No More Wire Hangers!

This is what democracy looks like.

And that's where I was most of yesterday, along with the missus and Caren and Niels and Matt, joining the evil feminist-homosexualist axis as we made a bright pink nuisance of ourselves on the streets of DC during the March for Women's Lives.

A conservative estimate puts the numbers at around 500,000. It may have been considerably more.

There was, of course, some opposition. But I was struck by how small (somewhere between a couple hundred and a thousand counter-protesters) it was - and, much like the asshats in the "Got AIDS Yet?" t-shirts who stood around on the corner for the Millennial March on Washington four years ago, how ultimately narrow and wrong-headed they seemed. The folk I was walking with - women, men, young, old, all races, all social strata - love life. They love families and children (many, many showed up with their own), and they understand the sacrifices - the hard choices - that have to be made to make the world better for everyone.

And, while I understand that the rhetoric on both sides of the abortion issue can get a bit intense, I have to say I have much more respect for the tactics of the pro-choice people. After all, I didn't see one poster yesterday with a photo of a mangled uterus from a botched DIY abortion. I'm tempted to say that might not be such a bad counterpoint, but I'd really rather let the opposition have a monopoly on the B-movie horror stuff. It's an ugly and unpleasant way to get one's point across. I'm more than willing to be disagreed with on any number of things I believe in, but if you can't do so without resorting to fetishized images of mutilation and gore - well, I'm also more than willing to let you.

UPDATE: Matt has posted a whole bunch of pictures. And in there are also reports from both Respectful of Otters and everythingsruined, for a couple of slightly more respectable bloggers' angles than mine.