300,000 MARCH HERE FOR ABORTION RIGHTS

An estimated 300,000 people, in one of the largest political demonstrations ever in Washington, marched on the U.S. Capitol yesterday demanding preservation of a 1973 Supreme Court decision granting women rights to legal abortions.

Jammed elbow-to-elbow, blowing whistles, beating drums and waving banners, the marchers packed a mile-long stretch of Constitution Avenue NW in a parade that continued more than four hours before the last of them arrived on Capitol Hill from the site of a morning rally at the Washington Monument.

The crowd -- a mix of grandmothers, civil rights activists, college students, homemakers and religious congregations energized by a pending challenge to abortion rights -- far surpassed organizers' early hopes and dwarfed a few hundred counterdemonstrators.

"It is time for Congress to understand we are the majority," said Molly Yard, president of the National Organization for Women, which coordinated the march.

"This is the biggest march for women's rights in the history of the country."

Eleanor Smeal, president of the Fund for the Feminist Majority, declared the battle over abortion "a whole new ballgame." "We've hit middle America," she said. "I can't get over it."

Billed as a watershed in the escalating abortion dispute, the demonstration on the cool, blustery day was intended by its organizers as a way to influence the Supreme Court and to regain momentum on the issue lost in recent years amid a conservative political surge.

The event turned into a marathon that lasted most of the day as waves of demonstrators, having inched their way along the Mall, then swarmed over the grounds of the Capitol for a boisterous second rally outside the building's West Portico.

Organizers had vowed that the march would show overwhelming support for abortion rights from a "silent majority" of women nationwide. For sheer size, the demonstration rivaled other events that have marked the nation's historic turning points, such as the 1963 march on Washington for civil rights, attended by 250,000, and a 1971 rally by crowds estimated from 200,000 to 500,000 to protest U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

It easily was the largest turnout for a demonstration about the abortion issue, and revived memories of women's rights protests earlier in the century, when suffragists fought for the right to vote. Like suffragists, many of the demonstrators yesterday dressed in white.

An abortion-rights demonstration here three years ago drew an estimated 90,000. About 67,000 antiabortion protesters rallied here in January.

The ranks of yesterday's marchers, some from as far as Los Angeles, thousands arriving by bus from college campuses around the country, seemed swept by a sense of settling accounts with their antiabortion adversaries, who have gained increased attention through fervid, sometimes militant attempts to stop abortions.

"Ayatollah and Pro-lifers Bomb Their Opponents," read one sign hoisted on the Mall yesterday, referring to the occasional bombings that have struck abortion clinics in recent years.

Thousands carried coat hangers as symbols of their fears that a reversal of the Supreme Court's ruling in Roe v. Wade would mean a return to dangerous, illegal abortions. Demonstrators at one point chanted, "Right to life, your name's a lie. You don't care if women die."

Frank Dorman, minister of the United Church of Christ in Cambridge, Mass., was among the thousands of church-affiliated demonstrators hoping to balance the antiabortion fervor of Christian fundamentalists. "I think the Supreme Court needs to see that they can't make a decision based on what they're hearing from the religious right," Dorman said.

Christina O'Leary, a 15-year-old from Cape Cod, said, "I think this will affect my generation a lot. I think it's important that we get involved and protect our rights."

Police reported only isolated, minor skirmishes between opposing demonstrators and made no arrests. At 15th Street and Constitution Avenue, about 200 antiabortion protesters held signs reading "Every Homicide Is a Personal Choice" and "Abortion Is Always Fatal."

The group was surrounded by U.S. Park Police officers, some on horseback. One counterdemonstrator, Julia Mitchell, 16, of Bethesda, said she was undeterred by the mammoth parade that pressed slowly forward a few feet in front of her.

"Abortion is wrong. No one can have the choice of murder," said Mitchell, a student at the private Oakcrest girls school in the District. "I'm praying for them. It's very sad."

Police reported some marchers throwing light bulbs filled with blue paint at counterdemonstrators, but said most of the confrontations involved only verbal exchanges and displays of graphic photographs supporting the groups' competing views.

At another point, several abortion-rights demonstrators linked arms and tried to remove a group of antiabortion activists gathered at the Capitol Reflecting Pool, where 4,400 white crosses had been planted to symbolize the number of abortions each day, organizers said.

When the demonstrators at the crosses refused to move, the abortion-rights group backed away.

"We are here to pray and to ask God to visit His will on all these people who think they are for abortions," said Judie Brown, president of the antiabortion group American Life League Inc., who was at the mock cemetery.

Some abortion-rights organizers were awestruck by the response to yesterday's rally. "All of us, the core of Democratic women who began planning this effort, are surprised by the diversity of people who are part of this march, but not part of any group," said Ann Lewis, former vice president of the Democratic National Committee. "It's swelling beyond what any of us imagined."

Feminist and civil rights groups designed the march to hold back attacks on Roe v. Wade. That ruling is being challenged in a Missouri abortion dispute -- Webster v. Reproductive Health Services -- scheduled for oral arguments before the court April 26. The Missouri law provides that life "begins at conception" and restricts use of public funds and public employees from "encouraging or counseling" a woman to have an abortion.

Organizers had hoped not only to impress the Supreme Court justices, but also to send a clear measure of disapproval to President Bush, who counts himself as an abortion foe.

Yard and others originally had predicted 50,000 to 100,000 participants in the event, but quickly realized last week that they had miscalculated as grass-roots organizers from numerous states and college campuses reported a snowballing mobilization.

Even as yesterday's march was struggling to get under way at noon, demonstrators continued to stream into the area from side streets and packed Metro trains. Metro officials, who had begun subway operations two hours earlier than normal at 8 a.m., reported more than 200,000 train passengers by 3 p.m.

Crowds blanketed the grounds of the Washington Monument and jammed areas across 15th and 14th streets near the Museum of American History for a 10:30 a.m. rally where one speaker vowed, "We will fight for a woman's right to an abortion and to bring a child safely into this world."

The crowds so overwhelmed available facilities that women took over the men's bathroom at one museum. At the Capitol, one official said that Marlo Thomas, among numerous celebrities taking part in the event, was swept out of her shoes.

Organizers had planned to take the entire parade past the Supreme Court, east of the Capitol, but eventually diverted the marchers down Pennsylvania Avenue NW to the Capitol's western lawn as the march began to bog down from its own size.

The demonstrators, who swayed and sang along with folk singers Peter, Paul and Mary, arrived at the Mall in many cases after struggling to find transportation here from distant sites. Many said they had never demonstrated for anything before, but saw this as the moment to be counted.

"We're trying not to slip backward," said Pamela Brooks, a children's librarian at a school in Boston who had flown here to demonstrate with her daughter Laura, a computer analyst there. "I see so many children who already are having babies."

Roxanna Galbreath, a lawyer and family planning volunteer who had flown in from Los Angeles with her husband Robert, an irrigation consultant, aimed her criticism at successive Republican administrations.

Bush, she said, "is in favor of having children and taking care of them and that's wonderful. But this administration is the one that's been cutting funds for family planning."

Students from Colby-Sawyer College in New London, N.H., had all but given up hopes of attending the demonstration for lack of funds to hire a bus. In a desperate call to NOW headquarters last week, though, they were introduced to an Alabama woman who was looking for ways to donate $450.

"We were all screaming, 'God's a woman! God's pro-choice,' " said student leader Elizabeth Dean. "It was a miracle."

Staff writers Carlos Sanchez, Retha Hill, Steve Bates, Jill Nelson, Dana Priest and Nell Henderson contributed to this report.

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.