We are pro-choice because we believe girls and women should have control over their bodies. Women’s reproductive rights are human rights. It includes the legal right to abortion, fertility treatment, contraception, reproductive health, and ingress to information about one’s own body. Spelled out, reproductive rights anchor a women’s liberation to determine the capacity of their bodies to reproduce or not. It is an individual woman’s right to rational decisions about and well-informed family planning services, inclusive of safe abortions with access to a complete span of inexpensive resources. It is paramount to understand that the prerogatives of reproductive health are a privilege everyone must have, regardless of ethnicity, age, or sexual identity. To make choices of one’s sexuality and reproduction rights are human rights.
Many countries globally limit and hinder access to protective, legal, and inexpensive abortion, which endangers women’s lives. It is estimated in recent studies that approximately 8-18% of materialistic deductive health deaths globally are due to abortions that are perilous (unsafe) in nature. The estimated death rate due to unsafe abortions per year ranges from 22,500 to 44,000 per year.
Most of such deaths transpire in developing countries, with Africa being the most inflated in numbers. Permitting women and girls the means and opportunity to information about their rights and sexual and reproductive health, including present-day contraception and cautious abortion, would intercept unplanned pregnancies sparing the lives of some of the most impoverished and marginalized women and girls. We must push for a positive influence on gender equality more widely.
The right to women’s sexual and reproductive health has been recognized and shielded by the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (C.E.D.A.W). Multiple articles of the Convention grapple over women’s rights to sexual and reproductive well-being, which has been principal in promoting women’s human rights in common. Further, women’s rights advocates have stressed how the status of women is primitively connected with the depletion of women, through social and political procedures, to their physical facets. When reproductive health is intended to necessitate more than just the biological functioning of a woman’s womb, we enter approaches centered on women’s sexual and reproductive health.
We believe women should have the freedom to govern and take charge of their sexual and reproductive existence, make choices, and access sufficient information (Shalev, 1998). Conversely, in the absence of the right to reproductive freedom, all such human, political and social rights are hindered in power to promote the welfare of women. In such cases, women have been deprived of their fundamental rights to social justice, liberation, and equality. All of which are under attack by the U.S. government with the overturn of Roe v. Wade.
Every woman is responsible for her reproductive rights, determining when to have children. These fundamental rights are imperative to the socio-economic welfare of women’s general health. According to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, a women’s ability to make choices about one’s own reproductive life and the placement of entering into parenthood is deeply linked to superior relationship stability, contentment, and increased experience of work among women (The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, 2011).
The recent years have put forth policies in the United States that are influencing women’s reproductive rights on a state and federal scale. Formerly, the case of Roe v. Wade implicated the legislative right to abortion, and evangelical activists continue to question funding allocation accusing Planned Parenthood of killing babies in the last trimester. The legislation created the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. The fact is that none of the planned parenthood funding goes towards the abortion procedure. The budget is only used for prevention like birth control. Aborting Funding remains a challenging issue (Jane Roe, et al., Appellants, v. Henry Wade., 1973). Although The Affordable Care Act of 2010 fortifies these limitations, the Medicaid programs of state have the choice to shield abortions using only state finances.
The recent judgment of Roe v. Wade being overturned by the United States Supreme Court severely impacts women’s reproductive rights in which abortion is no longer a free choice for women in over twenty states (Santamariña et al., 2022).
The ruling of Roe v. Wade, referred to by the U.N. Reproductive Health Agency (United Nations Population Fund, 2022) and the World Health Organization (WHO), reported that 45 percent of all abortions globally put the lives of women at grave risk leading to maternal death. Statistically, more women will be subjected to death as limitations by governments grow (World Health Organization, 2022). The U.N.F.P.A. accentuated that “Hindering the right to abortion does not avert women from soliciting abortion; it merely makes it more lethal” (Overturning of Roe v Wade abortion law a ‘huge blow to women’s human rights’ warns Bachelet, 2022).
This change negatively impacts women with lower wages battling financial challenges, and more obstacles to obtaining contraception consistently. How is it that we as women are back to fighting for fundamental rights about our bodies? Why does someone else’s religion bear any weight on the choices I make with my body? No one is killing babies!!! Women are making responsible health care choices that affect the rest of their lives. What kind of government forces women to have babies? Is this the first step to making women second-class citizens?
Women’s reproductive rights have been politicized in the 21st century, reverting women’s rights back to the 19th century and forcing women to give birth to an unwanted child. Accessibility to abortion and contraception thus remains a vital conflict in reproductive rights, with new issues stemming to the surface. A women’s human dignity should be of paramount value. When will it be widely acknowledged that reproductive rights must be a constitutional right in comprehensive social justice matters? We cannot fail to recognize that there are women trapped in conditions of armed conflict, internal displacement, combating trafficking, and women in the sex trade who are met with immense reproductive health challenges. These women are susceptible to unwanted pregnancies, torture, sexual violence, and marginalization due to poor access and information about reproductive rights. Women’s reproduction rights need to be highly prioritized as a fundamental right to the liberation of women’s reproductive autonomy. My Body, My Choice!