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Why We're Pro-Choice

Why are we pro-choice? The short answer is simply that we do not feel that any person, group, community or culture can consider women as equally human and whole, with as much right to everything that happens within their bodies as men have over theirs, and NOT be pro-choice. We can't talk about sex that's healthy for everyone involved if more than one half of the population involved don't have as much ownership of their own bodies as the other.

Here's the longer answer.

Scarleteen as an organization supports the equality and reproductive rights of all people, which includes the right of each and every woman to choose what is right for her when it comes to her own body and everything inside of it. In everything we do here, we strongly advocate for the sovereign right of any one person to have full ownership of every aspect of their own body and every cell that lives within it. Without that right, sexual consent becomes meaningless. Sex as a choice or as something willingly shared becomes meaningless. Choosing to have children becomes meaningless.

We support reproductive choice because it is a far greater issue than the right to abort.

Reproductive rights include the right to sound gynecological and sexual health, the right to use contraceptives and safer sex tools, and the right to make choices about pregnancies which each individual decides is best for themselves -- in body and in mind -- and any and every potential child.

Can you imagine if we suggested that it was perfectly fine for us, most of us not even being male, to mandate or insist that all men only did with their semen what WE thought it was right for them to do, based on OUR ideas of what we want to do for ourselves?

If men, too, as often as women do, did not always get a say in when they had sex, were not the group with the ONE highly effective, affordable and risk-free birth control method they could get anywhere, whose use was totally in their control, or were NOT the group who could not GET pregnant, how men might react if we suggested that even with all that, we still didn't think THEY should be able to choose for themselves if they became pregnant, and if so, what they did with their pregnancies? When we put the shoe on the other foot, it's pretty easy to see how anyone trying to dictate, or actually dictating, what happens to women with their own bodies and their own lives is denying women a very basic and intrinsic human right.

We support choice because we support mindful, responsible and compassionate parenting, and we support not simply life, but a quality of life for children, women and men around the globe. Being able to choose if one will be able to give a potential child a life of quality is important not just for women, but for children and all the rest of us.

We support choice for the same reasons we would not support slavery: a person's body is their own, and the legislation which guides it should not hinder that person from full ownership of it. Without reproductive rights, a site like Scarleteen would be of no use, as its mission is dependent on men and woman having the right to make sexual choices for themselves. We support choice because a critical part of our mission, and one of the most vital aspects of healthy sexuality, is personal and bodily autonomy.

Unfortunately, reproductive rights are not a given.

Even right now, the reproductive rights of women -- the full ownership of our bodies -- isn't something we can just claim for ourselves. In nearly all countries, what reproductive rights we have are determined FOR us by a governmental body which is composed of a majority of policy-makers who aren't even women, and don't even know what it feels like, physically or emotionally, to be pregnant or to risk pregnancy. The laws those policymakers create and enact more often than not have no effect on them personally: they do not limit their rights in any way, and women's lack of full rights and bodily ownership may even create benefits for them.

For that reason and more, these rights must be safeguarded vigilantly, and it is easy to forget that if we have been raised in a culture in which it seemed a given.

Right now, especially in the United States, our current administration's aims stand directly counter to those rights, and they are working to deny some or all of them. To keep these rights, it is important that everyone act as best they can to maintain them.

We highly encourage you to help do so. The organizations below are laudable and excellent places to find out how you can help protect reproductive rights, and why you direly need to.

There's one other great way you can help. Respect individual women's choices.

In other words, if you're female, know that whatever choices you have felt or know were best for you may not be the same for women who are different than you, or in different situations. What the right choice is for any person in any situation depends on that person and that situation, very uniquely.

If you're a young woman who has never been pregnant or parented, you may even surprise yourself someday -- as many women do -- if you become pregnant by finding that what you thought was going to be the choice you'd make it's the one that seems right for you now. If you're male, know that the fact that you can never become pregnant and have never been pregnant means that you just need to step back when talking about ANY woman's reproductive choices, because they are choices you will never have to make and live with yourself. We all need to listen to what real women have to say about their real choices more than we listen to what other people have to say about other women's choices.

Understand that if you don't argue that any one group or person has the right to mandate what another group or person eats, how they dress, what they say, who they interact with, who they love, what job they choose, what religion they practice -- or feel that anyone doing any or all of those things to you would be denying you very essential human rights -- arguing that you or anyone else should have the right to make decisions for a woman who is not you is just as unsound. You can help a lot by simply respecting women, and respecting that women deserve the human rights everyone else does.

Information at Scarleteen is written assuming reproductive rights and choice are givens, even when they are not fully legally sanctioned or mandated.

Because it is imperative to have choice to address most topics here, we will not entertain debates on why women should not have reproductive rights or procreative choice at our boards nor at other sections of the site, nor will we respond to emails which harass us regarding this stance.

In interactive areas of the boards, users are welcome to discuss their own reproductive choices and how they feel about them, as well as certain arenas of politics regarding choice, but any posts or comments which attempt to assign a personal value to one particular reproductive choice, or support the idea that women should not have full bodily autonomy and reproductive choice may be edited or removed.