Why You Should Be Pro-Choice // Revel Youth Article
Are you okay with people telling you what you can or can’t do with your body? Well there are a lot of people out there who aren’t. When it comes to abortion there is a lot of controversy over if a person should have the choice to choose if they want an abortion or not. Here’s our reasoning as to why you should be pro-choice, or in other words, let people choose what happens to their body. Abortion is and should stay legal.
Making abortion illegal is unsafe because people will still try to abort. According to World Health Organization “Unsafe abortion has significant negative consequences beyond its immediate effects on women’s health. For example, complications from unsafe abortion may reduce women’s productivity, increasing the economic burden on poor families; cause maternal deaths that leave children motherless; cause long-term health problems, such as infertility; and result in considerable costs to already struggling public health systems.” This shows that unsafe abortion can cause many health problems, and making abortion legal fixes these problems. World Health Organization also says “Where abortion is permitted on broad legal grounds, it is generally safe, and where it is highly restricted, it is typically unsafe. In developing countries, relatively liberal abortion laws are associated with fewer negative health consequences from unsafe abortion than are highly restrictive laws.”
Abortion isn’t just for women who don’t want a child. The top reasons women have abortions according to WebMD/women are birth control (contraceptive) failure, inability to support or care for a child, to end an unwanted pregnancy, to prevent the birth of a child with birth defects or severe medical problems, and pregnancy resulting from rape or incest. In fact 32,000 pregnancies are caused by rape every year in the United States. Why in the world would we make a women go through a pregnancy after she’s been raped? Although there are other reasons women have abortions other than just not wanting a child, saying that women should only have abortions if they have been raped, is saying women only have a right to their body after they’ve been violated.
The biggest argument we hear from pro-lifers (people who think women should not have the choice of abortion) is “you’re killing an innocent human being!” and that's why this topic is such a difficult one. As one of our teachers, Mr. Reed, said “By that logic, people with miscarriages should be in jail. People don’t get judged for having a miscarriage, but are when they have an abortion.” The bottom line is, yes you are aborting a fetus, but scientist still don’t agree on when a fetus is considered a human. As BCC says “Unfortunately there's no agreement in medicine, philosophy or theology as to what stage of fetal development should be associated with the right to life.”
Even though all the points we've given you are valid, the bottom line is, it’s a woman's choice what she does with her body. A large group of the pro life community are men, and guess what? Most men will never go through a pregnancy. They will never know what it's like to be raped and then become pregnant or fear for their life because of a pregnancy. We are all entitled to our bodies, and that includes pregnant people. If you are against abortion, don’t have one, but don’t take away other people’s choice.
