Thousands of individuals hit the streets of LA and other US cities in support of the rights related to reproductive health. It came in a series of protests across the nation against the almost total ban on abortion in Texas.
The fifth Women’s March started from the Pershing Square area to Los Angeles City Hall. Here, representative Karen Bass, plus Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors members Holly Mitchell and Hilda Solis were going to speak against the piece of legislation in Texas.
The march included Texas student Paxton Smith, who gave a popular valedictorian speech against the law, and feminist lawyer Gloria Allred.
March organizers were looking forward to having around 20,000 individuals as Los Angeles protest participants. There were similar gatherings in other Southern California areas, including West Hollywood, Long Beach, and Pasadena.
The Women’s March Foundation (WMF) was holding a march in DC, with over 600 mini-marches planned elsewhere in the nation. The law in Texas, without exceptions for incest or rape cases, lets private citizens sue any person who aids a woman in getting an abortion following a six-week pregnancy period. It applies to one who drives her to a health clinic for the procedure or the clinic’s staff.
According to the Women’s March website, the US Supreme Court declined an emergency plea to block the ban on abortion and took the steps that would overturn Roe v. Wade. The website described the law as the direst-ever threat to access to abortion in Texas.
For this reason, the march happened in Washington DC and each US state on October 02, 2021, before the US Supreme Court reconvened. It happened as a message regarding the fierce opposition of the protestors to not just limiting abortion access but also overturning the case that concerned Jane Roe and Henry Wade.
The first march happened on the day that followed the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 45th US President and is among the nation’s largest-ever public demonstrations. As per a Washington Post analysis, single-day women’s marches attracted 3.267 to 5.246 million individuals in the country. An approximated 750,000 individuals took part in the 2017 LA demonstration.
