Hundreds of thousands of women and a smattering of men from across the United States and dozens of other countries marched through the nation's most politically symbolic space Sunday in the largest women's rights protest in more than a decade.
Older women in their Sunday best mingled with college students in T-shirts in a massive demonstration sparked largely by what they see as President George W. Bush's efforts to trim away women's right to an abortion.
Organizers, who said this protest was larger than the 750,000 who attended the last abortion rights demonstration in 1992, said they were also calling for medically sound sex education, birth control, and better health care for women worldwide.
Waving signs that read "Fire Bush" and "Keep Abortion Legal," the crowd packed onto the National Mall - the grassy esplanade that links the Congress, the White House, and America's most revered monuments and museums.
"All the people are here today not only to march on behalf of women's lives but to take that energy into the election in November," Senator Hillary Clinton told the crowd before the march began.
"What we need to try to communicate as clearly as possible to all women and men who are fair-minded in America is that a vote for a pro-choice candidate is a vote for conscience," she said, urging the crowd to vote for the Democratic presidential candidate, Senator John Kerry.
"It's a vote for the choice that a woman and her family can make and it's also a vote for someone who will protect economic rights and health care and so much else," she said.
Opponents of abortion rights also turned out in far smaller rival protests, many carrying pictures of aborted fetuses and denouncing what they see as infanticide.
"It's murder. It's wrong," said one man from San Diego, California, who declined to give his name. This country has become an abomination before God. What's it going to take for this country to repent and come back to God."
More than 1,200 civic groups worked together to organize the protest, sparked by recent efforts by recent efforts to curtail the reach of a landmark 1973 US Supreme Court ruling that recognised women's right to an abortion.
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