As a woman, I feel like I should be supportive of other women. Women have always gotten the short end of the stick for as long as anyone can remember, but these days, we are mobilizing and standing up for each other–and it explains why we were able to have a woman as the presidential nominee for a major party. It is why women are CEOs and engineers and scientists. We have realized that we really are powerful when we stick together instead of tearing each other down. That being said, supporting other women involves being supportive of what they choose to do with their bodies.
Abortion has long been one of the most hotly debated issues in this country. It is always pro-life vs. pro-choice with very little middle ground. But the thing is, there is a lot of grey area here.
I am 100% pro-choice. To be perfectly clear, that does not mean I am in favor of abortion. Being pro-choice means being in favor of a woman’s right to choose. In a perfect world, abortion would not even be on the table–but it is–and we owe every single woman who finds herself needing one the right to a safe one.
This is our reality. We cannot sweep it under the rug. The least we can do is ensure that women have qualified doctors who will give them quality care and that they can be given an honest opinion about what their best option is. Although abortion is the opposite of ideal, we must stand with the women who decide that this is the path they need to take at that point in their lives. Sometimes it is frustrating when it seems like women are using abortion to just cast aside a baby that was the result of being irresponsible, but it is really not our business.
Even though I–like many pro-choice and pro-life proponents alike–wish abortion was not even an option, it is, and we need to offer women the safest avenues of having this procedure. We need to support organizations like Planned Parenthood, which help women with reproductive health—and have actually caused abortions to be on the decline for quite some time now.
Even if we do not agree with the practice of abortion itself, we should stand by other women who sincerely think this is the right choice for them; by depriving women of that choice, we make them more susceptible to endangering their lives to have one. You do not have to necessarily think abortion is okay, but Colliegettes, I encourage you to be supportive of women who choose to have an abortion, because we would all want that if we were in that position.