"The loss of Roe v. Wade is collective, but this story is mine. I ask you not to look away."
Not quite two months in, many of the predictions about post-Roe v. Wade America have come true: Abortion has become harder to access in many areas, forcing large numbers of women to travel for the procedure and overwhelming many of the nation's remaining clinics. |
But there have been unexpected developments, too. One thing that's surprised me, as an editor who has spent the past several months leading Opinion's coverage of this issue, is how swiftly a national debate emerged about whether child survivors of sexual assault ought to have ready access to abortion. Perhaps I should've seen it coming — young children are impregnated more often than a lot of people realize, and at least some of them were bound to be affected by new abortion bans. Part of me probably didn't want to confront a reality so dark. |
Nicole Walker asks that we all confront that darkness. In a guest essay published this week, she writes that her babysitter started molesting her when she was 10 and impregnated her at 11. If she hadn't been able to get an abortion in 1980s Utah, she writes, "I would be a prisoner subject to a body's whims — and not my body's whims, but the whims of a teenage boy." |
"Some abortion rights supporters worry that devoting too much energy to the stories of young children who need abortions — abortions that are still legal in at least some U.S. states — narrows the cause," Walker writes. She rejects that logic, believing that a threat to one person's bodily autonomy is a threat to every person's bodily autonomy. |
"Pregnancy and childbirth change life trajectories," she writes. "Now, for many more Americans, trajectories are set. Paths defined. This future is foreseeable. I ask that you look at it." |
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