Despite promises from the anti-abortion movement to support pregnant women and children, the “pro-life” lobby appears to be invested only in the unborn. These burdens disproportionately fall upon poor and working-class women without the means to travel across state lines to receive the care they need. Without the right to abortion, women are forced to make terrible choices. Any civil right contingent upon political whims is not actually a civil right. We should not live in a country where bodily autonomy can be granted or taken away by nine political appointees, most of whom are men and cannot become pregnant.
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People should not have to demonstrate their virtue to justify a personal decision about how to handle a life-altering circumstance. All those who want an abortion should be able to avail themselves of that medical procedure. Given that unfortunate reality, we should not live in a world where someone who is raped is forced to carry a pregnancy to term because a minority of Americans believe the unborn are more important than the people who give birth to them.Īnd we should defend abortion access not only in cases of sexual violence. We should not live in a world where sexual violence exists, but we do. Whoever leaked it wanted people to understand the fate awaiting us.Īt least, that is what I am telling myself. Wade was leaked before the justices planned to announce their decision, likely next month. It is stunning that a draft of a Supreme Court ruling that would overturn Roe v. And the trajectory of my life, too, would have been further altered. The trauma I endured would have only been compounded by a forced pregnancy. But a 12-year-old is not equipped for childbirth or parenthood. If I had been pregnant, I don’t know what I would have done. I worried I would not know who the father was. And still, in the weeks and months after, of course I worried I was pregnant. I have told the story and am tired of telling it, and the story is not the point. I was sexually assaulted by several young men when I was 12. It is unfathomable to consider how a forced pregnancy would have further altered the trajectory of her life. She is still dealing with the repercussions of that trauma. It was the early 1970s.Ī pregnancy would have, in Debbie’s words, ruined her life. Her mother took Debbie to a doctor, who said that because of her scar tissue, she was sexually active and must have a boyfriend.
Her stepfather often threatened to kill her younger brother and her mother if Debbie told anyone, so when the fear of pregnancy became too consuming, she told her mother she was assaulted at school. She had no one to talk to and nowhere to turn. The abuse went on for years, and as Debbie got older, she was constantly terrified that she was pregnant. My wife’s stepfather began raping her when she was 11 years old.