Carleton Progressive

Claire Harper

This fall, I’m running Carls for Choice, Carleton’s pro-choice group. After receiving e-mails from the group all year, I finally got involved with it last spring. Spring Term, Carls for Choice had two events I participated in. On Good Friday, there was an anti-choice protest in front of a Planned Parenthood; Carls for Choice joined the pro-choice counter-protesters. The second time, I went up really early on a Saturday morning to escort women into an abortion clinic. Anti-choice protesters target this clinic every Saturday morning, so as escorts we are there to support the women entering the clinic and provide a barrier between them and the protesters. The clinic began collaborating with Carls for Choice as well as Oles for Choice, St. Olaf’s pro-choice group, last year, training our groups to escort and setting aside one day a month for us to do so. Carls for Choice also works to raise awareness of the importance of women’s rights to abortion, comprehensive sexual education, and access to birth control. We do this on campus through tabling, collecting signatures to support pro-choice legislation, and hosting other events.

At our first day escorting this year, one of the protesters yelled at me that my mother was ashamed of me for helping women get abortions. The protester could not have been more wrong. My mother made a choice to have my sisters and me. She raised me to believe in women’s rights, including their right to make the private decision of when and with whom to have a child. I have always found it disturbing that our government, comprised primarily of men, feels it has a right to make such a personal decision for all women in the United States. Forcing women to have children they cannot care for or do not want does not serve the needs of the mother, the child, or anyone else involved. Children deserve to be raised in an environment that can support them emotionally and economically, and our society ought to trust women to decide whether or not they are able to provide that support. I am a strong believer in adoption, but because of how physically taxing pregnancy is, women need the choice of whether or not to carry a child to term. Giving birth still forces women to take precious time away from their jobs and education even if they choose to give the baby to another family. Even if not legally given a choice whether or not to have an abortion, women would still terminate pregnancies if they felt unable to carry a child to term or provide for the child after the birth. Outlawing it would simply make getting an abortion far more dangerous. Women would have abortions secretly, leaving them unable to make sure the person performing it could or would perform it safely. It is so much easier to give women a choice, allowing each woman to exercise her own personal beliefs regarding abortion and when life begins, than to outlaw it and force women who feel they need abortions to endanger themselves by seeking an illegal surgery. I am not pro-abortion. I am pro-choice.

Being pro-choice means that I want to help women choose when and with whom to have a child every step of the way. Some of my favorite buttons I’ve distributed while tabling with Carls for Choice are the ones in support of comprehensive sexual health education. Abstinence-only and insufficient sexual health education fails people, leaving women with unwanted pregnancy and disease. By educating people on the methods of birth control available, pregnancy can be avoided, and the number of abortions will decrease, too. The more education people have, the better they will be at making their own decisions about reproductive health.