By Thane Grauel 

WESTPORT — Hundreds of people gathered Sunday on the Ruth Steinkraus Cohen Bridge to protest the U.S. Supreme Court’s rulings last week to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade decision on abortion rights, as well as a New York law restricting the carrying of concealed handguns in public. 

Sunday’s “Rally Against Regression” was the second such event in six weeks on the downtown bridge, organized by DefenDemocracy of CT. 

Beth Cobb, who lived for years in Weston and now lives in Bridgeport, held a sign reading, “Pro-life is killing women.”

“Women are no longer equal citizens in this world,” she said of the decision. “I fought so hard for Roe v. Wade, I can’t believe we’re doing this again 50 years later.”

“I remember the college years of pregnant women, young students with means, having to go to out of the country for abortions,” Cobb said. “I remember the scare and terror of back-alley abortions, the lives that it took, and we just cannot go back to such a barbarian practice of medicine.”

“It’s the long arm of the evangelicals and Donald Trump and the court he has put in place,” she said. 

On May 8, more than 300 protested downtown after a news report that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito had prepared a majority draft opinion indicating the court was poised to overturn the 1973 landmark decision in Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion nationwide. 

That decision was issued Friday, largely unchanged from the leaked document, by a 6-3 vote of the court’s conservative majority. 

In anticipation of that ruling, Gov. Ned Lamont last month signed into law a measure, passed by the state’s General Assembly, that protects medical providers here and women from other states who come to Connecticut for abortions.  

On Thursday, the high court’s conservatives invalidated a 108-year-old state law in New York that had limited a person’s ability to carry a concealed gun in public. 

Other signs at the bridge Sunday read, “Let’s talk about the elephant in the womb,” “Handmaid’s Tale is not an instruction manual,” “Our bodies our choice,” and “If my uterus could fire bullets you wouldn’t regulate it.”

“Two violent decisions were made by the Supreme Court this week,” organizer Darcy Hicks told the crowd. “And they’re not done, this is just a portion of their agenda. [Senate Minority Leader] Mitch McConnell himself said that he only needs one more Republican in the Senate this November in order to finish the job of making a national ban on abortions in America.”

“We will be living in the Handmaid’s Tale,” Hicks said of the dystopian television series. “That is not an exaggeration.”

“This Supreme Court is a bunch of politicians masquerading as justices,” said U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.

Annie Lamont, a venture capitalist and wife of Democratic Gov. Ned Lamont, also spoke. She recalled when Roe v. Wade was decided.

“There was nothing that could have prepared me, and my daughters, for the devastation we felt Friday,” she said.

“I grew up in a mostly Republican small town in Wisconsin,” she said. “Roe v. Wade was passed my sophomore year of high school, and there was nothing controversial about that decision at that time (in) my town.

“Women, my mother, my grandmother’s generation, knew what it meant for them,” she said. “It was a collective sigh of relief, and acceptance, that this right gave them the power over their own lives,” she said. “It did more than that, it gave us a profound step toward equality.”

“With Friday’s decision, there is no equality,” Lamont said. “Without agency over our bodies, we are second-class citizens.”

First Selectwoman Jennifer Tooker, a Republican, attended the abortion-rights rally last month and was at Sunday’s event as well.

“I’m horrified,” she said.