Chris Stanfield brought his daughter to the abortion rights rally Friday evening on the lawn of the Walter H. Rice Federal Building on Second Street in downtown Dayton.
He said he felt helpless earlier and wanted to do something and fight for his daughter.
“If you don’t fight for things, if you just don’t push back onto the storm, the system will run you over,” Stanfield said.
Organizers registered people to vote and called on the protestors to vote in the upcoming elections. At the end, protestors led a short march around downtown, with signs displaying slogans like, “My uterus has more restrictions than your guns!”
Julie Beall came to the rally with her sister, Dona Noune, who said she’d heard the news first from her children who are traveling in Europe before she heard the news locally.
Beall said she was angry at the state of the world and encouraged people to be politically active.
“I’m tired of people who say, ‘oh, I don’t vote because it doesn’t make a difference.’ This is the reason you vote and put people in that will fight for what you know is right,” she said.
Joy Schwab, founder of the Dayton Women’s Rights Alliance and a longtime women’s rights advocate, called on protestors to change leaders at the state level and vote in more Democrats, because the Supreme Court decision on Friday returned the decision to the state.
Ohio already filed to put in place a six-week abortion restriction and is eventually expected to place more restrictions on abortion.
“A fertilized egg is not a person,” Schwab said. “I am not an incubator and neither are any of you.”
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