What right does anyone but me have over my body? Who decides what my future should look like and how I should handle my relationships? Why is everyone revolving around us women and judging us as if we didn’t have minds of our own, as if our bodies didn’t belong to us?
Emergency contraception has been prohibited in Colombia, and my head is boiling with anger. I’m angry because a society that will not take responsibility over its hungry and uneducated children is telling us that it’d rather have more unhappy citizens (both mothers and children) abandoned to their luck than give a woman freedom to make a decision over her own priorities.
To use the “child as God’s miracle” as an argument against abortion and/or emergency contraception is to deny the fact that children are human beings and not just cute little pets to cuddle. It’s like getting married for the sole joy of having a wedding. Children don’t only need the smile of a loving mother (who will of course be thrilled to have her life truncated because of this unwanted step) in order to thrive, but also slightly more basic things like food and clothes and good education, which in many cases the mother cannot provide. I wonder if those who go preaching about how beautiful it is to have a baby know what it really means to give birth to a person. A person’s lifetime usually spans a few decades, so I don’t see what’s so fantastic about letting yourself and somebody else down from their very appearance on Earth and for so, so, so long.
I refuse to let tissue grow inside me if it is bound to become a fundamentally unhappy human being. My parents have given me so many opportunities and so much joy that I cannot conceive the idea of denying my own children the amazing kind of life I have had. I cannot fathom why anyone should be denied such right, and most important, why women should be denied the right to treat their bodies as what they are: their own.
In Colombia, a woman’s future is deemed to be worth less than that of a pair of cells. This is how important we are to those who rule over us.