Lucy Schultz worked as a young volunteer with Brook London last year. Here, she gives us a flavour of sexual health issues in America from a blog that she wrote in November - we hope to bring you more of these letters from Lucy throughout the year.
Growing up in New York City and now attending Brown University, two of the most liberal places in the country, I sometimes forget just how terrifyingly conservative the United States can be. That is until I’m reminded by a legislative act swarming the news in its latest attempt to jeopardize American women’s reproductive rights.
Most recently, this was Mississippi’s Proposition 26, or the “Personhood Amendment”, which attempted to declare that, “the term ‘person’ or ‘persons’ shall include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof”. If passed, this amendment would grant fertilized eggs the legal rights and protections that apply to all other people, thus branding abortions (including those for victims of rape or incest), Emergency Contraception, IUDs, attempted in-vitro fertilization, and laboratory embryo testing as murder in Mississippi.
While this ballot may now seem ridiculous and far too extreme, a few weeks ago it seemed likely to pass. It was even endorsed by the candidates for Mississippi governor from both major parties. The state of Mississippi has already heavily regulated abortions, so much so that there is only one abortion clinic in the entire state. Not only that, but Mississippi requires minors to have parental or judicial consent in order to obtain an abortion, while adult women must receive counseling and wait twenty-four hours afterwards before actually having the procedure (therefore requiring two separate trips to the facility) in order to discourage women from going through with the abortion. And who can forget the terror when Dr. George Tiller, an abortion provider in Jackson, Mississippi, was shot to death while entering his church in 2009 (abortion is the only medical procedure in which the fatality rate is higher for the provider than the patient). Women’s access to abortions and other contraception is already few and far between in Mississippi, and Proposition 26 would have outlawed all that remained.
Mississippi voters did in fact reject this ballot in the polls on November 8th by over fifty-five percent, thus repealing the amendment. Unfortunately, this does not mean the end of legislation meant to encroach on women’s reproductive rights. The group Personhood USA, which established the initiative, is determined to start up similar propositions in other states such as Florida, Montana, Oregon, Nevada, California, and Ohio. Ohio is already currently debating the “Heartbeat Bill”, which would ban all abortions after six weeks gestation, when the fetal heartbeat is first detectable.
As a young woman in the United States, I can never feel quite at ease knowing that there is a constant threat on my friends’, my sister’s, or my own reproductive rights. Having spent the summer in London, interning at Brook, I have gotten a taste of what it is like to take reproductive rights as a given. I’m not sure that the U.S. will ever be able to adopt these progressive, liberal, non-religious views concerning abortion and contraception that the United Kingdom has. So, I cling to my campus feminist and sexual health activist groups in the hopes that we might make even the tiniest stride towards securing reproductive rights for American women.
