A Woman’s Choice

…A woman’s choice

With the advancement in women’s equal rights and medicine in today’s socio-economic standards, as we advance society must remember that each person should have the right to adequate standard or living. With these adequate standards each individual has the right to freedom, free-will, health, and comfort. In our current standards of life a woman’s sexuality and body should not be subjugated to the standards and ideas of others. To maintain the freedom of such rights each woman should granted the ability to the healthcare of having an abortion, for reasons such as: not being able to afford the child, pregnancy due to rape, or the ramification on the woman’s health.

With society’s advancements farther in the 21st Century, the cost of living for a family has risen for a simple family. With 40-50% of all marriages ending in divorce (Marriage & Divorce 2015) most women are becoming the sole provider for their individual families. To prevent long-term burden and financial suffering most women require an abortion. In the year 2008, it required a single mother between $9,460 to $11,180 annually to raise a child on her own as reported by Brandon in 2010. As that same child grows by the year 2025 the mother would spend over $291,570 on that one child. With food insecurity on the rise due to financial obligations, death of a spouse, or homelessness it is more beneficial to not bring a child into an unfit environment. In a survey completed by Biggs and his peers in 2009, it was reported that over 75% of single women were on a type of Women, Infant, and Children (WIC) assistance program and even with government assistances it usually only aided with over 40% of each family’s needs for the child. With majority of women requiring to quit their careers when pregnant and causing finical burden, there is also the burden that comes from a non-consensual sexual act that causes the pregnancy.

With sexual assault happening once every 6.2 minutes (Criminal Justice Information Services Division. 2013), women usually are still trying to cope with the violation of their body. In her article Hoyson states that substantial injury resulting from the assailant’s inflicts usually are: physical pain, mental anguish, or pregnancy is usually the outcome (2010). Hoyson also further discusses in her article that these same women continue to feel emotional destress and thoughts of suicide as their pregnancy progresses. A current landmark case in Florida pertaining sexual assault and the woman becoming pregnant shows how a woman with then mental capacity of a four-year old was in need of an abortion and how it was seen as life-threatening by her neurologist (French 2005). With abortion assisting women each day to overcome obstacles due to pregnancy, the woman’s not only affected financially or emotionally due to rape, but also her physical health.

With the strains that a woman’s body has to endure during pregnancy, over 600 women die each year from complications during the process (Pregnancy 2016). Thrombophilia is one condition that is widely affected when a woman becomes pregnant and with the strain on her veins and arteries a higher change of complications. During pregnancy, majority of medications that are used to treat thrombophilia cannot be used for treatment for it could affect the fetus’s development. Medication such as Warfarin are known to cause birth defects, and with the higher chance of clots forming and traveling to the woman’s lungs, brain, or legs choices to terminate the pregnancy is in the mother’s best interest (Pregnancy 2016). With advance age or even being too young to carry a fetus to terms women have been reported dying from such complications and having no recourse due to current abortion laws or standards. A widely known advocate and feminist, Soraya Chemaly, once quoted during