Women’s Reproductive Health Rights:
Letter to Male Legislators

Please stop legislating my body and my choices –
you have more important things to do

Dear [fill in blank: senator, representative, etc.],

Regarding your stance on women’s reproductive health, please set aside your ideologies and theologies for a moment and reflect on the following with an open mind:

We can all agree that bringing a new life into the world can be the most precious moment of a woman’s life. But sometimes, victimizing circumstances beyond our control, such as sexual violence, critical health issues, or extreme poverty, place us in the position of having to make the most difficult and important decision we will ever face – a position you will never find yourself in and thus could never possibly understand.

It must be very easy for you to sit back, put on your blinders, and declare that “abortion is bad” and “contraception is immoral” – period, end of story. It’s not so easy for us.

How could you, as a man, begin to imagine what pregnancy is – how it affects every aspect of a woman’s body, and how it occasionally, sadly, results in the death of the woman? U.S. women are dying from childbirth at the highest rate in decades – at least 850 women would have died in 2010 without access to abortion services (statistics from U.S. Maternal Mortality Rate, National Center for Health Statistics; Planned Parenthood Report, and CDC – and this number does not include deaths that would have resulted from attempting to obtain illegal abortions.)

Do you understand how demeaning it is when legislators place more value on zygotes, blastocysts, and embryos than on the lives of the women carrying them? How insulting it is to presume that we are incapable of educating ourselves to the extent that legislation is being widely signed into law to force that education upon us using humiliating methods? And if education of women’s reproductive health is such a major priority, why are legislators pushing (and passing!) abstinence-only sex education in schools, which has been found to be completely ineffective in reducing incidences of teen pregnancy or the spread of STIs? (Ott, MA; Santelli, JS (2007 Oct). "Abstinence and abstinence-only education". Current opinion in obstetrics & gynecology 19 (5): 446–52))

When you, as a man, legislate matters of morality based on your own secular views – legislation that only affects women – rather than basing your political decision-making on science, logic, or the viewpoints of your female constituents, how does that make you any different from those imposing the legal inequalities of Sharia Law on women in other parts of the world?

Please stop waging this war on female Americans. We are more than vessels. We have hopes, dreams, and ambitions, same as you. When it comes to our bodies, it must be OUR choice, not yours.

Kindest regards,

[YOUR NAME]