There are a lot of reasons I’m voting in year’s this presidential election. This election is perhaps one of the most important elections in American History. Initially, I was going to vote for Bernie Sanders, but since that’s no longer an option…I’m voting for Hillary Clinton. Don’t get me wrong, I still find her to be problematic, but I’m the person who is perfectly okay with choosing the lesser of the two evils. Hillary Clinton is definitely the lesser of the two evils in my opinion. I cannot in good conscience vote for Donald Trump, as a woman, as a person of color, as an advocate for LGBT rights, as a college student, as a middle-class citizen. Perhaps the most important reason I cannot cast my vote for Trump is his stance on Women’s Rights. I was 9 when I first got my period; I was even younger than that when my body started changing from a skinny little girl, to a curvy, mature looking young woman.

As a woman, I’ve struggled with self-image and self-esteem, but I’ve embraced almost each and every part of myself. I am unafraid and unapologetic in terms of talking about my body, having a period, women’s health, sex and sexuality, contraceptives and everything in between. I’m the girl who advocates for waiting to have sex, I encourage knowing your body before you sleep with someone. I’m the person who tries to convince her friends to use menstrual cups instead of tampons and pads (if you don’t know what a menstrual cup is then you don’t know what you’re missing!). I’m also the person who, if you tell me you want to have an abortion, I will respect and support whatever you choose to do. For most people, abortion is a very clear cut, Black and White issue based on morals and where life begins.

For me, while I don’t think I would ever be able to go through with the decision to have an abortion, I understand that it is, for most, a tough decision to make. I recently read an article on Jezebel.com about a woman who made the painful decision to have an abortion at 32 weeks. It wasn’t because she just didn’t want to be pregnant, and it wasn’t because she was forced into it. It was a decision she and her husband made because there was nothing more that could be done for their unborn son. They tried having hope; they even ventured out and anticipated a miracle, despite being non-religious. Sadly, they received no hope and no miracle; they were told that their son was basically ‘incompatible’ with life outside of the womb.

The thing that got me the most was the grueling process of delivering her son. The fact that this woman had to fly to Colorado, pay $25,000 for a single shot to stop her son’s heart, fly back to New York City where her labor was induced and she had the painful process of having her son pulled (and I mean that literally) from her body says a lot about us as a country. The fact that so many people speak about being pro life, when actually they aren’t, is very telling. We now live in a society where men are raping women and are receiving lesser sentences because judges now have more sympathy for the rapist rather than the person they attacked. We now live in a society where jobs can deny the right to basic things such as contraception.

We live in a society where Mike Pence, the man running for Vice President of the United States can say he “can’t wait until Roe v. Wade is tossed on the trash heap of society where it belongs”. We live in a society where Donald Trump believes that women should face some type of punishment for having an abortion. One day, in the not so distant future, I’m going to have children. Hopefully, when my daughter is born, I will be able to raise her to be proud of who she is, body, of who God created her to be. I can’t do that if I’m voting for Donald Trump and Mike Pence who seek to destroy the very thing that’s important to me.