'My body my choice': Thousands rally across US for abortion rights

NYC protesters rally in support of abortion rights

Protesters carried placards that read "My body my choice" and "Keep your laws off my body"

Thousands of activists chanting, banging drums and wielding placards flooded streets across the United States on Saturday in a national day of action calling for safe and legal access to abortion.

The mass demonstrations were a response to a leaked draft opinion showing the Supreme Court's conservative majority is poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, a landmark 1973 ruling guaranteeing abortion access nationwide.

Thousands more people assembled in a central square in Brooklyn, New York, to carry a giant pink banner that read: "Our Bodies. Our Futures. Our Abortions."

"We're gonna keep fighting until we win," Schumer told AFP. "America is on our side."

"There's so many young people, so many mothers wheeling their babies, so many people with their husbands or boyfriends, so many men -- so many different kinds of people support this cause," she told AFP.

"There are a lot of people who have very traditional values, and are frightened by women who can make choices about their own body," Easter said, as a crush of demonstrators flooded into lower Manhattan.

- 'Contrary to our founding' -

"These are a group of people in this country who are working to dismantle 60 years of civil rights and civil liberties of the United States of America," Linda Sarsour, a prominent political activist, told AFP in New York. 

"What we want you to know is that you can do you -- and allow people to still have access to safe, affordable, women's reproductive rights."

Democrats have pushed to codify abortion rights into federal law, a bid to pin down Republicans on the divisive issue ahead of the polls.

But Republicans and one Democrat in the US Senate tanked the effort to advance the measure earlier this week.

Calling the Supreme Court "too politicized and much too partisan," Rosenbaum said that "in a country like America, who fought for individual rights," restricting legal abortion access "seems contrary to our founding." 

- 'Women want choices' -

Republican-controlled states have taken steps to restrict abortion rights in recent months, and overturning Roe v. Wade would grant them greater latitude to restrict or ban the procedure.

The largely peaceful protests have drawn Republican criticism over privacy rights of court members, but activists have responded by pointing to years of often violent protests outside abortion clinics and at the homes of doctors providing the medical procedure.

"It's very important to be here to take a stand and really say to the people who are making these decisions that women want choices and they want freedom to have that choice," said Viesha Floyd, 32.

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