About 300 supporters of Planned Parenthood slogged across the wet and slippery turf of the courthouse sunken gardens late Tuesday afternoon to voice their opposition to the Trump administration’s vow to cut funding for Planned Parenthood. Retired Episcopalian minister Mark Asman, wearing a pink scarf and Planned Parenthood cap, stressed that access to family planning information and medical assistance was inextricably entwined into the quest for social and economic justice.
As Asman and four other ministers held center stage, two anti-abortion protestors, each wielding large gory posters showing aborted fetuses, sought to inch their way forward. Determined Planned Parenthood supporters carrying pro-Planned Parenthood signs successfully blocked them.
Congressmember Salud Carbajal, the Democratic representative from the 24th District and a former Planned Parenthood board member, said the organization served 3 million women — and men — a year, providing birth control, sex education, HIV tests, and cancer screenings, as well as abortions. He spoke derisively of Trump’s “little administration” in Washington, D.C., and vowed to oppose any effort to roll back 40 years of abortion rights — as now guaranteed by the Roe v Wade Supreme Court case. “We are not going back,” he shouted.
