WASHINGTON — Tamika Spellman, who is in her 50s, has worked as a prostitute since she was 14. The job, she said, is the most stable work she has had and helped put her son through college.

She has grown tired of people’s moral qualms about what she does for a living, of police harassment, and of the dangers of the work. But she is doing more than stewing about it.

Instead, Ms. Spellman is one of the architects of a bill before the District of Columbia Council that would make it the first American city to decriminalize prostitution, placing the nation’s capital at the forefront of a growing movement that seeks to permit the activities of prostitutes, as well as pimps and johns, and to allow bordellos. Prostitution in the United States is legal only in a few counties in Nevada, which has about 20 legal brothels.

At an initial hearing on Thursday, more than 150 people — many of them current and former sex workers — gave radically different opinions about whether decriminalization would cause prostitutes greater harm. Some wore T-shirts that said, “Sex workers deserve housing, not handcuffs.”