I am a firm believer that certain health care options that were available to me as a young girl helped me out in my teenage years. If I didn’t have some of these clinics to help me out my life could have been different. I became sexually active at age that was far too young, in my opinion. I began to take birth control at the age of 14. I went to a Planned Parenthood and got birth control and an STI screening. Being able to go to this clinic without my parents’ consent played out in my favor, because my mother would have not been okay with me being sexually active at a young age and did not inform me of things I learned at the clinic. I am also a rape victim; I was raped at age 16 by someone I knew. I wasn’t able to go to my mother about it. I went to a Planned Parenthood and was notified by the doctors there that I had an STI. If I had not known this or not had the advantage of going to a Planned Parenthood, I could have spread the STI or, even worse, never known about it and my symptoms could have worsened.

There are so many more women whose stories are worse than mine and some people aren’t aware of these options. Even worse is the fact that the current administration wants to take them away from us and we should not lose our rights over our own bodies. We should be allowed to do and say what we please with our bodies. I strongly believe in the phrase “We live in a man’s world,” but men would not have a world if it wasn’t for women. Women work behind the scenes in so many things but we still need to fight for our power over our own bodies.

Tupac said it best:

“And since we all came from a woman
Got our name from a woman and our game from a woman
I wonder why we take from our women
Why we rape our women, do we hate our women?
I think it’s time to kill for our women
Time to heal our women, be real to our women
And if we don’t we’ll have a race of babies
That will hate the ladies, that make the babies
And since a man can’t make one
He has no right to tell a woman when and where to create one”

With these lyrics, I end my story. I pray and hope and will always have faith that we have the power to do what we please with our bodies.