In the early afternoon on Nov. 9, 2024, protestors gathered at Washington’s Columbus Circle as the bass of a distant go-go band thumped through Union Station. They took photos with their signs by the Columbus Fountain as a group of neon vest-clad organizers waited to direct them toward the music down Massachusetts Avenue.

Two blocks down the avenue, a protest had spread to outside the offices of the Heritage Foundation. Demonstrators danced to the beat of “I’m Every Woman” by Chaka Khan and “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” by Shania Twain, playing from the band’s speakers. They rang cowbells toward the building’s facade.

It was all part of a demonstration organized by Women’s March in response to the Nov. 5 election that reinstated President-elect Donald Trump to the nation’s highest office. Attendees, gathering in protest of anticipated challenges to reproductive freedoms under the next Trump administration, said they found hope in collective action and in one another.

The protest came ahead of the planned People’s March, which is set to assemble on Jan. 18 at the Washington Monument. A coalition of social justice groups, including Women’s March, is hosting the event.

Volunteers passed out signs that read “Protect and Defend Each Other” and “We’ve Got Us.” Community was a central theme of the demonstration, said Women’s March Managing Director Tamika Middleton.

“We are trying to find an organizer space for people to plug in, for people to find community in this moment, for people to target and focus their energy and their emotions and to register their dissent,” Middleton said.

Middleton said she believed most people at the Saturday demonstration were residents of Washington, Maryland and Virginia, but some participants said they traveled from Philadelphia, and others said they traveled from New York University’s campus.

Access to reproductive rights across the U.S. has decreased since Trump’s first term. According to the Supreme Court’s website, Trump appointed three of the justices who ruled in 2021 to lift national abortion protections in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case.

Thirteen states now enforce total bans on abortion, and eight more ban it in the first 18 weeks of pregnancy or earlier, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights research group. Republicans in Congress have proposed a number of measures to limit or restrict abortion access at the federal level, according to House Republicans’ budget proposal for 2025.

The Project 2025 policy agenda came to the forefront of national discourse in the months leading up to the election. In a December 2024 interview with Meet the Press, Trump said he “had nothing to do with [Project 2025]” but agreed with some of its policies. Still, Trump has nominated at least five of the project’s contributors to roles in his administration, according to an Axios count.

In its 879-page “Mandate for Leadership,” the Heritage Foundation outlines several strategies to restrict abortion for a conservative government. These include revoking the federal approval of chemical abortion medication, changing regulations to prevent the dispensing of abortion drug mifepristone by mail and limiting the drug’s use to 49 days gestation.

Ellen Keenan, senior communications manager at the Heritage Foundation, said the organization was not available to comment.

Trump himself has flip-flopped in his stance on a federal abortion ban. The president-elect suggested in an Mar. 19, 2024, interview that he was considering a federal 15-week ban with certain exceptions, saying he would announce his position at “the appropriate time.” But in a video posted to Truth Social in April 2024, Trump said he was proud to have ended the national protections of Roe v. Wade and that the decisions of individual states must be “the law of the land.”

With the protest coming days after the election, many protestors said they were nervous about reproductive rights. Caitlin Magdalinski, a protestor from Pennsylvania, said she was concerned for women in certain states experiencing increased maternal mortality because of reduced access to reproductive care.

Magdalinski, who lives outside Philadelphia, came to the demonstration as a way to escape her sadness over the election. She said she was disappointed that so many people voted for Trump or stayed home on election day.

“I want to do something besides cry on the couch,” Magdalinski said. “I need to get out and make my voice heard.”

Magdalinski said she’s nervous about the Trump administration’s potential policies on women’s healthcare. But she said she refuses to give up and go back to an era when inequality trumped women’s freedom.

“Yeah we’re sad, but now we’re upset, now we’re angry, now we’re going to do something about it,” she said. “And we just know nobody’s going to save us but ourselves.”

Nearly 30 minutes into the demonstration, Middleton took the stage to lead the demonstrators in a call and response. Demonstrators laughed when Middleton jovially scolded them for their lack of unison.

“Ain’t no power like the power of the people ‘cause the power of the people don’t stop,” Middleton and the crowd chanted back and forth.

Kate Waverly, a protestor who moved to Washington from Texas, said they were scared by restrictive abortion bans in their home state.

Waverly came to the demonstration wearing a red, white and blue knit hat. They said a 72-year-old woman gave it to them as part of “One Stitch, One Voice,” a project at the Jan. 21, 2017, Women’s March where marchers crocheted pussyhats, hats knitted in protest against misogynistic remarks made by Trump to give to others.

Waverly said they came to the demonstration on behalf of those in states with restrictive abortion bans.

“I was lucky enough to move out of Texas, but I still have a sister and a mother who live there, and so I’m here for them,” they said.

Jed Seifert, a Washington resident, wore a green kerchief as he watched over three young children playing on a bike rack opposite the stage of Massachusetts Avenue. He said he also came to support family: his wife and daughter.

“I don’t want my wife and daughter to have to worry about their rights, their body, their lives,” he said. “I don’t want limitations or control over my wife and daughter or women in general.”

Standing at Columbus Circle, Erica Scardina took photos of her mother and daughter. She held a sign that read “Donald Trump is a B—-.” Anger, Scardina said, drove her to the demonstration. She said she took an hour-long train ride from Baltimore to show her daughter that her voice and action matter in democracy. Her 5-year-old daughter, Ilani, waved a pink-lettered sign inscribed with “Girls can do anything.”

“It’s gut wrenching to think that your grandmother, my grandmother, could have more rights in her day than me,” she said. “It’s frustrating. It makes me furious.”

Mandy Scardina, Erica’s mother, said the election demonstrates that people in the U.S. don’t care about women or transgender people — or anyone other than themselves. Erica added that she thinks women in Democratic-led states don’t show enough care to those in Republican-led states without the same levels of access to reproductive healthcare.

Jessica Waters, an assistant professor of justice, law and criminology at American University and expert in reproductive rights law, said the future of reproductive rights is bleak. But she said people voting to protect reproductive healthcare in seven out of 10 state ballot initiatives on Election Day were victories for the pro-choice movement.

“I think one of the positive signs is that so many voters came out in favor of increased access to abortion care, even in states that went red,” Waters said. “So it’s clear that the trends, that have been the case for a long time, that most voters support access to abortion care.”

Erica Scardina said the women who are fighting and voting against anti-abortion laws give her hope.

“All the states that voted in favor — what was it like six states? — all the states that voted to pass abortion and make abortion available in their state, that’s what’s giving me hope,” she said. “Because there are people still out there that are willing to go out there and fight for, not just themselves, but for other people, too.”

Activists will continue the state and local level initiatives they were preparing in anticipation of a Trump victory now that he has won the election, Waters said.

“I think that the legal strategies for Roe and post-Roe are no longer going to work because reproductive health care access legally has long rested on a privacy right, and the Supreme Court has basically said that’s gone,” Waters said. “So there will have to be other arguments to make the case that abortion care should be constitutionally protected.”

However, Waters also said many legal organizations are prepared to immediately challenge new laws in court.

As the protest grew outside the Heritage Foundation, eight people, two sporting red Donald Trump hats, watched the commotion with crossed arms. Chatting with each other near the hood of a police car, they traded smirks as the demonstration’s programming went on. They declined an interview with AWOL twice.

For Trump and his supporters, Middleton only had four words.

“Be ready, we’re coming,” she said.