Drum beats and chants echoed throughout the Mission as students led a march for abortion rights Thursday afternoon on Mission Street. Cars honked in solidarity as protesters walked up 20th Street to 24th Street and then over to South Van Ness Avenue.
The demonstration was organized by Rise Up For Abortion Rights, a nationwide organization launched in January, 2022. The group set today as a national day of action in response to the leaked draft opinion of the Supreme Court that indicates the court is ready to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Chapters in more than 15 cities across the country participated in the protest, advocating for abortion rights, according to the Rise Up website.
Weekly protests have been organized in San Francisco ever since Politico leaked the draft ruling on May 2. The chapter has made it a priority to get local students involved.
“We have a lot of power,” said Sonia Delarios Moran, a student at Mission High School. She led a group of students from the school to the 24th and Mission BART station, megaphone in hand, to meet up with the rest of the protest crowd.
Magda Cholenwinska, an older member of the San Francisco chapter, reminded the group that the power is in their hands.
“Their lives are the ones on the line,” she said. “They wanna live and have the same rights their parents had.”
Walking behind a green banner with yellow words that read, “Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights,” Moran and her peers marched along 24th Street to perform a die-in on South Van Ness.
“I’ll be here for a while,” she said.
Go young people, fight and fight and fight and do not let these Republicans force you to give birth against your will! I am so sorry we could not keep your rights intact, but it is your turn now to fight and never let California take us back to the 1950’s!
I believe the emphasis should be about CHOICE, and the fact that they are taking away our rights. Every time the word “ abortion “ is used , it just stirs up the religious zealots. And I think there should be more emphasis on separation of Church and State. I think it’s a “religious “ idea that the embryo is a person , not a scientific one.
I disagree and think the reason the left is losing this fight is that they try to make a bad thing sound not so bad. Abortion is a horrible thing that should be legal. Abortion is killing the thing inside you that will eventually become a baby. Women should have the right to choose to terminate this creature, but it’s science and not religion that shows it’s a living thing inside the body that will eventually be a baby unless you kill it. I’d put ultrasounds under science and not religion.
Every time you try to sugar coat something, the people opposed to you use your sugar coating to say you are hiding the truth and therefore must be wrong. Take the issue head on, agree that it is not a good thing, but that it far outweighs all the bad when women doesn’t have the choice. Talk about rape, poverty, debt on society, etc…. Don’t try to say it’s not killing a living thing. That is just asinine and a losing argument.
The reason pro-choice supporters are losing the fight is this SCOTUS has an agenda. The SC will enact their agenda through legal reasoning. Moral and scientific arguments are irrelevant.
The current SCOTUS is deciding if “right to privacy” is legit. It’s a narrow focus.
Biked to 24th yesterday around noontime and saw who I think was Joey from the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party. Was this just a RCP cadre operation or was PSL involved too?