“What’s changed? Nothing,” said Aurie Pennick, a former civil rights lawyer and a Chicago resident for the last 70 years. “Our fight is still the fight. It has broadened, it’s more deliberate, but in terms of change… This isn’t the end the same way it isn’t the beginning.”
Pennick said she sees a connection between the protests she attended in 1966 organized by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the demonstration that brought hundreds of Chicagoans to the Loop Saturday once more to demand abortion rights for all.
The demonstration was “in solidarity” with the Women’s Wave day of action planned by the national Women’s March group, according to Mandy Medley, an organizer with Chicago 4 Abortion Rights.
It came about a month before the Nov. 8 midterm election, and nearly four months since the Supreme Court overturned the Roe v. Wade decision that had protected abortion rights for nearly half a century.
“If we don’t continue to fight here in Illinois and stand in solidarity with people in other states who don’t have abortion rights, they’ll come for us too,” Medley said.
Several speakers took the stage during a rally in Federal Plaza, from registered nurses to Chicago Teachers’ Union representatives, speaking on their experiences in health care and celebrating a recent referendum in Kansas that solidified abortion rights in the Republican-led state.
A constant presence on stage was Alicia Hurtado, a 22-year-old member of the Chicago Abortion Fund. “Abortion is a community responsibility” and “Everyone loves someone who has had an abortion” are two of the slogans and chants they led the crowd in repeating before introducing speakers, phrases echoed on signs and buttons in the audience.
Amy Rosen was holding multiple signs, one with the latter phrase written across it because it’s how she became an abortion rights advocate — something she likened to being “pro heart surgery.” She said her Catholic upbringing pushed her against abortion rights at a young age, though her views changed when her friend had to get an abortion when they were teens.
“I had the opinion that if you died while having an abortion, it was like dying while you’re committing a crime,” Rosen said. “Since then [I had] the realization that you can’t even be compelled to give blood to save your child’s life, but you can be compelled to give your entire body to keep a child alive. It isn’t right.”
Attendees then embarked on a mile-long march to the northeast corner of Wacker Drive and Wabash Avenue, just across the river from Trump Tower, where a final rally ended the protest.
“Kansas showed us what is possible,” Linda Loew, a member of Chicago 4 Abortion Rights shouted as part of her closing remarks. “We must return to the streets again and again… We are in this fight for abortion rights and full reproductive justice until we win.”
