Florida lawmakers, hands off abortion rights

Palm Beach County Resident Ella Reiss shouts and applauds during a Bans Off Our Bodies abortion rights protest at Clematis Street and Flagler Drive in West Palm Beach, Saturday, October 2, 2021.
Palm Beach County Resident Ella Reiss shouts and applauds during a Bans Off Our Bodies abortion rights protest at Clematis Street and Flagler Drive in West Palm Beach, Saturday, October 2, 2021.

In one state after another, anti-abortion laws are being proposed and passed. Where is the equity in these bills? It takes both a man and a woman to produce a child. Yet only the woman is being punished and forced to break laws if she wants to terminate a pregnancy.

Having a child doesn’t happen in a vacuum, it simultaneously affects the family’s health, emotions and economic wellbeing and can have a tremendous ripple effect all the way up and down a woman’s life. It enormously affects a woman financially as she may lose her job or lose workdays for medical reasons, not to mention pre- and post- natal care time and the cost and effort of bringing up the child.

Getting pregnant by accident is not a shame. It’s a situation that must be dealt with seriously, by the parties involved and their doctor. How to handle it is their decision, based on their finances, health and emotional status, none of which the government has any knowledge of. These politicians, mainly men on a controlling mission, may want to ignore this fact of life but women can’t.

Childbearing and child raising is one of a woman’s primary choices. Those forcing her to carry full term should legislate that the man responsible for the pregnancy and/or the government should be made to bear the financial responsibility for that child until it comes of age.

With these anti-abortion laws, either she must carry to full-term and then give her child away, which is heartbreaking and will haunt her for the rest of her life, or, she keeps the child and bears most of the responsibility no matter what her plans for the future were.

To try to convince others that childbirth has nothing to do with consequences is insulting to women. All those who support government control of reproductive rights, especially of women, will feel its negative effects in the upcoming election. Women, birth control and their economic freedom are inextricably tied to one another. The majority of women I know know that it is so.

Adele Guadalupe, of Delray Beach, is a board member of PBC NOW, a chapter of the National Organization for Women.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Commentary: women's rights should not be abridged by Legislature