Women in their 20s are just starting out in their careers and adult life. To help these women become successful, they need access to family planning services—and they have a right to these services.
I am a 22 year old woman. I graduated from the University of Washington in 3 years with 2 degrees. Upon graduating, I started working for the Human Right to Family Planning Initiative and still do. A couple of months later, I began writing for Forefront, a suicide prevention organization. Then a few months after that, I also started working at Northwest Parkinson’s Foundation. I consider myself to be a successful woman. There are many factors that have led to my success, but one factor that is often overlooked is access to family planning services.
At 22 years old, sex education, contraception, and emergency contraception have helped almost every single woman I know. We rely on it. We rely on having factual, unbiased information to tell us what we need know. We rely on having contraception to keep us from getting pregnant when we aren’t ready to start a family. We rely on having emergency contraception for those times when something unexpected happens. Then, quite a few of us have relied on abortion services when we have had unplanned pregnancies.
In the past year, these family planning services have been severely threatened. Trump has been aiming to interfere with sexual and reproductive healthcare access since before he took office. The Trump administration is hurting me – and all women like me. He has added more abstinence-only education programs into the federal budget, he has rolled back the Obamacare birth control mandate, and he has done everything in his power to cut out abortion services.
I don’t want family planning services. I need family planning services – and so does every woman I know. Taking away evidence-based sex education, and access to contraception, emergency contraception, and abortion services is discrimination and it violates our rights as women.
So at the end of the day, why is a man dictating my health and my success? Women deserve an equal chance at success, but how are we going to be successful without the health services we need?
Make America Great Again = discriminating against women’s health and giving women less of a shot at success.