Women’s sexual pleasure and health
Jan 22nd is the 35th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, and it is just as important as ever to vote for pro-choice candidates, judges, and laws. I hope all of my readers here are supportive of women’s sexual pleasure and rights. I don’t normally get political, but I just want people to know that women’s freedom to pursue personal pleasure is constantly being challenged in the courts and legislature in the US. Other parts of the world are also facing these challenges. Safe access to gynecological care, contraceptives, family planning, and abortion is in danger as more laws are passed to restrict a woman’s choice. Information related to personal care, and reproduction is being censored as being obscene or pornographic. People are looking at pornography for sex education because it isn’t being taught by schools or parents. Young adults are painfully uninformed about basic health and anatomy. Worse yet, adults are uninformed about basic health, anatomy and sexual safety.
The way I see it, these restrictions on a woman’s choice and reproductive rights is really an issue of power and control. Contraception and abortion has been practiced since ancient times. It wasn’t really a big deal for a doctor or midwife to provide contraceptive herbs or an abortion in the US until the 1800’s. A brief and informative timeline of recent reproductive rights history is available at the Emma Goldman Clinic.
People make a lot of arguments against reproductive rights; religious based arguments seem to be most common currently. People are free to believe what they wish about reproductive right, birth control and abortion, but they have no right to make those decisions for others. This is a diverse country and there is a wide range of beliefs about the morality of these things. Trying to impose those beliefs on another person is a violation of basic human freedoms. It is like a grown up method of bullying, trying to control people for the sake of making yourself more powerful. There have been issues with pharmacists not wanting to fill prescriptions for contraceptives and judging who is allowed access to birth control. What would happen is a pharmacist denied someone psychiatric medicine and said that it was because he or she is a Scientologist and believes that psychiatry is bunk?
There are so many issues involved in reproductive rights and a woman’s right to choose, and I’m not able to cover them all here. If you are interested in learning more or discussing these topics please see NARAL Pro-choice America for up to date accurate information and statistics.
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