What better way to start off the new year, than to oppose women’s rights.

 When men have a right to dictate what happens to women’s bodies, where do our rights go? 

When women are no longer able to make a choice concerning their health and their future, should we even bother with our right to vote?

Why not take that away as well? 

Perhaps we should remind a few out in the community that a termination is not an easy choice to make.

But a choice that a woman has the right to make. 

This extreme thinking is not about the abortion, it is about misogyny and the oppression of women. 

This type of man – who will defend to his last stand that abortion is wrong, and calls for clinics to be shut down – is just the type of man to complain when the mental health system is overrun with future people, suffering from myriad social and psychological illnesses as a result of being nudged around the state system from foster home to foster home. 

The type of man who will complain when the 70,000 15 to 19-year-old girls worldwide die due to pregnancy and childbirth-related complications (UNFPA, 2007), and are no longer the ghosts of poverty and distant lands, but tragedies among our communities also. 

The type of man to complain that the state system is overrun with children in need of a home, while he sits back. 

The type of man to complain when suicide rates among women increase drastically because they have no where else to turn.

When the choice to end a pregnancy results in the end of the mother’s life.

When will the people who call for abortion to be illegal see the real damage of destroying a woman’s right to make choices concerning her own body?

 When making abortion illegal, abortions do not stop.

There are people in the world who will continue to administer abortions, not medical professionals; criminals who watched a two and a half minute video on YouTube. 

Recently, as we would all have read about, heard about, tragically a young woman died as a result of being gang-raped, in India. 

If this woman had not died, and had become pregnant as a result of the ordeal, would you continue to oppose her choice?

 Her choice to keep the pregnancy, her choice to end it?

 It is the woman’s choice, not yours, not anyone else’s, hers.

Mietta Marchingo

?Quarry Hill