Putting yourself in other people's shoes can be quite difficult. Imagining someone else's ideas, opinions, qualms and fears as your own, even if you are able to put yours aside for a while, is never an accurate statement to how the other person really feels. That is why we are all given the free will and ability to chose and think for ourselves. Only we really know what our individual needs are, yet there are still some issues where others seem to think they know better and can essentially choose for everyone else. When Republicans pass bills to defund Planned Parenthood or advocate for pro-life ideals on live television, or when protesters threaten women and doctors outside of clinics and even when feminists are called "baby killers" and "murderers", all that tells women is that we are incapable of making choices about our own reproductive health simply because people put their own beliefs before our own bodily autonomy.
Legislation and policies in the United States that restrict women's rights, particularly their reproductive rights, has been long called the war on women, as these laws have been formulated to impose outdated and patriarchal social views on women. However, the reason why I will always be pro-choice is not only because ultimately a woman should have the rights to decide what to do with her own body, but because legalizing and providing secure abortion practices would do so much more than just contribute to a good democracy. It would decrease the female death toll that clandestine abortions ensue, cut down on violence rates, and advance the movement for gender equity.
Estimated annual number of unsafe abortions per 1000 women aged 15–44 years, by subregions, 2008
While the debate on the issue is still very focused on the morality of abortion, that discourse should not drive the legal implications of the subject at hand. Rather it should pose the idea that abortions will continue to happen, whether the practice is legalized or not. What people fail to consider is that being pro-choice does not mean that you are pro-abortion.
By no means do we encourage the practice, we feel as though, when caught in a situation where the only way out is by terminating a pregnancy, a woman should have the reassurance that she would be able to do so safely and not put her life at risk. The imposition of anti-abortion laws or protests outside of clinics is an attack on women as it restricts their reproductive health and also puts the blame on them entirely. It is demeaning to women everywhere and sets our society back 40 years in time. The more restrictions and the more constraints put onto something, the less control you have over it and more lives are put at risk.
Abortions only account for three percent of the services provides by clinics such as Planned Parenthood, where the other 97% of the services are directed towards STD and STI testing and treatment, free cancer screenings and prevention, distribution of contraception with medical guidance and anything encompassing women's health and well-being. Services like these are critical for the prevention of unwanted pregnancies, however, they offer abortion practices as a last resort for women caught in an unwanted situation - no woman wants an abortion like she would want an ice cream, she wants an abortion the same way an animal caught in a trap wants to gnaw it's leg off.
When the Supreme Court passed Roe v. Wade in 1973, a huge step was made where women all around the country were given their right to an abortion. Yet that was not the only thing that the legalization of abortion in America brought to the people. Crime rates fell drastically within approximately 20 years after the case passed, proving then that legalizing abortion reduced crime rates as it prevented unwanted pregnancies from being carried on despite the woman's conditions to raise a child or not; and that later on in life those children who would most likely grow up and fall into crime simply weren't there.
Twenty years before the law was passed, women who had to carry unwanted pregnancies to term were forced to bear their children in unsuitable conditions or left them at the hands of the foster care system. Years later in the late 1980's homicidal rates among young men skyrocketed and could have been prevented had these men not been forced to grow up in inadequate environments. Studies have also shown that legalizing abortion reduces infanticide, teen age drug use, and teen age childbearing consistent with the theory that abortion will reduce other social ills similar to crime.
In countries where abortion is still illegal, clandestine abortions are the number one cause of maternal mortality. Every year unsafe abortion practices and its complications claim the lives of 47,000+ women worldwide, where poor and low-income women have the hardest access to safe procedures and account for half of that statistic.
Again, we go back to the issue where abortions will continue to happen regardless of the legal standing on the issue, where women with money and power have access to safe practices and women who do not withhold that privilege die at the hands of those who prohibit them to make the choice for themselves. So you can be as against legalizing abortion as you want, but you cannot ignore the fact that women still suffer from personal beliefs being imposed on everyone when, as mentioned in the beginning of this article, only we really know what our individual needs are.
Take for instance the very common story of a teenage girl who, due to a faulty education system never learned anything from sexual education and was poorly instructed to "simply abstain from sex", and ends up pregnant at the age of 16. She was underage, immature, scared, and unprepared to raise a child and should not have been forced to. Forcing someone to carry a pregnancy to term and bear an unwanted child as a "punishment" does not exactly translates as very pro-life.However, it is not just about the 16-year-old who made a mistake, or the 30-year-old woman, at the peak of her carrier who's brith control failed, or even the 13-year-old raped by a family member and robbed of her youth - it is about every woman out there and the right to privacy and individual choice, its about freedom and about reclaiming sovereignty to our own bodies.
