Marc McCarthy, president of the university’s anti-abortion group Students for Life, recently wrote about the oppression inherent in abortion, or as he called it, “the legal killing of 3,500 people per day in the United States.” In one sense, he is right – there is oppression of women every day, and this oppression has led to a genocide of sorts affecting women throughout the world. According to the Guttmacher Institute, about 67,000 women die from complications due to illegal botched abortions each year. Why, when the ability to perform safe abortions is possible and legal in much of the world, are there so many women dying of illegal abortions?
According to the National Abortion Federation, about 88 percent of U.S. counties do not have an abortion provider. That means that even women who most anti-abortion advocates would not deny abortion – such as rape and incest victims – do not have convenient access to abortion clinics. Even if women are able to access abortion providers, many of them are regularly harassed and at times physically assaulted by anti-abortion picketers who demonstrate outside of abortion clinics. Additionally, women in the military who get pregnant due to rape cannot receive an abortion because health care facilities on military bases do not offer this service.
“Pro-choice” encompasses the ability of women to have access to comprehensive sex education, so women have the necessary resources available to prevent pregnancy altogether. The abortion debate is only a fraction of the myriad of issues the pro-choice perspective argues. Many individuals, including some anti-abortion activists, utilize contraceptives in lieu of ineffective methods of pregnancy prevention. According to the 2000 census, the average number of children per family in the U.S. is 1.86, indicating that over an average woman’s “childbearing years” (15-44), she must use contraceptives for three decades in order to have the number of children she desires. However, if a woman is not “promiscuous,” is practicing safe sex and becomes pregnant through statistical pitfalls, should she not have the right to then make the decision of whether or not to keep the child?
In the case of anti-abortion activists, instead of riling pro-abortion-rights advocates and trying to make abortion illegal, why not try to minimize the need for it? Why not fight for comprehensive sex education and easier access to affordable birth control? The members of Terps for Choice realize abortions are taxing but necessary decisions for many and their impact can be minimized through the aforementioned tactics. If we start valuing the life of an embryo more than the woman carrying it, it becomes easy to argue against access to contraceptives.
So while Terps for Choice respects the right of Students for Life and other anti-abortion groups to hold their opinions – even if they differ from ours – we ask that, as long as safe abortion is legal, they respect the choice of women to utilize resources available to them without fear of harassment or misinformation. That was the intent of Terps for Choice when we left information from the 2008 American Psychological Association Task Force Report on Mental Health and Abortion at the lecture “Does Abortion Cause Mental Illness?” We provided Students for Life with information from the 105-page report, but we felt that our time was best spent at the lecture “Yes Means Yes” occurring simultaneously, where we learned about rape culture and attempts to combat sexual assault through sexual empowerment in a non-misogynistic framework. It is time to realize that the true oppression of women lies with the harassment and misinformation they receive when trying to utilize legal and safe resources and the dire consequences that can occur when women are either denied or stigmatized for accessing these resources.
Xenia Strunnikova and Aliya Mann are co-presidents of Terps for Choice. They can be reached at amann12@umd.edu.
