Summary: The Reproductive Rights Of Women

Control over oneself is something that almost everyone strives for. From preteens to the elderly, freedom and autonomy is a basic human desire. This is case for women, in the past and present, which fought and are still fighting for control over their reproductive rights. A woman’s body is her own and women have been fighting for this freedom for hundreds of years. Many women come from different backgrounds and have been through different situations, so to restrict all women from making fertility decisions that could very well be do or die is wrong and uncalled for. In the past, women were under complete control of their family, and usually these households were under the supervision of a male. When time came for women to fight for their …show more content…
In the documentary, “The Abortion Diaries,” there was a woman who, because of abortion laws in the country where she lived, got a botched abortion. This subsequently led to her not being able to have any more children. If abortion was legal, dangerous and emotionally challenging occurrences such as this one would never happen. This story is also similar to those of women who received back alley abortions or even tried to abort fetuses themselves. Compulsive sterilization also falls into this category of abuse of personal space. In the book, Reproductive Politics, Rickie Solinger discusses how the procedure of sterilization was used as a punishment for criminals, and to “reduce the welfare burden” that poor women posed on the government. We spoke in class about how the reproductive rights of some people were valued above others and how unfair that is. Non-white women and women with disabilities were some of the major targets of compulsory sterilization, due to the practice of eugenics, race bias, class bias, and disability bias on the parts of the doctors involved. Fortunately the court case Skinner v. Oklahoma led to the drastic decrease of the practice of sterilization, even though it did not completely eradicate it. Every citizen should be equally protected under the eyes of the law, regardless of race, ethnicity, …show more content…
Religious groups’ opinions are founded on the beliefs that killing an unborn child is immoral and that murder is wrong, along with the thought that teens with access to rights will engage in premarital sex. The invention of the ultrasound gave rise to the idea of personhood: a fetus is a person with a life and rights. The members of these groups are operate on these conservative beliefs and advocate for laws and restrictions to be put into place to deny contraception and the access to abortion to anyone who needs. Some of these people do believe that abortion is warranted in some circumstances, but this movement is mostly centered on those who are morally opposed to all abortion and contraception. Anthony Comstock is a prime example of this group of people. His actions had a strong impact on reproductive rights’