Lauren Rankin
Lauren Rankin’s speech today on the subject of abortion and reproductive health rights had a great impact on me. I had always been an advocate for abortion, feeling that women most definitely reserve the right to their bodies and should be able to do whatever they want to it. But, despite my stance, I did not actually know very much on the subject of abortions aside from what I saw in the media about it. So I still had questions. Was it really baby killing as so many people claimed? Was it a horrible and painful procedure, as it was made to seem? In her speech today, Lauren Rankin cleared up all of my questions about abortion, and even strengthened my stance on it. One of my favorite things that she said was that abortion was portrayed to be such a horrible thing and stigmatized just because of the fact that it was the act of women taking control of their bodies. I had never thought about it in that way, but that simple description of it transformed every thought I had about it, in a sense clarifying it to an entirely new level and allowing me to relate it to every other act that women were degraded for; for example, a women who goes out with many guys is stigmatized as being immoral or called names even though again this is an act of her taking control of her body and doing what she wants with it, without letting anyone control her or influence her on her actions.
Another aspect that affected me greatly was hearing Lauren’s description of her times working as an escort for a planned parenthood clinic, and how angry mobs of people would crowd around these women and curse at them, calling them horrible names, without any knowledge of what the women have gone through nor the circumstances behind this decision. It baffled me, and makes me so disappointed to live in a world where people can openly be so cruel and hurtful and think that their actions are perfectly fine and justified. I wish that people would stop caring so much about what someone completely unrelated to them does to their body. People have so many opinions about things that have absolutely nothing to do with them and it infuriates me. Its not like these people are going to help or support any of these women with their children if they do not have an abortion. I just wish people could learn to be more accepting and less judgmental.