Below is a cross-posted article that Fatima Hussain and I wrote for The Tech, MIT’s newspaper. It was written for an American audience and so the language is somewhat US-specific, but the content is not. Incidentally, the article was the source of Friday’s quote of the day on Jill Stanek’s horrible blog, which means that if you’d like to read a really creepy comment thread on the article, you can find one here.
For as long as the United States government has existed, it has been shirking a critical moral obligation. We are talking, of course, about our nation’s failure to protect the right of every woman to receive an affordable abortion on demand.
Abortions in the United States are technically legal, but in practice they can be very difficult to come by. Many women cannot afford the cost of a safe abortion, and even for those who can, a devastating shortage of qualified abortion providers means that they often have to travel long distances in order to reach a clinic. Once they do get to a clinic, they are frequently met with threats of violence from right-wing extremists or stymied by state regulations deliberately designed to make it as hard as possible for them to receive the care they need. The United States is very far indeed from providing universal access to abortion services, and the results of this oversight are nothing short of tragic. Continue reading
