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To arrange a media interview with Ellie Smeal or other spokespersons at Feminist Majority Foundation, contact the FMF media department at 703-522-2214.
Date: April-20-04
Contact: Jeanne K.C. Clark
Phone: (703) 522-2214
Email:
CAMPUSES NATIONWIDE ORGANIZING FOR HISTORIC MARCH FOR WOMEN’S LIVES AS PART OF FEMINIST MAJORITY’S CAMPAIGN
Arlington, VA – Eleanor Smeal, President of the Feminist Majority, today announced that the organization's Feminist Campus Campaign (www.feministcampus.org), the world's largest pro-choice campus network, has organized campuses from coast to coast to send delegations to the historic March for Women's Lives in Washington, DC on Sunday, April 25, 2004.
Young women and men from colleges, high schools and community groups are expected to be at least one-third of the participants in the upcoming march. This reflects the support found in a 2003 Harris poll for Ms. Magazine, which showed that 76 percent of women aged 18 to 29 support abortion rights. Delegates from more than 350 campuses – covering a wide range of public and private, two and four year colleges – will march as part of the student-run Feminist Majority Leadership Alliances.
A large contingent of motion picture, television and musical artists (most organized by the Feminist Majority through its Los Angeles office) will be marching. Many will also be performing at the event.
Smeal, first through her leadership in the National Organization for Women (NOW) and now through the Feminist Majority, has helped organize every major women’s rights march in the nation’s capital, starting with the first-ever national abortion rights march, held at the Vatican Embassy on Mother’s Day, 1975. The Director of the March for Women’s Lives is Alice Cohan, Feminist Majority’s Director of National Programs and former Political Director of NOW. Cohan, who was the director of the last three reproductive rights marches, has also directly organized the national capital marches for the Equal Rights Amendment, gay and lesbian rights and other issues for nearly 30 years.
The March is being organized by seven of the nation’s most powerful women’s rights, reproductive rights and civil rights organizations, including the Feminist Majority, National Organization for Women, NARAL Pro-Choice America, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, American Civil Liberties Union, Black Women’s Health Imperative, and National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health. More than 1300 additional organizations, including the National Association of Social Workers, NAACP and many others are supporting and helping to organize turnout for the March.
The March comes as the current U.S. administration has blocked funding for international family planning agencies that give their clients information on abortion, blocked education on reproductive health care choices here and abroad, and signed the first-ever U.S. ban on a medical abortion procedure. Current policies keep women from having access to treatments that could prevent up to 500,000 pregnancy-related deaths, 3 million AIDS-related deaths and more than 80,000 unsafe abortion-related deaths worldwide each year.
Editors and Reporters NOTE: For press credentials and more information about the March, visit www.feminist.org/march; for interviews with Eleanor Smeal or other Feminist Majority spokespeople, call 703-522-2214.
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