Essential Titles For Understanding Your Reproductive Rights

As a woman, I find reproductive rights a huge issue and an important one for all women and men too. I came across an article on Bustle titled 11 Essential Titles For Understanding Your Reproductive Rights by E. Ce Miller. In the article, E. Ce Miller writes:

Of the myriad freedoms in ever-increasing peril in the wake of America’s 2016 presidential election, a Trump administration’s threat to women’s reproductive rights is an issue at the forefront of many women’s minds. In the past week dozens of publications, from CNN and the Washington Post to Elle, Glamour, Jezebel, and Vogue, have reported that the number of women requesting IUDs — a small, T-shaped device implanted in a woman’s uterus, and a form of long-term birth control that could outlast a Trump presidency and is still covered by the Affordable Care Act — has skyrocketed since the election. Planned Parenthood has received more than 200,000 private donations between $10 and $10,000 since November 8, in part thanks to the #WeWontGoBack hashtag on Twitter, which is being used to share important news and information about reproductive rights and encourages donations to Planned Parenthood in response to the election. And I don’t know about you, but I’ve defended my own vagina’s inalienable rights more in the last two weeks than I have in the last 28 years put together. Suffice it to say: women are nervous. And more than a little pissed off. 

Donald Trump’s most inflammatory policies about birth control include revoking federal funding from Planned Parenthood, returning abortion laws to the discretion of individual states (which means restricting access to legal abortions for millions of women — "they might have to drive to other states," Trump said in a recent 60 Minutes interview, as though we all just have Trump's private Boeing 757 at our disposal), and toying with the idea of “punishing” both abortion-seeking women and their doctors. But when it comes to legislating the uterus, Trump’s VP pick is a whole other story. Mike Pence’s history with women’s reproductive rights includes his being the first congressman to propose revoking all federal funding from Planned Parenthood (in 2011), signing eight anti-abortion bills into law during his first four years as governor of Indiana, co-sponsoring a bill designed to redefine “rape” in order to further restrict women from seeking legal abortions, delegitimizing condoms as a safe and effective form of birth control and STD-prevention (in a CNN interview), and closing so many Planned Parenthood locations in Indiana (none of which even performed abortions) that egregious lack of affordable care led to a 2015 HIV epidemic that has since been declared a public health emergency. So, plenty to look forward to if this proposed administration holds.

Lots of food for thought when it comes to reproductive rights! Click on the top link to discover the essential books for understanding your reproductive rights.