Post-Roe protest grows in Lafayette: ‘Not standing around anymore’

Statehouse delays special session on abortion, protest numbers grow. Plus, GOP picks challenger for Campbell in House District 26. And city giddy over Loeb Stadium’s first concert load-in

Thanks this morning to sponsor Stuart & Branigin for support to help make this edition of the Based in Lafayette reporting project possible.

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(Photo: Dave Bangert)

At some point, an hour-and-a-half into the post-Roe chants and cheering for drivers laying on their horns along Columbia Street in the name of reproductive rights, a swelling crowd started repeating: “Time to march/Time to march.”

And so they marched – enough of them to fill the sidewalks around the Tippecanoe County Courthouse and catch up with the tail of a crowd still queueing up and waiting for room to get walking.

“We’re not standing around anymore,” Julia McCormick, a Purdue student who lives in Lafayette, said. “We’ve got to keep moving.”

Dave Bangert @davebangert

Then they marched. “We’re not standing around anymore,” one protester says. Timelapse:

That seemed to be the theme of an afternoon rally that started a few hours after Republican leaders at the Statehouse announced that they would postpone a special session, from July 6 to July 25, to take up possible legislation the further restrict abortion in Indiana. The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling Friday that overturned Roe v. Wade removed federal protection for the right to have an abortion, sending the question back to states. And that’s what House and Senate leaders in Indiana have said they’ll do – in some way.