Abortion rights under attack

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Women across the world, even in our country, are denied the right to choose whether they bear children.

The Supreme Court this month agreed to review the Texas anti-abortion law known as House Bill 2 (HB2), the law that threatens to close all but 10 abortion clinics in the state, and deny women access to safe and legal abortions, according to The New York Times.

Because there is a vast divide between pro-lifers or pro-choicers, the matter of abortion is not as simple as legislators would hope. As a result, women have been forced to choose between extremes that could damage their economic viability and their lives.

On Nov. 17 the Texas Policy Evaluation Project released a report on self-induced abortion. According to the report, at least 100,000 Texas women have attempted to end a pregnancy on their own without medical assistance.

These findings demonstrate that in the face of burdensome restrictions on abortions, women will resort to extreme methods to terminate their pregnancies. The Texas law has already shut down 22 clinics, according to NPR, leaving only 19 clinics for a state of 268,820 square miles.

“Women still need abortions in our communities, and many of those women take matters into their own hands,” said President and CEO of Whole Woman’s Health, Amy Hagstrom Miller. “Poor Texas women are finding themselves experimenting on their bodies when abortion is supposed to be legal.”

Miller represents the plaintiff in the case Whole Women’s Health v. Cole, the case in which HB2 will be evaluated by the Supreme Court.

The Guttmacher Institute, that advances sexual and reproductive health worldwide through research, said that in 2011, 71 percent of pregnancies in Texas resulted in live births and 14 percent in induced abortions. This leaves more than 73,000 women without options.

To live in a world where my sister, my future daughter and her friends wouldn’t have the choice over their own body is appalling.

Jamilyn Hall is the assistant opinions editor of the Kentucky Kernel. 

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