Abortion rights supporters and antiabortion activists shout at one another during a “Bans Off Our Bodies” rally and march to the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington on Saturday.
Thousands of people took to the streets in the Southland on Saturday as part of a nationwide effort to protect abortion rights in the aftermath of a leaked Supreme Court draft opinion overruling the landmark 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision. In L.A., activists demonstrated near City Hall in downtown Los Angeles, joining hundreds of women’s rights rallies across the state and the U.S. Protesters also gathered in Long Beach, Pasadena, Sherman Oaks, Palos Verdes and Santa Ana as well as San Francisco, San Diego, Washington, New York, Chicago and Austin, Texas.
Irfan Khan was a staff photographer with the Los Angeles Times from 1996 to 2024. He previously served as a freelance photographer for the publication beginning in 1989. Khan started his career as a commercial photographer in 1973 in Pakistan and moved to Dubai in 1977, where he worked for an advertising agency and at a leading English newspaper. Khan’s assignments have taken across Southern California and the U.S. Internationally, he has photographed the Hajj in Saudi Arabia and war zones of the Pakistan/Afghanistan border in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. He was part of the team awarded the Pulitzer Prize in breaking news for coverage of the 2015 terrorist attack in San Bernardino. In his spare time, he enjoys listening to semi-classical music of the Indian subcontinent and playing cricket on Sundays.
Kent Nishimura is a former staff photographer with the Los Angeles Times, based in Washington, D.C. Born in Taiwan, Nishimura immigrated to the United States, grew up in Hawaii and is a graduate of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His work has been recognized by Pictures of the Year International, the National Headliner Awards, the White House News Photographers Assn. and the National Press Photographers Assn., among others. He has worked on staff at newspapers across the United States and freelanced for many national and international publications before joining The Times in 2017.