Mass Rally in Capital Backs Legal Abortion

WASHINGTON — People by the tens of thousands marched and chanted and carried banners past the White House and on to the Capitol here Sunday to demonstrate support for the right to legal abortions.

Police estimated that the marchers, most of them women and many wearing the white and purple colors adopted by the suffragette movement in their grandmothers’ day, numbered 85,000, and sponsors claimed 125,000. The police figure was more than double their estimate of 37,000 people who turned out Jan. 23 for an anti-abortion rally here.

Reagans Not Home

It was sunny and springlike in Washington on Sunday but January’s demonstration took place in unseasonably warm weather. President Reagan addressed that rally in support of the “pro-life” movement. Neither the President nor Mrs. Reagan was in the White House during Sunday’s demonstration.

Sunday’s turnout marked the first phase in an effort by so-called pro-choice womens’ rights groups to underscore their opposition to what they see as an effort by the Reagan Administration to upset the 1973 Supreme Court decision that overturned restrictive state abortion laws and effectively upheld a woman’s right to have an abortion.

The group’s sponsors have assigned hundreds of women to Capitol Hill today to lobby members of Congress to remove an anti-abortion rider from the pending Civil Rights Restoration Act. They are organizing for a second mass demonstration next Sunday in Los Angeles.

A sign of the rancor that the abortion debate has roused came as the women paraded 10 abreast past the White House. A man broke through police lines holding in both hands an object he claimed was a human fetus and shoved the object into the faces of marchers.

“This is the choice pro-choice offers,” the man shouted as he tried to join the march. Police, who bundled him into a squad car on a disorderly conduct charge, identified him as the Rev. Jerry Horn, 33, and said he claimed to represent a group called Americans Against Abortion.

The demonstrators, some of whom carried red coat hangers symbolizing the back-alley abortions their movement deplores, carried purple and white banners bearing such legends as “Forced Pregnancy Is Involuntary Servitude” and “Reagan, Get Out of My Bedroom.” They chanted such slogans as “We won’t go back,” and “Not the church, not the state, women must decide their fate.”

Smeal Draws Cheers

At a rally on the greening lawn below the Capitol’s west front, Eleanor Smeal, president of the National Organization for Women, told the cheering crowd: “Abortion is the hottest issue of the feminist movement and we are a majority.

“The silent majority will be silent no longer,” Smeal shouted to enthusiastic applause.

Feminist Gloria Steinem said that the meeting was designed to “show majority support for choice,” and “no government, right or left, should have the right to interfere with that.” And former Rep. Bella Abzug (D-N.Y.), declared: “If the liberty of some is taken away, the liberty of all is taken away.”

Mary Ann Sorrentino, whose work as executive director of Planned Parenthood in Rhode Island led last year to her excommunication from the Roman Catholic Church, told the rally that the action “has energized this movement.”

Letter to Bishop

Before the march, an anti-abortion group called the American Life League called a news conference at which its president, Jodie Brown, announced that she had written the Most Rev. John R. Keating, Roman Catholic bishop of northern Virginia, urging excommunication of Catholics who support abortion, starting with “appropriate action” against Smeal because she has “flagrantly violated many of the church’s laws.”

Brown added that her group is studying the cases of other prominent Catholics who support freedom of choice, including Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and former Rep. Geraldine A. Ferraro (D-N.Y.), the 1984 Democratic vice presidential candidate.

When told later about the press conference, NOW’s Smeal commented that she is not in “bad company” and suggested that Brown’s group “must be really desperate.”

“I believe millions of Catholics support free choice and that abortion and birth control should remain legal,” Smeal said. “Frankly, I think I am in the mainstream of lay Catholics.

“If they start to excommunicate all the people in this country who believe it (abortion) should remain a legal option in a pluralistic society, it would be millions,” she added.