Stats and Facts About Abortion, Sex Education, and Contraceptives
You've most likely heard the terms pro-choice and anti-choice when discussing reproductive rights. Some people have heard these phrases before but might not have the definitions straight. Allow me to "break it down, yo." Someone who is pro-choice supports the idea of keeping abortion safe and legal and making contraceptives easily accessible. People who identify as anti-choice do not support keeping abortion legal or making contraceptives easy to access. These clashing viewpoints cause a lot of issues and raise a lot of important questions about legal and safe abortions along with the way sex education is being taught in America.
Women's clinics are places that provide abortions, pap smears, birth control, and other needs related to safe reproductive health. I spoke with a fellow feminist named Megan Delilah who works as a paid clinic escort in her state. The title of clinic escort is an important one. There are a lot of anti-choice people who protest outside of women's clinics and harass the people working there and going there for services. Megan's job is to help keep these protesters in check and make sure that any patrons of the clinic get in and out safely. I asked Megan if she had ever dealt with any particularly nasty protesters and she gave me some incredible feedback.
She said "[My experiences have] probably not been as nasty as some others, but there have been some gross moments. The first few times I did escorting it was part of an escort/counter protest campaign during the antis' 40 Days For Life campaign, (if you don't know, it's forty days of constant protesting outside of abortion clinics.) So, half of our group would hold signs and generally try to piss off the antis while the rest of us waited for patients in order to walk them in. I was doing the counter protesting aspect on one particular day, and one of the antis was putting rosaries on the fence posts outside of the clinic. He's not allowed to do that because that's clinic property, so my friend and I simply took the rosaries off the posts and put them next to a backpack he had placed on the ground. When he saw us doing that he got extremely angry, called us bitches, and threatened to slap my friend, I can't remember if my friend called the cops on him for threatening her, but if she did they didn't do anything about it." Megan also talked about anti-choice protesters that bring microphones and yell about how "everyone is going to hell, killing babies is sin, God is coming, etc." Megan has also been personally targeted by anti-choice protesters.
I asked her what a normal day as a clinic escort is like and she replied with "It's usually boring. There's a lot of waiting involved. However, it's also really fulfilling because I get all kinds of relieved looks and gratitude once I let patients know that I'm there to make sure the protesters have a tougher time harassing them. The antis can be annoying sometimes, but live tweeting their antics can make it bearable, and it's always fun to drown out their terrible singing or chanting by blasting music. They're not big fans of the The Clash. I also get a lot of people 'praying for me' and by 'praying for me' they mean staring at me intently while they chant stuff in what appears to be an attempt at an exorcism. So far it hasn't worked." She summed up her usual day as "boring, fun and also extremely important." Some of the lengths the anti-choice protesters go to are insane. In Massachusetts anti-choice protesters only have to be a minimum of six feet away from a clinic when protesting. And this law was put in place because of the murders of two Massachusetts Planned Parenthood employees committed by two anti-choicers in 1994. In the summer of 2014 the Supreme Court unanimously overturned a Massachusetts law that would have put a thirty-five foot "buffer zone" between anti-choice protesters and clinics. Many people who are anti-choice base this belief on the teachings of their religion. This is evident in the quotes from Megan I shared earlier.
While abortion laws are kind of strict in America, things are worse in other nations. When I was researching this topic I found that women in developing countries account for ninety-five percent of illegal abortions. Many countries where abortion is illegal or highly restricted have significantly higher abortion rates than countries with liberal abortion laws. The approximate numbers of women who were hospitalized after unsafe illegal abortions in these countries are shocking.
Bangladesh: 71,800
Brazil: 288,700
Chile: 31,900
Colombia: 57,700
Dominican Republic: 16,500
Egypt: 216,000
Mexico: 106,500
Nigeria: 142,200
Peru; 54,200
The Philippines: 80,100
And 80,000 women die every year from complications from illegal abortions. But even with these staggering facts and statistics some minds are still unchanged. In an article by Maya Dusenberry on feministing.com, I found out that pro-choice legislators took a stand more than ever in 2014.The State Legislators introduced ninety-five bills to expand access to abortion according to the Guttmacher tally, But in January of this year, the House GOP proposed a 20-week ban on abortion. This meaning that if the ban is approved, a woman will not be able to legally obtain an abortion twenty weeks or later in the pregnancy.
By the age of forty-five, three out of ten women will have had an abortion. That's a lot of ladies. A lot of middle schools and high schools teach abstinence only sex education. A lot of people think that teaching adolescents things like "nobody wants to have sex with you if you've had multiple sexual partners in the past" and "STDs are scary and there's no way to prevent them" (and we're gonna use them as a scare tactic so you don't have sex) will lower teen birth rate and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and infections. What we're not being taught is how condoms work, what the full anatomy of the male of female sexual organs are, and how to respond when someone is being pushy or abusing you sexually.
Rape is taboo. The female body is taboo. There are boys that don't even know females pee and menstruate out of different places! The subject of sexuality is never even touched on. All because adults are afraid and because of that, their kids will be afraid. Our country sexualizes the female body all the time but never bothers to talk about how crazy cool it is! If we want to, we can carry small people in our uteruses! But carrying those small people is a choice that everyone with a uterus deserves to have. Countries with the lowest abortion rates are Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. They all have liberal abortion laws, good healthcare, comprehensive sex education, and accessible contraceptives. Megan had this to say about the importance of accessible contraceptives. "[Not having accessible contraceptives] is a safety issue for women and not having this access means a lot of women dying preventable deaths." She is right in saying this. Easy access to contraceptives has saved a lot of women from a lot of pain and difficulty and that will hopefully continue. It is imperative that eventually every woman has the ability to choose. Although it is a hard goal to reach, I think we can do it.
Sources:
feministing.com
everydayfeminism.com
plannedparenthood.org
rookiemag.com
rhrealitycheck.org
tumblr.com
Women's clinics are places that provide abortions, pap smears, birth control, and other needs related to safe reproductive health. I spoke with a fellow feminist named Megan Delilah who works as a paid clinic escort in her state. The title of clinic escort is an important one. There are a lot of anti-choice people who protest outside of women's clinics and harass the people working there and going there for services. Megan's job is to help keep these protesters in check and make sure that any patrons of the clinic get in and out safely. I asked Megan if she had ever dealt with any particularly nasty protesters and she gave me some incredible feedback.
She said "[My experiences have] probably not been as nasty as some others, but there have been some gross moments. The first few times I did escorting it was part of an escort/counter protest campaign during the antis' 40 Days For Life campaign, (if you don't know, it's forty days of constant protesting outside of abortion clinics.) So, half of our group would hold signs and generally try to piss off the antis while the rest of us waited for patients in order to walk them in. I was doing the counter protesting aspect on one particular day, and one of the antis was putting rosaries on the fence posts outside of the clinic. He's not allowed to do that because that's clinic property, so my friend and I simply took the rosaries off the posts and put them next to a backpack he had placed on the ground. When he saw us doing that he got extremely angry, called us bitches, and threatened to slap my friend, I can't remember if my friend called the cops on him for threatening her, but if she did they didn't do anything about it." Megan also talked about anti-choice protesters that bring microphones and yell about how "everyone is going to hell, killing babies is sin, God is coming, etc." Megan has also been personally targeted by anti-choice protesters.
American anti-choice protesters
I asked her what a normal day as a clinic escort is like and she replied with "It's usually boring. There's a lot of waiting involved. However, it's also really fulfilling because I get all kinds of relieved looks and gratitude once I let patients know that I'm there to make sure the protesters have a tougher time harassing them. The antis can be annoying sometimes, but live tweeting their antics can make it bearable, and it's always fun to drown out their terrible singing or chanting by blasting music. They're not big fans of the The Clash. I also get a lot of people 'praying for me' and by 'praying for me' they mean staring at me intently while they chant stuff in what appears to be an attempt at an exorcism. So far it hasn't worked." She summed up her usual day as "boring, fun and also extremely important." Some of the lengths the anti-choice protesters go to are insane. In Massachusetts anti-choice protesters only have to be a minimum of six feet away from a clinic when protesting. And this law was put in place because of the murders of two Massachusetts Planned Parenthood employees committed by two anti-choicers in 1994. In the summer of 2014 the Supreme Court unanimously overturned a Massachusetts law that would have put a thirty-five foot "buffer zone" between anti-choice protesters and clinics. Many people who are anti-choice base this belief on the teachings of their religion. This is evident in the quotes from Megan I shared earlier.
While abortion laws are kind of strict in America, things are worse in other nations. When I was researching this topic I found that women in developing countries account for ninety-five percent of illegal abortions. Many countries where abortion is illegal or highly restricted have significantly higher abortion rates than countries with liberal abortion laws. The approximate numbers of women who were hospitalized after unsafe illegal abortions in these countries are shocking.
Bangladesh: 71,800
Brazil: 288,700
Chile: 31,900
Colombia: 57,700
Dominican Republic: 16,500
Egypt: 216,000
Mexico: 106,500
Nigeria: 142,200
Peru; 54,200
The Philippines: 80,100
And 80,000 women die every year from complications from illegal abortions. But even with these staggering facts and statistics some minds are still unchanged. In an article by Maya Dusenberry on feministing.com, I found out that pro-choice legislators took a stand more than ever in 2014.The State Legislators introduced ninety-five bills to expand access to abortion according to the Guttmacher tally, But in January of this year, the House GOP proposed a 20-week ban on abortion. This meaning that if the ban is approved, a woman will not be able to legally obtain an abortion twenty weeks or later in the pregnancy.
my favorite quote from Friends that kind of applies to this
By the age of forty-five, three out of ten women will have had an abortion. That's a lot of ladies. A lot of middle schools and high schools teach abstinence only sex education. A lot of people think that teaching adolescents things like "nobody wants to have sex with you if you've had multiple sexual partners in the past" and "STDs are scary and there's no way to prevent them" (and we're gonna use them as a scare tactic so you don't have sex) will lower teen birth rate and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and infections. What we're not being taught is how condoms work, what the full anatomy of the male of female sexual organs are, and how to respond when someone is being pushy or abusing you sexually.
Rape is taboo. The female body is taboo. There are boys that don't even know females pee and menstruate out of different places! The subject of sexuality is never even touched on. All because adults are afraid and because of that, their kids will be afraid. Our country sexualizes the female body all the time but never bothers to talk about how crazy cool it is! If we want to, we can carry small people in our uteruses! But carrying those small people is a choice that everyone with a uterus deserves to have. Countries with the lowest abortion rates are Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. They all have liberal abortion laws, good healthcare, comprehensive sex education, and accessible contraceptives. Megan had this to say about the importance of accessible contraceptives. "[Not having accessible contraceptives] is a safety issue for women and not having this access means a lot of women dying preventable deaths." She is right in saying this. Easy access to contraceptives has saved a lot of women from a lot of pain and difficulty and that will hopefully continue. It is imperative that eventually every woman has the ability to choose. Although it is a hard goal to reach, I think we can do it.
Sources:
feministing.com
everydayfeminism.com
plannedparenthood.org
rookiemag.com
rhrealitycheck.org
tumblr.com
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