Blog for Choice Day!

Why I am Pro-Choice:
Hi, good day everyone. Today is a little bit special. Today is the 34th anniversary of Roe v Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision, which firmly established the US constitutional right to abortion. Today is therefore Blog for Choice day; and today everyone is therefore encouraged to blog about why they are pro choice.
Here is my reason:
I could write this post about how it is time to start treating women as adults who can make their own decisions. How it is time to trust women that they know what is best for their own health and their futures.
I could write about how I am sick of the belittling of women in the anti-choice campaigns, like our views don’t matter, like if we got left with a choice of terminating an abortion we would instantly make the wrong one and regret it.
I could write about how I found it weird that last time I saw an anti-choice demonstration they showed factually incorrect images of foetuses and the crowd consisted of only men.
I could write about how abortion is very rarely a solution a women chooses to use as contraception. How we rather take a pill and/or use a condom to protect ourselves, and how abortion is a lifesaving last option, not something we do out of laziness or because we love it so much. Abortion is a hard choice. But believe it or not, women can make hard choices too, and abortion should be a choice no less.
I could write about the overwhelming evidence of the increase in illegal abortions and their disastrous consequences. I could point out that 80,000 women die each year because of them. Or that the number of abortions does not decrease because you ban them. Or that 288,700 women were hospitalized in Brazil last year following illegal abortions.
I could write about any of those things because they are so important.
But you should know about them already; you should be convinced by them already; you should have heard them before and told other people about them.
I want to blog for choice because I have a slightly different viewpoint than many of those reading this. I come from a country (Sweden) where there no longer is an abortion debate. Where we have realized many of these things; taken them into account; looked at our own values and morals, and our healthcare ideas; and we have come to the democratic conclusion that banning abortion is not right. It is not only unhealthy, deadly, immoral, old-fashioned, and repressive, it is also a breach of a fundamental human right. The right to decide over your own body, should we start restricting the handicapped to have sex? If you restrict one reproductive right then others will follow.
But neither of this is really the point. The point is that the Swedish way works; we have less abortions and less illegal abortions, but more compulsory sex education, an open and honest discussion about sex, and an outlook of sex as health and good. You have to believe Women, and young women are independent and intelligent enough to make informed decision, the school provides, by law, help with these decisions.
This goes for all of Western Europe. For example, in the Netherlands, where teenage sexual activity is about the same as in the U.S., pregnancy rates are only one-ninth those of the United States. Education, education, education, and a little bit of honesty. Banning abortion is not a solution, it breaks my heart to see that people still fighting for it. Few of them has the experience I have been lucky to grow up in, few of them have lived in the most obvious example how reproductive rights are healthy, and must remain a fundamental human right.
For my favourite feminist blogger Jill's, excellent "Why I am Pro-Choice" blog post check here! (Creds to her for the figures in this post).