Standing protest for women’s rights to take place Wednesday in Glenwood Springs
Organizers hope for education, engagement
The organizers of a standing protest for women’s rights in Glenwood Springs this Wednesday hope that the event will spur awareness, engagement and education in the community after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on June 24, ending the constitutional right to abortion.
“What we’re running into is that there’s a lot out there that are aware that Roe v. Wade was overturned, and they don’t really understand what that means to them — they just see it as taking away abortion,” said Katrina McAlpine, who co-organized the Wednesday protest with Tammy Reynolds and Trinity Sebleton. McAlpine and Reynolds are based in New Castle and Stebleton is based in Silt.
The protest will take place at 5 p.m. at Sayre Park in Glenwood Springs, according to event organizers. An earlier plan to establish protests at multiple spots between Aspen and Glenwood Springs was scrapped in favor of one central location.
McAlpine said she hopes to engage with people “whether they’re mad or accepting. … so that they can understand where we’re coming from on it, and why we feel so passionate about what we’re fighting for.”
That fight is for the right to choose and for education, McAlpine and Reynolds emphasized in a joint interview on Zoom.
“We’re for your right to choose, and … it’s not my choice or my right to tell you what you can do with your body,” Reynolds said.
The fight is for education, too — not only on the impacts of the Supreme Court’s decision, but also on the importance of voting and on the tenets of sex education.
“I want everybody to have an educated vote,” Reynolds said. “Whether you vote the way I want you to or you vote the other way, that’s strictly up to you, and I find it very important that everybody votes.”
The effort goes beyond November elections, too, Reynolds said.
“This is something that we’re going to have to continually fight … and there’s ladies that I know that have been fighting it all of their lives,” Reynolds said. “They’re in their 70s and 80s, and they’re still fighting for this, and I just kind of hope that we leave our daughters in a better place instead of putting them in a worse place.”
Organizers are still gathering and developing education resources to share, with the intent of developing consistent and persistent messaging that goes beyond the event itself.
“I think what we’ve all realized is that you do a march or you do a protest, and then that’s it and you wait until the next one, and that’s not what we want to be doing,” McAlpine said. “We don’t want to be waiting for the next marches — we want to be doing things … in between that time frame.”
The protest Wednesday also aims to give people a voice in the community beyond communicating with elected officials, McAlpine said.
“We have to be the change that we wish to see in this community because they’re not going to do it for us,” she said.
