The rally will assemble at 11:00 a.m. in Upper Senate Park at Constitution and Delaware Avenues.

Some NOW chapters and other groups which support women's rights are organizing buses to travel to the event. Meetings to organize publicity and participation are taking place in Chicago, New York, Pittsburgh, and other cities. Information on the event, as well as a fact sheet in English and Spanish and a flyer, are available at NOW's web site at www.now.org.

Under successive Democratic and Republican party administrations on both the state and federal level, legislators have passed many laws restricting access to abortion. These measures include mandatory delay and biased counseling laws, funding restrictions, and forced parental consent and involvement laws. In recent years, many states have passed bans on an abortion procedure that opponents of women's rights call "partial birth abortion."

These restrictions hit working-class women in disproportionate numbers. Since 1976, when the Hyde Amendment was passed by Congress, virtually no federal Medicaid or other federal funds may be used for abortion. As a report by the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy explains, the "ability to obtain an abortion, especially early in pregnancy when the procedure is safer, is directly related to the capacity to afford one. In effect, many indigent women were deprived of their right to choose."

In addition, the wholesale bipartisan assault on working people has had a disproportionate impact on workers and farmers who are women. For example, the elimination of Aid to Families with Dependent Children, a key plank of former president William Clinton's policies, has increasingly pushed workers, in particular single women with children, into a precarious existence.

Shortly after taking office, President George Bush reinstated a policy which eliminates international funding to organizations that offer abortion counseling or lobby their governments in favor of abortion rights.

In a victory for women's rights, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled March 21 that a public hospital cannot administer drug tests to pregnant women without their consent. The 6-to-3 decision held that tests of pregnant women for cocaine, conducted by the staff of the Medical University of South Carolina in collaboration with Charleston, South Carolina, police, violated constitutional protections against illicit search and seizure. All but one of the 30 women arrested under the policy were Black.
 
 
Related article:
Defend the right to choose abortion  
 
 
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