The simple truth: half the population will never have to experience the challenges of being a woman. Moreover, some might say I’m the wrong person to voice the overall complaints for females everywhere because I am still a child. Yet, society has made it very clear that it cares not of age, but what lies between your legs. This is something that has been proven to me throughout the course of my life. From a young age most girls are told how to act, how to think, how to dress, and what they can and cannot do with their own bodies.

And yet, as they grow older,  women are told that they can do anything they want; run for president, own a business, become a doctor, receive or teach higher education, calculate the math to send a rocket into space, and overall just help with the progression of their community.

Yet fact remains, this is contradicted when women still can’t even dictate the decisions that happen to their own body.

Abortion should be legal because women who are denied abortions are more likely to become unemployed, to rely  on public welfare, to be below the poverty line, and to become victims of domestic violence.

Conversely, reproductive choice empowers women by giving them control over their own bodies.

To begin with, I believe that the term “Pro-Life” should mean that we hope to better the lives of the the citizens in our community. People that support the “pro-life” movement preach on the value of human life but will constantly disregard the group of people that provide life and the well-being of their own lives.

It is hypocritical to say  that human-life is this precious hing, when we would openly volunteer our women to be victims of domestic violence, mental health trauma, postpartum depression, minimal education, and poverty.

Denying women the right to abortion is cruel and will only cause more distress in their lives.

The University of California in San Francisco did a study on the consequences of denying women abortions; this study included “women who are denied abortions are 14 times more likely to become victims of poverty and domestic abuse. These individuals almost always loose any chance of a stable career or steady income because of their  conditions.”

If people decide that they are willing to throw away the well-being of our women to support a preconceived idea of how these same women should treat their own bodies, then we will never really be able to move forward. We are seriously hurting half of the population by denying them safe operations. And the ironic thing is, we aren’t stopping abortions; we’re only preventing the process of healthy, safe abortions, that are done by medical professionals. If we make abortions illegal then we are letting females in our country know that we aren’t concerned about their mental health.

The American Psychology Association has recently disclosed “more and more females are being taught that abortions are wrong, but people are forgetting the stress this is causing on these individual’s mental health.”

A study comparing the mental health of women who received abortions to women denied abortions found that women who were denied abortions “felt more regret and anger” and “less relief and happiness” than women who had abortions. The same study also found that 98% of women who received abortions “felt it was the right decision” a week after the procedure.

People are making decisions under the “Pro-life” movement, and while doing this they are completely forgetting the well-being of these women in their own lives. If people continue to make these harsh decisions without thinking about the females involved, we could force women to carry out unsafe and mentally scarring alternatives. Denying women the right to the abortions will severely hurt women who are already in the need of help.