As a 30 year old woman, living in the United States, I am in the enviable position of never having lived in a time when I did not have the right to choose. Today is the 35th anniversary of the landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court that granted me, and the millions of other women in this country, that right. Roe v. Wade is not about abortion. It is about choice. It is about the power to control the path one’s life takes, whether that path should include a child or not. Roe v. Wade is about making personal decisions without the interference or intervention of any outside authority. It is about privacy in making those decisions. I have never been in the position of having to make the decision to terminate a pregnancy. But at 17, working as a peer crisis counselor, I listened to girls who had. I held their hands. I hugged them and stroked their hair as they sobbed about the horrible decisions they were faced with making. I can tell you that not one of them took the responsibility of making that decision lightly. Not one of them was happy to have to make it. But every last one of them was happy to have it available. And so am I. It does not matter whether you could choose abortion for yourself. It does not matter what circumstances lead any woman to that decision. All that matters is that the choice be available. Now, more than at any other time since the ruling was made, the right to choose is in danger of being revoked. Many of the conservative candidates in the current presidential race would have your rights stripped to satisfy their moral code, their vision, their version of God. In order for our daughters, our nieces, our young women of today to have the right to choose, we need to stand up. We need to fight to protect the rights our mothers fought so hard to win for us. Stand up. Add your voice to those already demanding Roe v. Wade be upheld and our right to privacy maintained. Vote for a Pro-Choice candidate.
3 comments:
Thank you! This is wonderful! I am so happy at all the people who have put up blogs today. We can all add our voices to the chorus to protect our rights.
I feel really lucky to be in the generation I'm in, too. There are a lot of young girls who are going to have a painful surprise in their future if they don't join us and demand that the government leave their bodies alone.
I think you're right. The really frightening thing is that the girls that have come in the generations after us are so far removed from the struggle, they have no idea what potential for evil there is in their ignorance. The girls that saunter into and out of my classroom don't even know what Roe v. Wade is. I, as a language teacher, am not allowed to discuss it with them. These are the same girls that no longer have relationships. They 'talk to' people, which means they sleep with whomever they feel like without any sense of commitment or obligation. They are also, mostly, from poor families with inattentive parents, and the people who will most likely seek an abortion if the occasion arises. It saddens me how little they know about something that could potentially have such a monumental impact on their futures.
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