In America, there is a huge fight over women’s healthcare rights. Many Republicans are, state by state, looking to defund Planned Parenthood, which is like Marie Stopes over here, but founded by Margaret Sanger, the woman who helped invent the Pill. They’re doing this while congress investigates whether PP was accepting money illegally for foetal tissue. If PP were accepting money, they say, it was simply for admin and transport costs – the foetal tissues being used for stem cell research.
As for real-life women outside of Congress, they're seeing attempts to minimise their access to safe abortions – and pap smears and mammograms and advice on which Pill to take and prescriptions for contraception. And they're not happy about it.
In order to show the importance of giving women access to abortions – as well as all of the other routine healthcare options that PP offer to both women and men – #ShoutYourAbortion has got eight video testimonials of women explaining why they got abortions.
The idea is to ‘destigmatise abortion by creating a network of voices and a platform for women to tell their stories.’ This is done by telling women's stories. Reasons behind the abortions from not being ready at all in the relationship they were in to drug problems, from being pregnant with a foetus with fatal abnormalities to mental health problems. As well as the various, overarching and utterly randomly occurring reasons that women might some day need an abortion, one in three American women will have an abortion in their lifetime – proving that it’s an integral part of healthcare that should not be cut.
Check out the videos here:
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.