HEAR HER VOICE! You Decide to Vote!

By Maya Hairston

“Real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time.” Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court

Most Americans want women to have access to abortion in at least some cases. According to PEW Research, 59% of us do. And yet, state houses, beginning with Texas, are finding ways to pass laws that enforce the will of the few over the majority. Young people and young women especially, need to have a say in these laws. The only way to have a say is to bring more voices into the electorate. Registering 18-year-olds in schools can make up to 8,000 new voters, half of them young women, eligible to vote right here in Philadelphia. PA Youth Vote is campaigning to do just that. Let's support them!!

¼ American women will have an abortion sometime in their life

My body is not their property': Texas woman's journey across state lines for an abortion: https://abcnews.go.com/US/body-property-texas-womans-journey-state-lines-abortion/story?id=80602289

18 year old Mel shares her story on Advocates for Youth Voices: “Sometimes we mess up. Sometimes our plans go awry. Without abortion a woman’s choice is be a mum or be a virgin. I feel no shame, no sorrow for my choice. I am truly grateful I live in a country where I can access services relatively easily and I thank the medical practitioners who enable that. I am grateful I am not forced to be a mum.”

Mel’s story captures how abortion changed her life for the better. Although there are additional options, such as birth control, there are plenty women whose lives were changed for the better by abortion. Mel is just one of many young women who had the opportunity to choose what happened in her body. This is why young people and young women need to have a say in laws that affect their accessibility to making decisions about what happen in their body!

Maya Hairston studies english and music. She has aspirations to be a criminal justice lawyer someday and then segway into politics. She is apart of Black Pre-Law Association, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Incorporated, and Dischord A Capella. She loves to read any Toni Morrison book, and she enjoys spending time with her three sisters and two dogs.