Pro-Choice

Liam Walsh ’18// Page Editor

It has been 44 years since Roe v. Wade secured the women’s right to privacy and autocracy over their own body. Why should a bunch of old, white, men who are never going to have an abortion put laws in place to limit abortion?

The right to choose helps to ensure women’s civil rights, lifting restrictions off of their bodies, which their shouldn’t be restrictions on to begin with.

A woman shouldn’t be chastised and persecuted against for wanting to end a pregnancy stemming from rape, or have to keep something they can’t afford and will not have a healthy environment to grow up in.

Adoption is a promoted alternative by pro-life activists, but adoption still requires the women to carry the baby for nine painful months that bring emotional agony and physical dangers.

Completing an unwanted pregnancy can also threaten the life of the mother, with birth allowing more chance of health issues than terminating the pregnancy does.

They are completely safe. Abortions are a common medical procedure that have half as many complications associated with it compared to wisdom teeth removal, according to Vox.com.

Abortion is also not a rampant problem threatening the integrity of our country. In the past few years, abortions have gone down to 14.6 abortions per 1000 women of childbearing age in 2014, compared to 29.3 abortions in 1980 and 1981, according to npr.org.

The cause for this drop can be attributed to the use of contraceptives, and only eight percent of people who have abortions are using it as the first contraceptive according to lawteacher.net. People aren’t relying on abortion as their main form of contraception, according to lawteacher.net, they are trying other methods that didn’t work.

The abortions that are happening aren’t occurring late in the pregnancy, with 91 percent of abortions happening in the first trimester, according to foxnews.com.

Abortions provide an option for women to have control and safety over their own body while remaining a completely safe operation with much misinformation being spread about it.

Pro-Life

Mary Grace O’Shea ‘17// Staff Writer

In February, the annual March for Life occurred in Washington D.C., one of the largest events advocating for life rights of all ages. This year, amidst all of the political conversation and argumentation regarding the election of Donald Trump as the new president, I realized that many news sources have had things(whether positive or negative) to say about him, but important events like the March for Life are hardly even covered.

After the march happened, I was online for days looking at articles and videos and I noticed that nearly every source that reported it was a religious website or newspaper. This upset me simply because I believe that regardless of the political stance you are for, being open and respectful of the other side is important. For U.S. citizens, it is a basic human right to stand for what you believe in and to show it.

The reason I was affected by the fact that there was a lack of reporting on the March for Life is because I am pro-life. I believe that the rights of an embryo from the moment they are conceived are the same as when they are a human of 10, 20, 40 or 80 years old. Though a small human cannot speak, they can feel pain and they are emotionally attached to their mothers.

According to the Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life, babies in the womb can feel the pain of an abortion after 20 weeks gestation. Doctors performing the procedures have visualized babies flinch and recoil while being torn out of the human that is supposed to protect them. The researchers also said that babies feel pain more intensely than adults at this time, as their spino-thalamic pathway has just been formed.

Some argue that a woman that has been raped should not have to keep her baby, but that child is still a living, beautiful human inside of her with a life and a future. To me, taking away the life of a person depending on your body’s nutrients is no different than taking its life once it is in the world. It is real, living, breathing and a gift.

Adoption is an option for every single mother on this earth. A woman that has been raped or has become unintentionally pregnant is risking her life with a child inside of her, but so is the woman that has finally become pregnant after years of trying. Adoption gives the women that will never have a chance to have a human grow inside of them to become someone that cares for and loves that baby.

I, as a supporter of life, could not understand more clearly that certain families or single parents are unable to support their children in a healthy and safe manner. However, this should not restrict the life of their child. The rights of a precious baby are as alive and well as they are for you and me.