During a press conference on Thursday House Speaker Paul Ryan announced that the GOP plans to take efforts to defund government funding of Planned Parenthood. This is an issue. Planned Parenthood provides crucial healthcare services for women. Among some of these services are birth control, cancer screening and STD testing. But let’s keep it real. We all know that many people are against Planned Parenthood because the first thing that comes to their mind is “abortion”. Abortions only take up 3% of Planned Parenthood services but regardless that shouldn’t matter. I do not think it’s right at all that they get to try and defund a whole entire organization because of their personal beliefs. I think this is an attack on women's rights.

Abortion has always been a touchy subject but in recent years it’s being covered more and spoken about more openly. When I first learned that this was even a controversial subject to debate about I was confused. Why is it even an argument whether or not a women gets to chose what happens with her body? What gives people the right to try and restrict a woman from making decisions she feels are right for her? That being said it’s obvious that my stance on this issue is pro-choice, and I will continue to stand by that and stand with Planned Parenthood. I believe that us women, should have the final say on what happens with our bodies, no matter what any votes say. My body, my choice.

There are many “pro-life” arguments and I put pro-life in quotations because I don’t believe that the people who call themselves that are really pro-life at all, I think they’re pro-birth which is completely different. I don’t think they care what happens after a woman decides to keep a pregnancy and give birth, as long as she doesn’t get an abortion. For example here’s a scenario. They outlaw abortion and a woman gets raped. She has the baby but she’s not financially able to take care of it on her own on top of already being emotionally and mentally distressed because of what happened. The moment she asks the government for assistance the same people that are so “pro-life” are going to be ridiculing her and telling her that she’s “lazy” and that she’s just “looking for handouts." How do you want to force women to have children they don’t want but don’t want to help them take care of them? How are you pro-life if you don’t genuinely care about the life it has after birth?

A common pro-life argument is that if a female doesn’t want to have a baby then she shouldn’t of had sex, I think that this argument sounds ridiculous. I do believe that if you don’t want to have a child and to protect yourself in general that you should be practicing safe sex, but accidents happen. I do not think that just because you had unprotected sex you should be forced to have a child you don’t want, I believe that you know what is the best decision to make for yourself. There are also many different reasons why women chose abortion, contraceptive failure, inability to support or care for the child properly, to prevent the birth of a child with birth defects or severe medical problems, rape, danger to the women’s health, etc. Despite what many people think abortion is not always an easy choice and doesn’t always have to do with unprotected sex. I don’t have to morally agree with someone’s choice but I do need to respect the fact that their body is their body and I shouldn’t get to tell someone they can’t do something just because I wouldn’t do it. I understand that there are other options like adoption but not everyone wants to carry a child for nine months and then go through the adoption process, that also isn’t free or emotionally easy. And any argument regarding religion is invalid to me because people have many different types of religions with different beliefs and some people aren’t religious at all. So how can we let one religious belief set the precedent for a whole law?

The decision to have an abortion is protected under the Constitutional Right to Privacy. This was decided in the well known 1973 case Roe v. Wade. The Supreme Court applied this core constitutional principle of privacy and liberty to a woman's ability to decide whether or not she wants to terminate or keep a pregnancy. So why on Earth are we still trying to take away women’s reproductive rights? If pro-lifers were to have it their way and the United States did indeed outlaw abortion, women would have less rights then corpses. Just think about that, a person has to give permission for their bodies to be used after they’re deceased but we have people trying to make laws that restrict women from deciding what happens to their bodies while they are alive and breathing. Trying to defund Planned Parenthood that provides women like myself with birth control and other services and trying to pass bills like Ohio’s Heartbeat Bill are just ways to try and infringe upon our constitutional rights. A woman's uterus is not the property of the US government so people need to stop acting like it is. We need to keep politics and religion out of women’s uteruses.