The minute Trump came into the presidency, as a woman, I was nervous. He is notorious for having no respect for women, as seen in his vulgar quotes about what he does to women. He has even been accused of sexual assault.
One thing I was most nervous about was Roe v. Wade, because Trump would be sure to fill the empty seat on the Supreme Court with a conservative. As of Saturday, I was right; Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed as the newest Supreme Court justice.
This move makes the current Supreme Court one of the most conservative in modern history. The scariest part about all of this is that President Trump has made comments before about overturning Roe v. Wade, and now that seems very possible with Kavanaugh’s confirmation.
There are many reasons overturning Roe v. Wade does not make sense to me, the first one being that Trump was pro-choice at one point. In an interview with NBC’s Tim Russert in 1999, Trump claimed to be “very pro-choice.”
Now he is leading the anti-abortion crusade just 20 years later. The only reason for this switch is to win over extreme conservatives’ support, and he knows being anti-abortion will do it. Those are the people who elected him, so he will continue to cater to them regardless of his true moral stance.
He would rather knowingly sacrifice the rights of women in order to gain the power and approval he so desperately wants.
Furthermore, the idea of banning abortion simply does not make sense to me. According to Planned Parenthood, abortion is one of the safest procedures, with a safety record of over 99 percent. That is in stark contrast to the way it used to be when abortions were illegal.
In 1965, one sixth of pregnancy and childbirth-related deaths came as a result of illegal abortions. In the 1960s, eight in 10 women with low incomes in New York City who had an abortion tried to perform the procedure themselves.
If pro-life people truly cared about the health of the baby, why would they want to resort back to a time where the baby is threatened even more by illegal abortions than they would be in a legal procedure?
Unfortunately, pro-lifers do not care about the safety of the baby as much as they care about taking away a woman’s right to choose her path in life. If they did care, they would not want a baby coming into the world where it cannot be properly cared for or nurtured.
Abortions do not happen because a mother wants one, they happen because she needs one. Maybe she cannot afford the baby so it will be malnourished, or she is homeless so it may not have a roof over its head. Regardless, she is preventing further harm and pain to the child.
Pro-lifers would rather see a woman and her child suffer than a woman abort a fetus that cannot feel pain earlier than the third trimester.
Many pro-lifers would also want to prevent gay couples from adopting a child who needs a family and home. In their eyes, mothers must bring the fetus they don’t want into the world, so that child can then sit in the adoption system for 18 years.
All of this is extremely possible with the election of Brett Kavanaugh. With this extremely conservative Supreme Court, they could potentially vote to overturn it.
All we can do now is vote and take back Congress in these midterm elections. I hope for the sake of women everywhere that Roe v. Wade stays intact, and all that we have fought for in the past decades does not go away with just one vote.
