The My Body, My Rights movement was started by Amnesty International to promote every person’s right to make their own decisions about their health, body, sexuality and reproductive rights without fear, coercion, violence or discrimination.
(The above picture is one of Amnesty International’s promotional images for the movement).
What does this mean? It means several things, such as:
- Having access to sexual and reproductive health services. This includes contraception and sex education.
- Being able to access safe abortion services, at the very least when concerning rape, incest, when your life is in danger or the fetus has a fatal impairment.
- Having the freedom to pick your own sexual partners, and to choose when and who you want to marry.
- The freedom to live free from violence such as rape and sexual violence including genital mutilation, forced pregnancy or abortion, or discrimination based on sex, gender or sexuality.
While this campaign has been around for a few years, it’s important to talk about it now. There are a lot of changes going on in our government. The new administration has the potential to affect everyone’s medical coverage, and in this case specifically the women’s ability to control their reproductive health. Because of this, having a conversation over My Body My Rights is extra important for females right now.
Regardless of where your political opinions lie, this is an important issue for every person, not just women. This is not a gender or sex-specific issue because having the control over health, body, sexual, and reproductive rights is something that affects everyone. Often this kind of movement may be dismissed as a women’s issue. But that’s not true. Men have the same right to access contraception, have the freedom to choose their partners, and not be discriminated against as women. Therefore, this is a universal issue.
The moment that a government, religious group, or any other kind of social or political group attempts to regulate a person’s body, it counts as an invasion of the person’s right to choose exactly what happens to their body.
At the core of this movement is the idea of freedom. Every single person should have the freedom to see a doctor about their health and the freedom to access affordable (or free) contraception regardless of age, race, socioeconomic status, geographic location, religion, sexual identity, gender, or anything else.
Each person should be free to access medical procedures like abortions, especially when that is a necessary medical step. No government, social or political group, religious movement or faith should be able to stand in the way of a woman’s right to choose what happens to her body, especially in the case of rape, incest or medical need to terminate a pregnancy.
Every person should have the freedom to live their life authentically, with full control over who they sleep with, who they enter into relationships with, and who they marry. They should also have full control over when they decide to do these things, with no coercion from anyone, including parents and other family or community members.
Finally, everyone should have the protection of knowing that these freedoms are observed, that they are protected, rather than invaded by, their governments, social, political or religious groups.
So why is this movement so important? Because without the freedom to decide about our own bodies, we literally lose control over ourselves. And in the United States, where we are supposedly entitled to life, liberty, and property, shouldn’t the liberty to control our bodies be an unalienable right, protected and free from the ever-changing whims of politicians, regardless of who is running our government at any given time? Right now, it is not a protected right. The only way to change that, both in our country and around the world is to get involved and make our voices heard. For more information about the movement and about how you can help, visit https://www.amnesty.org/en/get-involved/my-body-my-rights/.