[Day 4] Reproductive Rights
Two years ago rageprufrock began the first 14 Valentines and she spoke of how women are praised in song, worshiped in poetry, and derided in culture. She spoke beautifully and elegantly of women, comparing our bodies to luminous flowers. She spoke of the state of women, and the need to remember what we go through, what women throughout the world suffer through.
We are daughters, sisters, mothers, and lovers. If we choose, we can bring life into world with our blood and nourish it with our bodies, but the world that we helped create, that women have bled for and fought for and cried for, doesn't recognize us. Our history is one of abuse. We are not safe.
Women suffer from domestic violence and rape. We are devalued. We are taught that we are lesser. There is still so much work to do, so much for us to accomplish.
It's 2008 and Hillary Rodham Clinton is, as I write this, campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination in the U.S. Yet, even as this is happening, women are being killed the world over, suffering from infanticide, dying from lack of medical care, killing themselves in the fight to be what society tells them they must. One in three women will still experience sexual assault in her lifetime. So much has changed and so much has stayed the same.
It's 2008 and we've come so far, but there is still more work to be done. We deserve better, and we can do more. We're strong. The next fourteen days is meant to remind us of that. It's our time to take back our bodies.
V can stand for vagina, like Eve Ensler's groundbreaking monologues. V can stand for violence, under whose auspices all women continue to make a home.
V can also stand for victory.
Reproductive Rights
In 1968, reproductive rights were first discussed at the UN's International Conference on Human Rights, and it was expressed that "parents have a basic human right to determine freely and responsibly the number and the spacing of their children." Over the last forty years, this has been expanded on in enough ways that the UN now states, "Reproductive health implies that people are able to have a satisfying and safe sex life and that they have the capability to reproduce and the freedom to decide if, when, and how often to do so. Implicit in this last condition are the right of men and women to be informed [about] and to have access to safe, effective, affordable and acceptable methods of family planning of their choice, as well as other methods for regulation of fertility which are not against the law, and the right of access to appropriate health-care services that will enable women to go safely through pregnancy and childbirth and provide couples with the best chance of having a healthy infant."
Reproductive rights cover everything from the choice to conceive or not to the choice to terminate a pregnancy or to carry it to full term; these rights are vital to maintaining the quality of women's health worldwide, and they're under attack all around the globe. Hungary has restricted funding for abortions not required for medical reasons or in cases of rape. Women in Uganda are fined and imprisoned for helping other women terminate their pregnancies. In the United States, 47 states give pharmacists, doctors, insurance companies, and other individuals the right to refuse women access to contraceptives and other medical treatments on the grounds of moral disagreement. Schools are bound to abstinence-only sexual education if they wish to procure federal funding, and many states are considering making it more difficult or even impossible to terminate a pregnancy.
We need groups like Ipas to help us hold on to the right to control our bodies. They work globally to improve women's ability to exercise their reproductive rights. They seek to make abortions safer, more easily accessible when needed, and to provide the means to prevent unwanted pregnancies. Their work to reduce the number of deaths from unsafe abortion practices, and their tireless efforts to provide women worldwide with the highest attainable standard of health and reproductive services should be both applauded and given our utmost support.