My Body My Choice: The Abortion Conversation
- Hattie Lewis
- Oct 17, 2021
- 2 min read
In the week that saw my University make social media headlines over its Pro-Life society, I'm thinking about how the right to a safe and legal abortion has been under threat since it was legalised in the UK 1967. For the last 50 years, the debate of Pro-Life or Pro-Choice has circulated, but I personally have not come face-to-face with it until last week. And I'll be honest with you - I'm raging!
For a bit of context, my university tends to not allow opinion-based societies in order to keep the campus feeling safe and comfortable for everyone, and yet somehow, the Exeter Students for Life managed to rear their ugly head. The society is based on 'the fight for the lives of preborn babies in the womb', but what about their mothers? What about the number of women and girls in this city who've chosen to terminate a pregnancy and now feel threatened or villainized? Who's fighting for them?
The Vice President of this society claims that he 'does not believe that any woman really wants to have an abortion... that it is a choice made in fear', but he said it himself, it's a 'choice'! The decision to not go skydiving because you're scared of heights is a choice made in fear, that doesn't give someone else the right to push you out of a plane. Women make the decision to have an abortion based on many different things, that could be their financial situation, where they are in life, or that they simply don't want a child, but the key point is that no-one else has the right to tell someone what to do with their body.
This is not just an issue of Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice, its about women being spoken over, being spoken for and having their rights put on the line. An individual can personally feel that they wouldn't choose an abortion for themselves, and still be Pro-Choice, because someone else's decision is theirs and theirs alone. Everyone should have the right to choose.
It's been 50 years of fighting to keep our rights, after fighting to get them in the first place. So, where do we go from here? We need to be loud. We need to stand up and speak, and not let ourselves be spoken over or spoken for. We need to talk to each other, we need to talk our men and our boys and teach them that the freedom to choose what a woman does with her own body is her decision alone. And that whatever that decision is, she deserves respect and safety. We need to be aware that we are in a position of privilege to even be able to have this conversation. Elsewhere in the world, some women don't have that luxury. Feminism should be for all women everywhere.
I challenge you to talk to someone today about this issue, get the conversation moving and keep it going in the direction of respect for women and their decisions.
Useful link:
Comments