Blogging for Choice

Question: What is the importance of voting pro-choice?

On the blog Pam’s House Blend, blogger Autumn Sandeen mentions the concept of a “deal breaker” in the next presidential election:

What is the issue that I demand a candidate to have said “magic words” in support of to get my vote?

My issue is the right to choose. I will not and cannot consciously vote for anyone who does not support a woman’s right to reproductive choice, including abortion.
Now why is that important to me?

• I want the children of my generation and their children, and so forth and so on to have the same ability to choose that I have today, if not more freedom of choice.
• Women are not stupid. They know what an abortion is. They are fully grown human beings, capable of deciding whether the circumstances are right for them to give another human being life.
• Abstinence only education is a joke. It doesn’t work. This study proves what many have always thought.
• I know that comprehensive sex education works. My health teacher in tenth grade, who taught us high schoolers about sex, may have been a steadfast Christian, but she still held a whole class period where we got to look at and learn about birth control methods. Abstinence may have still been the focus, but we were told about the options should we choose sex of any kind. A study just came out that agrees with me on just how well it works.
• Queer children should learn about their options when it comes to having (safe) sex. A heteronormative sex education program cannot teach them this very well. All sexual education teachers should be required to include information for their queer students in their classes.
• Queer women have an equal stake in reproductive choice. They also have children, who may someday have children as well.
• The fact that 87% of counties in the United States do not have an abortion provider . That is ridiculous. Just another way a woman’s right to choose is limited in this here United States.
• All people must know that no means no, and how important it is for sex (of any kind) to be safe, sane, and consensual. Period. No gray rape, no question of whether a woman has consented or not. I am for enthusiastic consent by all parties involved in a sexual encounter, as written about here and here. Not just heterosex, but all sex.
• All rape is unacceptable and should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
• My body is mine. It belongs to me and not to anyone else. Not to any government, not to a church, and not to any potential partner. I am fiercely protective of what things are mine, and this is one of them. My body, my choice.

It is important because I am a woman and so is 51% of the rest of the world.

Reproductive choice is an essential human right, not to be limited by race, class, age, upbringing, location, sexual orientation/preferences, gender, or sex. It is just as important to me as it is to a mother of five in the Sudan or a Japanese lesbian.

This is why I blog for choice.

P.S. This is the second year I’ve done this. The first year exists on this blog.