Big March Figures to Be Family Affair

For her 60th birthday present last year, Molly Lyon of Newport Beach was given a party with 70 friends at the Four Seasons Hotel.

This year, she requested something completely different--a trip to Washington with her daughter so they could walk together at Sunday’s March for Women’s Equality/Women’s Lives sponsored by the National Organization for Women. More than a mere present from her husband, Leon, the trip represents “an affirmation of my life as a political activist and human being,” she said.

“We’re going to send a very strong message to the Supreme Court and Congress,” Lyon said. “Women are not going to let Roe vs. Wade be overturned. We’re not.”

Spurred on by the impending U.S. Supreme Court consideration of a test case on abortion and angered by recent blockades of family planning clinics by radical anti-abortionists, about 40 marchers from Orange County--including several first-time activists and six mother/child teams--began leaving this week for what is expected to be the largest-ever march for women’s rights. Organizers are predicting more than 200,000 marchers from around the world--many more than the 90,000 who turned out for a March, 1986, pro-choice rally in Washington.

A local sympathy rally will be held at 2 p.m. Sunday at the Santa Ana Civic Center at Civic Center Drive and Flower Street.

“There never has been a time that was as impressive and dangerous as it is now,” said Myra Brown, 69, a retired social worker from Newport Beach, who will be marching for women’s rights for the first time along with her daughter, Lea Ann Brown, 39, of Berkeley. “One gets lulled into thinking things are safe.”

Besides, she said: “I thought it would be exciting and fun and important. What the hell. I’m an old lady, I might as well go and do what I want to do.”

Ivan Schwarz, 27, a film producer in Los Angeles, will join his mother, Linda Schwarz of Santa Ana, for his first march. “I get chills thinking about it. It’ll feel good to be around half a million people who believe like you do--especially growing up in Orange County in a fairly conservative neighborhood.”

Local marchers say they want not only to preserve reproduction rights for future generations, but also to demonstrate that Orange County is not as conservative as its reputation suggests.

A Times Orange County poll in January showed that 60% of Orange County residents opposed the U.S. Supreme Court barring abortions except in the case of a threat to a mother’s life. In general, Orange County residents are more liberal on the abortion issue than the rest of the country, according to UC Irvine professor Mark Baldassare’s annual Orange County Survey.

While members of the local contingent belong to Women For, NOW, Planned Parenthood, California Abortion Rights Action League (CARAL) or the American Civil Liberties Union, most said they planned to march as a group under a banner “Orange County California Women for Pro-Choice,” another of Lyon’s birthday presents.

“We need to let Orange County know, and the rest of the nation know, we are not this Republican bastion where everyone thinks alike,” said Cathy Jensen, president of the Orange County chapter of the ACLU, who will be marching with her 19-year-old daughter, Chris, and her 12-year-old son, Jeffrey. “We really are a stronghold of liberal leadership unparalleled in the nation.”

Lyon said women friends, afraid of publicly expressing their convictions, have told her privately: “Go there for me Molly. March for me.” Those who told her that, she said, expressed fear that their husbands’ careers would suffer by association with such liberal social views.

Republicans for Choice

A group called California Republicans for Choice also will send a contingent, according to Arlene Sontag, 54, of Anaheim Hills, president of the South Orange County YWCA and a self-described liberal Republican, who will march. “I just don’t see government telling you what to do with your own body,” she said. “This goes along with the Republican philosophy of less government.

“Nobody favors abortion,” she said. “It’s not a solution. Education is the solution. But choice is the issue.”

Marchers will stay in hotels or with friends; some plan to tour the city today. The 2-mile march at noon Sunday will begin at the Washington Monument, continue up Constitution Avenue and pass the U.S. Supreme Court to the Capitol, where a rally will be held in the afternoon. Many will wear white, the suffragettes’ symbol of unity, and carry banners identifying their group.

Monday, a group led by activist Wendy Lozano, a women’s studies lecturer at Cal State Long Beach, plans to lobby Orange County legislators to stop adding anti-abortion amendments to unrelated bills and to support an Equal Rights Amendment that was reintroduced this year.

Changed to Abortion Issue

Originally, the Washington march was aimed at garnering support for the ERA. But organizers said the increase in the efforts of abortion opponents, including President Bush, turned it into a primarily pro-choice event. In January, soon after his inauguration, Bush offered encouragement by telephone to about 67,000 anti-abortionists gathered for a rally outside the White House.

The rapidly rising enthusiasm for pro-choice activism is unprecedented in Orange County, activists said.

Last month, during the blockades of family-planning clinics by the anti-abortion Operation Rescue in Orange County and elsewhere in Southern California, “our phone rang and rang and rang; we couldn’t answer all the calls from women asking what we can do to help,” said Donna Phelan, 56, a secretary for Planned Parenthood in Orange County.

On Sunday in Washington, Phelan said she will march for the first time since the Vietnam War.

“To me, it’s more than a women’s issue; it’s a civil rights issue,” said Linda Schwarz, Orange County liaison for CARAL. She called abortion the “tip of the iceberg” on the agenda of certain religious groups. “We had a President who gave them a stronger voice, saying, ‘It’s OK, it’s OK,’ to these people. And these people feel now the time is right. (They say,) ‘We can impose our view on the country.’

The Pill Issue

“We’ve never done that to them, but they feel they can do it to us,” Schwarz said.

Marchers acknowledged that their demonstration comes at a time when the issue could become moot through the presence of an abortifacient pill, RU486, which has become available in France.

Lozano, however, said the upcoming U.S. Supreme Court’s test case from Missouri due for oral arguments later this month may include a ruling on when life begins, something that could outlaw the pill in the United States. In that case, “women’s groups would smuggle it in,” she predicted.

According to the ACLU’s Jensen, “There will be civil disobedience if the court makes an unwise decision.” If abortions become illegal, she predicted that women will train themselves to perform their own abortions as they did in the past. “Don’t think we’re going to go to men to be butchered in back alleys.”

Sontag said: “We’ve said we’ll chain ourselves to the White House gates.”

Some family members marching together said they hoped that their participation in the demonstration would have benefits beyond the issue of abortion.

Molly Lyon’s daughter, Linda Othenin-Girard, 38, of Los Angeles, a former anti-war activist at UC Irvine and UC Santa Barbara, said: “It’s very special because we’re doing it together. . . . It makes me reflect on what we have in common, our ‘womanness,’ which isn’t something that necessarily comes out as a child, an adolescent, or even an adult.”

‘Standing Together’

Jensen said: “I really think children should understand the power of standing together. They can see that each of us individually can make a difference. And when we join with other people, we can make a bigger difference.

“It’s quite an experience to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with people who chose this issue to link arms, whether they are men or women, old or young, whether they’ve personally done this, or personally (are) fortunate not to have had to make this choice.”

She added:

“No matter what the outcome of that Supreme Court decision, choice and the freedom to express ideas will be stronger for the fact we went.”