The Right to Safe and Legal Abortion

I can’t remember a time when women were denied access to safe and legal abortion.  I don’t take this right for granted and neither do 68% of young Americans who believe abortion should be available in their own community. Our grandmothers, our mothers, our communities fought for this right so that I would be able to make my own decisions about my body. As we honor the 41st anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, the right to safe and legal abortion has never felt more important to me than it does now.

In 1973, the Roe ruling stated that a woman’s ability to have a safe abortion is part of her constitutional right to privacy.  In essence, no state could outlaw abortion, yet many have tried. There have been more attacks on our reproductive freedoms in the last three years than in the entire previous decade. Even here in New York, a key piece of legislation to level the playing field for women, the Women’s Equality Act, died in the State Senate last year because it would have codified the tenets of Roe v. Wade in state law.

This fight isn’t about being “pro-choice” or “pro-life.” Those outdated labels don’t come close to defining who we are or the complexity of this issue. Instead of talking about what divides us, let’s talk about what we can agree on. What the majority of us do agree on is that these are decisions that should be left to a woman and her doctor. 

By Nicole Massa, President of Vox: Voices for Planned Parenthood at Stony Brook University