But when Patricia Ireland, the president of the National Organization for Women, came to campus last week to sound the rallying cry against President Bush's antiabortion policies, she drew a crowd of about 40 students - far fewer than the hundreds who stood up to demand the school hire minority advisers. It was a similar story as Ireland toured other Boston-area campuses last week, urging students to attend a NOW rally in Washington on April 22.
People feel like they have an innate right to it.
Born a decade after Roe v. Wade made abortion legal in 1973, most of today's college freshmen came of age too late to witness NOW's campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s and its battles over abortion during the Reagan era. To some young liberal activists, it's yesterday's news. Two years ago in Seattle, the World Trade Organization meeting drew 40,000 activists, many of them young people. Last year, police clashed with about 10,000 protesters at an International Monetary Fund meeting in in Washington. District of Columbia police spent days planning for the IMF protests.