WILMINGTON, N.C. (WECT) – Pro-choice activists, like Jill Brown and Caroline Miller, gathered in Downtown Wilmington on Wednesday to voice their hope for change.
“We won’t go back, we’re not turning back the clock 50 years,” Miller said.
That was the big message Wednesday from people like Brown and Miller, who say they’re standing up for rights that their mothers and grandmothers fought for decades ago, and it’s something they never though they would have to do.
“We are outraged that our Supreme Court just overturned 50 years of precedent that has been upheld time and time, again, as an inalienable right for women. So, we’re just out here, showing our outrage and trying to make the movement move and keep it in the forefront of people’s minds, that we’re not going to take it lying down,” Brown said.
Miller says she showed up for multiple reasons, but the most important, for her daughter, who was also rallying with the group.
“I have to be out here now with my daughter, fighting for her rights when I really thought this was something that was locked away and thrown away and thrown away the key and done with.”
Miller added that the consistency of rallies is showing local representatives that this is an important issue to them.
Representative Deb Butler also spoke at the rally, encouraging rallygoers to keep standing up for their rights.
“While it is still legal in North Carolina, it is by no means easy and women are going to come from all over this country to North Carolina to seek help because abortion is legal in North Carolina today. We have to keep it that way,” Butler said. “Now, more than half of the United States either have a ban in place, an abortion ban, or are likely to ban abortion in the very near future. More than half. Predominantly in the central part of this country, and in the Southeast, where we all live. That leaves 34 million women of reproductive age at risk and we know based on geography that is more likely to affect poor women, women of color, indigenous women.”
Brown and Miller have been rallying with a small group in both Brunswick and New Hanover counties. They said they won’t stop until change is made.
“This is about women’s health, this is about choice for every human being, health choice and reproductive choice, and we will not have that forced upon us and taken away,” Miller said. “It’s important that we stand up for our rights. Otherwise they’ll be stripped away more and more. So, stand up, speak up.”
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