On the night of Tuesday, May 13, 2019, legislators in Alabama passed a bill that would outlaw abortion at any stage in a woman’s pregnancy, shortly after Georgia Governor Brian Kemp made abortion illegal after a fetal heartbeat was detected. This is the equivalent o six weeks after conception. Even earlier this year, states such as Ohio, Mississippi and Kentucky passed similar bills.

The most significant of these bills has been Alabama’s. The bill will hold doctors a criminally liable for abortions at any single point in pregnancy. The only time an abortion can be performed is if there is a serious threat to the mother’s life or the unborn child has a lethal anomaly. The bill will not make any exceptions for cases of rape, or incest.

The conservative legislators who have passed these bills see themselves as heroes. They believe they are giving an unborn fetus a second chance. Read the sentence again. Giving the unborn fetus a second chance. In the preamble to the new bill, the legislators state that medicinal science has continuously recognized the humanity of the unborn child. It also cites the principal in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal”. This indirectly compares the bill against abortion to suffrage, the anti-slavery movement, the Nuremberg war-crimes trials, and the civil rights movements prof the 1960s. In the preamble, the legislators also include the Holocaust, Soviet gulags, genocides in Africa (for example, the Rwandan genocide) and many other slaughters. Why do they include these massacres? To compare the un,her of deaths, and call every death in these slaughters minuscule next to the amount of babies that have been aborted in the United States of America since 1973 (Roe vs Wade).

A characteristic that many people have been becoming,in aware of quickly, is the population of these states. Alabama and Georgia have one of the highest populations of black women in the United States. These white, middle-aged and above, conservative men do not want to eliminate abortions. They want to take away these women’s reproductive rights. They are aware that abortions themselves cannot be gone fully every, the only thing that can be taken away is the access to safe procedures. If they really believed that laws against abortion would take away abortions, then wouldn’t they believe that gun laws would change gun violence? But I guess that is a topic for another time.

The concept of abortion has always been, is, and probably will always be a very controversial topic. The idea of taking away a life that has not even begun is awful, but the idea of making decisions for the mind and body of a life that already exists is worse. And the worst part is that the 25 people who passed the bill, were men. White men. White men are making decisions for the population based off of the conservative ideas being fed to them from past generations. It will never be acceptable for this group of people to make decisions that do not affect them in the slightest way. Never. Abortions need to be legal, reproductive rights are human rights. Women need a voice, the outnumbering should be clearly overruled by the fact that no women participated in passing this bill.

We [women] get asked why we still fight back. We get asked why we still march, speak, scream, and protest if “we’re already equal”. This is why. These bills. Decisions that affect OUR bodies, OUR psychological and emotional wellbeing, and OUR futures, are decisions that we do not have a say in.

I am disgusted, saddened, and genuinely scared for the times to come. I will never understand the point of view of someone who is against abortion. I’m sorry, but I will never be able to understand it. “What if the fetus would have grown up to cure cancer?”, what if the 11 year old girl that your FORCED to have a child would have grown up and cured cancer. “You aren’t even giving the fetus a chance at life.” But raising a child in poverty, neglect, and a world where it was not meant to enter until much later is somehow a better opportunity. Abortion is murder, but so is bringing a child into poverty. One of the two just kills you faster. It is tough to look at it this way, but it is the reality. I will always respect decisions that women take over whether or not to have an abortion. Always. But that is their decision to make, not the 25 white male legislators of the state in which she lives.

If someone does not like abortion, they can ignore it. Just as they have surely been ignoring the 445,000-690,000 children in the foster care system.