Washington ? Hundreds of thousands of people on Sunday filled the Mall and marched along Pennsylvania Avenue to show their support for abortion rights, loudly identifying President Bush as the leading enemy of what they called “reproductive freedom.”

Organizers of the March for Women’s Lives said they had drawn 1.15 million people, making it the largest abortion rights gathering in history. “This has been the largest march for reproductive rights, the largest march for women’s rights, and the largest march of any kind in this country,” said Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women.

Police would not issue an official estimate, but some veteran commanders said the crowd was at least the biggest since the 1995 Million Man March, which independent researchers put at 870,000 people. Metropolitan Police Chief Charles Ramsey would say only that he thought the march had met and perhaps exceeded its organizers’ expectations. Their march permit was for as many as 750,000.

A contingent of about 250 people from Kansas University participated in the march.

Celebrities, from entertainers to politicians to activists, lent their shine to the event. Actors Cybill Shepherd and Whoopi Goldberg attended, as did singers Ani DiFranco and Moby. Feminist icons Patricia Ireland and Gloria Steinem were there, and so were former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. Billionaire Ted Turner was there. So was NAACP Chairman Julian Bond.

“If all we do is march today,” Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., told the crowd, “that will not change the direction this country is headed under this administration.”

Polarizing issue

Several blocks away, Jay Rhodes of Alexandria, Va., held a sign equating abortion with the Holocaust. He shouted sarcastically, “Keep murder legal” when marchers challenged his views. “It’s very hostile,” said Rhodes, 52, who said he came to join counter-protesters who lined part of the march route. “There’s a lot of anger on both sides.”

Organizers sought to transcend the polarizing issue of abortion, portraying the event as the work of a coalition to improve women’s access to reproductive education health care worldwide. But the dominant themes were two. Again and again, march participants vowed that abortion was here to stay. And that Bush had to go.

An anti-abortion demonstrator watches the abortion-rights rally wind past on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. Sunday's march included advocates from nearly 60 countries.

Bush did not return from Camp David in the Maryland mountains until late afternoon. The White House issued a statement: “The president believes we should work to build a culture of life in America and regardless of where one stands on the issue of abortion, we can all work together to reduce the number of abortions through promotion of abstinence-education programs, support for parental-notification laws and continued support for banning partial-birth abortion.”

Earlier, Jeanne Clark, spokeswoman for the Feminist Majority, one of the organizations behind the march, said that while President Clinton was in office, women felt that his veto could protect them. Now, she said, growing concern about Bush administration initiatives has prompted women to march anew. The previous major abortion rights rally on the Mall took place in April 1992, seven months before Clinton was elected.

Bush raises alarm

In 2001, shortly after taking office, Bush barred the government from funding international organizations that use money from other sources to provide abortions or information about terminating a pregnancy. Earlier this month, he signed a bill that made it a federal crime to harm or kill a fetus during the commission of another federal crime.

That law defined an “unborn child” as “a member of the species homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb,” alarming abortion rights advocates, who challenged the bill in three different federal courts even before Bush signed it.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., right, talks with Vanessa Kerry, daughter of Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., on the Mall in Washington, as hundreds of thousands of women gather for an abortion-rights rally and march. Sunday's rally focused on women's reproductive rights.

The Bush administration has not made it possible to obtain the so-called morning after pill, known as emergency contraception, without a prescription.

Concerned about what they saw as an erosion of rights, the Feminist Majority joined NARAL Pro-Choice America (formerly known as the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League), the American Civil Liberties Union, Black Women’s Health Imperative, the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, the National Organization for Women and Planned Parenthood Federation of America to fight it.

Holding a red fly swatter that said “Stop Bush,” Carmen Barroso, a New York-based regional director of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, called the day a “mobilization against the war against reproductive rights and reproductive health.”