Today marks the 41st anniversary of Roe v Wade, the 1973 US Supreme Court decision that set the stage for safe and legal abortion access for women around our country.
I spend part of each week working to protect that freedom. It is often heartbreaking work, especially the testimonials I come across about what life was like for women who could not carry their pregnancies to term, for whatever reason.
When I started this work, nearly a year ago, I had a conversation about it with Grandma and her friends at dinner one night. One woman told me about her work with battered women and children in Washington, DC, and how she could never oppose abortion because she could not imagine forcing a woman to bring a child into an abusive home. Another woman could not stop shouting that abortion is murder. Thus began my work.
I support safe and legal access to contraceptives, sex education and abortion services as part of a comprehensive approach to reproductive health care. As a form of health care, I believe that such a personal decision should not be barred by legislative action, but that it should be a made in conversation with whomsoever the woman making that decision chooses, be that her doctor, faith leader or family.
This week, I saw a short film that focuses on four adult children of women who lost their lives due to unsafe abortions. Before 1973, women had few choices and if they could not find a doctor willing to help them, they resorted to using objects, like knitting needles, that could puncture not only the uterus, but the abdominal wall and colon, causing lethal infections. Poisonous chemicals were another alternative. The chemicals would cause an abortion, but they could also burn holes through the woman's uterus and again, death.
There were wards in hospitals dedicated to women who were ravaged by these attempts, often they were women with other children.
We cannot allow these conditions to exist again. Women in desperation will find a way to end a pregnancy, regardless of the law. Let's make sure that desperation is no longer a factor. By funding sex education in public schools (instead of abstinence only education), by making contraceptives free and widely available, we will see a drop in abortions rates, and teen pregnancy rates.
Let's work on that. I am. Will you?
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