP Chairman Julian Bond.

“If all we do is march today,” Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) told the crowd, “that will not change the direction this country is headed under this administration.”

Several blocks away, on Pennsylvania Avenue, Jay Rhodes of Alexandria held a sign equating abortion with the Holocaust. He shouted sarcastically, “Keep murder legal” when marchers challenged his views. “It’s very hostile,” said Rhodes, 52, who said he came on his own to join counter-protesters who lined part of the march route. “There’s a lot of anger on both sides.”

As the marchers thronged 14th Street yesterday afternoon, Guilford College sophomore Parks Marion, 19, recalled his mother dragging him through the same streets during a 1992 abortion-rights rally. Then, he complained about the walk. Yesterday, in the midst of a take-two-steps-and-stop pedestrian crush, he marveled at “just the sheer number” of people. “It’s overwhelming and it’s wonderful,” he said.

Organizers sought to transcend the polarizing issue of abortion, portraying the event as the work of a coalition of groups that want to improve women’s access to reproductive education health care worldwide. But the dominant themes of the day were two. Again and again, march participants vowed that abortion was here to stay. And that Bush had to go.

Bush stayed at Camp David in the Maryland mountains until late afternoon, when he returned to the capital. The White House issued a statement that began on a conciliatory note and then turned to administration policies that are popular with conservatives. “The president believes we should work to build a culture of life in America and regardless of where one stands on the issue of abortion, we can all work together to reduce the number of abortions through promotion of abstinence-education programs, support for parental-notification laws and continued support for banning partial-birth abortion,” the statement said.

Earlier, Jeanne Clark, spokesperson for the Feminist Majority, one of the organizations behind the march, said that while President Bill Clinton was in office, women felt that his veto could protect them. Now, she said, growing concern about Bush administration initiatives has prompted women to march anew to show their concerns. The last major abortion rights rally on the Mall took place in April 1992, seven months before Clinton was elected.

In 2001, shortly after taking office, Bush barred the government from funding international organizations that use money from other sources to provide abortions or information about terminating a pregnancy. On April 1, he signed a bill that made it a federal crime to harm or kill a fetus during the commission of another federal crime.

That law defined an “unborn child” as “a member of the species homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb,” alarming abortion rights advocates, who challenged the bill in three federal courts even before Bush signed it.

The Bush administration also has not made it possible to obtain the so-called morning after pill, also known as emergency contraception, without a prescription.

Concerned about what they saw as an erosion of rights, the Feminist Majority joined NARAL Pro-Choice America, the American Civil Liberties Union, Black Women’s Health Imperative, the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, NOW and Planned Parenthood Federation of America to fight it.

Holding a red fly swatter that said “Stop Bush,” Carmen Barroso, a New York-based regional director of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, called the day a “mobilization against the war against reproductive rights and reproductive health.”

A few feet away, sitting in a folding chair under one of the Mall’s shade trees, retired IBM employee Franz Hespenheide of Gaithersburg seemed almost reassured by what he was witnessing. “To see all these people,” he said, “just reinforces our belief that this government has to go.”

Sandra Kauffman, crouched in the grass next to her three-wheel bike, watched with tears in her eyes as four lawyers approached the stage — they had argued cases before the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of abortion rights. “It’s been a long fight. It’s incredible to see,” Kauffman said.

In the last presidential election, Steve Baker, 40, voted for Bush. But Baker said he told his wife, Cindy Maloney, 34, that if he felt women’s rights were being compromised in a Bush administration, he would be the first to march with her at an event such as yesterday’s. “I really didn’t think this was going to happen,” he said.

Many people wore or carried signs that displayed their political views. One popular placard featured a portrait of Bush and the phrase “one-term president.”

Bob Kunst of Miami had flown in Saturday night to sell 40,000 anti-Bush bumper stickers. On the Mall yesterday, one hand held the stickers and the other a thick wad of cash. “We’re doing incredibly well,” he said.

The signs in the bus windows at Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium’s Parking Lot 3 — one of several staging areas — read like an atlas of Northeast and Great Lakes states. Big cities and small towns were listed on the placards, including Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Millersville, Lancaster and Durham.

Kay Kennard had marched for civil rights in the ’60s and had been to Washington many times chaperoning students on field trips. But yesterday, the retired teacher emerged from a nine-hour bus ride that began in the Cleveland suburb of Beachwood to help teach a lesson to her 15-year-old niece, Brytney Saulters. “We want the right of women to make their own choices,” Kennard said.

Buses lined several blocks along 22nd and East Capitol streets, while about 800 filled four parking lots outside the stadium. At 10:30 a.m., people filled the sidewalk for a block and a half waiting to get into the Stadium-Armory Metro station.

Katie Panella, 19, slapped a pink sticker on her right thigh and clutched a “Stop Violence Against Women” poster in front of her Brown University women’s rugby jacket as she strode towards the station.

Though a little bleary-eyed from the trip from Providence, R.I., she looked forward to showing the importance of mobilizing voters against Bush’s policies. “He’s a threat to women’s rights,” she said. “It’s just exciting to have so many young people out marching.”

Charlotte Hummel, 47, chairs the Landsdowne, Pa., Democratic Party, and came yesterday to show her 9-year-old daughter, Zoe Farquhar, “a major national event.” Hummel said that women have long been at the wrong end of government intrusion into their bodies. “If you control women’s bodies, you control their lives.”

There were several hundred antiabortion activists lining the route of the march, exchanging shouts with the marchers. Police reported no physical clashes, however.

As the march surged down Pennsylvania Avenue, Bertram Lee, 14, of Northwest pulled a cell phone from his pocket and left a message for his girlfriend, who couldn’t attend. “I’m wearing a pink shirt and a yellow sash, and I’m proud of it,” he said, his voice filled with emotion. “I just wanted to tell her I love her,” he explained after the call. “This is amazing.”

About 20 feet back from the front line, a tall, slender man in a linen jacket towered above the women around him, walking with a meditative air. It was NAACP leader Julian Bond. “Crowds have a calming influence on me,” he said, craning his neck from side to side. ” I’ve been through a lot of these but never on a pro-choice march. We’ve supported the pro-choice movement since 1968 but never endorsed something like this.”

Dinah Finkelstein, a 16-year-old student, came to the Mall by Metro from her home in Northwest. She said she was “amazed” by the scene, and she looked it, gazing in all directions at the crowds around her. “This is really a defensive measure,” she observed, “against everyone out there who doesn’t think that we deserve a choice.”

While it was clear that the march was organized to oppose any infringement of a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion, as enshrined in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, some of the other goals were harder to divine.

The official march posters and banners cited eight words — choice, justice, access, health, abortion, global, family planning — offering several objectives.

Many people defined their own agendas. “I want ‘Pro-choice, Pro-child,’ ” Roberta Blumberg, 53, told volunteers handing out signs yesterday morning. She already juggled two yellow and purple “Who decides?” signs attached to hollow cardboard tubes, but she wanted to modify one with a pro-child statement.

“It’s important to look past focusing on abortion rights,” said Adia Harvey, 27, a Johns Hopkins University instructor who lives in Lanham. “You have to put abortion in the context of women’s reproductive freedom,” which she defined as full access to contraceptive technology and sex education.

She said organizers had done a better job than in the past of broadening the agenda, but she and some of her co-marchers agreed that the bottom line was defending the right to an abortion. “It seems a pity that it comes down to this,” said Tahi Reynolds, who works for an nonprofit education organization in the District.

Organizers announced yesterday afternoon that they had surpassed a million marchers, reaching that conclusion after they said they had passed out more than a million stickers. Alice Cohan, the march director, said 2,500 trained volunteers were given stickers — reading “count me in” — that they pasted on people as they got off buses or entered the march area.

Police would not make a formal estimate. Veteran officers who had been on hand for marches and demonstrations in years past said it was the biggest such gathering since the Million Man March in 1995, a gathering whose size was hotly disputed and that led to the discontinuation of crowd estimates by U.S. Park Police. After that march, a team of researchers recounted the crowd from photos and set the number at 870,000, with a margin of error that offered a range for the turnout from 655,000 to 1.1 million.

Officers disagreed about whether the march matched or surpassed the number at the Million Man March, but many veterans of such gatherings put the figure at at least 500,000. Acting Park Police Chief Dwight Pettiford flew above the crowd in his agency’s helicopter and said the “entire Mall was covered with people.” “I don’t know if they achieved their numbers or not, but there were lots and lots of people,” Pettiford said.

Metro reported large numbers of riders. Spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein said that as of 5 p.m., 320,138 riders had entered the system, more than double last Sunday’s ridership but far below weekday average of 670,000, she said. And homebound demonstrators were delayed after a bus became stuck in an underpass near RFK Stadium. By nighttime, the bus was dislodged and traffic was moving.

U.S. Park Police arrested 16 protesters from the Christian Defense Coalition about 3 p.m. for demonstrating without a permit.

Sgt. Scott Fear said the group had permission to demonstrate along Pennsylvania Avenue but moved into an area designated for the March for Women’s Lives.

“We gave them three warnings,” he said. “They decided that 16 of them were going to stay, so [those] 16 were arrested and charged.”

2004 The Washington Post Company

Monday, April 26, 2004; Page A01