Pro-choice forces mustering for capital march

[maddezmom]

Washington -- Suite 300 is deceptively quiet. Office workers sit at their computers in cluttered cubicles, the only sounds the tap-tap-tap on the keyboards, the endless chirp of the telephones and the low hum of conversations.

But the numbers tell the real story.

The workers in these four cramped rooms in a downtown office building get an average 1,000 e-mails a week and run a Web site that earlier this month logged 1 million hits in one day. They've ordered 700,000 purple and gold stickers and 800,000 palm-size leaflets. Some are trying to recruit more than 6,000 volunteers, while others are coordinating hundreds of delegations coming here from across the United States.

The goal, Alice Cohan explained this week, is to assemble a crowd on the National Mall that is "too big to ignore." The cause: women's abortion rights, which activists say are threatened as never before
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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/04/17/MNGV666MFQ1.DTL

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Generation Ambivalent
On the eve of the biggest abortion-rights march in a decade, organizers try to attract a younger crowd
By Debra Rosenberg

Newsweek April 26 issue - One night last week in downtown Washington, D.C., the NARAL Pro-Choice America "march action center" hummed like a campaign headquarters on election night. Fueled by pizza and soda, a few dozen volunteers glued a thousand placards onto cardboard handles in just half an hour. They had only days left before the first large abortion-rights gathering in more than a decade—the April 25 "March for Women's Lives." Some of the volunteers reminisced about marches of years past. But Laura Kopp, 18, had little to be misty-eyed about. An intern at a nearby law office, the Antioch College freshman acknowledges that not all of her peers find abortion rights an easy sell. "We're the first generation to be more pro-life than our parents," she says.

Abortion-rights leaders are aiming to change that. "We have a big, big challenge," says Planned Parenthood president Gloria Feldt, who hopes the march will inspire a new wave of young abortion-rights activists. Recent polls show a steady erosion of support among the post-Roe generation. Last fall UCLA found that 55 percent of freshmen at more than 400 schools said abortion should be legal, down from 64 percent a decade earlier. In a February NEWSWEEK GENext Poll, only 3 percent of those 18 to 29 called abortion the most important issue America faces. Born long after the last back-alley abortion and raised under the pro-choice Clinton administration, the post-Roe set has learned to take legal abortion for granted. Some disagree with the abortion-rights movement entirely. "They just assumed we'd be on their side," says Boston College student Kelly Kroll, 21, a former president of American Collegians for Life.
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more:http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4767209/