NO: OFFER PEOPLE A BETTER CHOICE

As a teenager, I took risks. My sights were set on fantastical romance and being swept off my feet to escape a difficult family life. But soon I found myself alone, scared, pregnant, facing life-changing decisions. At the time, I turned to Planned Parenthood. They presented me with two choices, parenting or abortion. Abortion seemed to be the right path — ideal, private, secret and discreet. My abortion was scheduled at over 20 weeks’ gestation. Similar to now, parental consent was not necessary for abortion to be performed on minors in California during the 1980s. You could walk in and out of the clinic the same day, and no one would know.

A few days later, I painfully labored in my bathroom, realizing I had delivered the unexpected remnants of a partially aborted baby. Forty years later, I began to realize the havoc this ideal, private, secret and discreet decision was wreaking in my life and the lives around me. I never dealt with a lifetime of raising my child, but rather, a lifetime of emotional turmoil for taking the life of an individual, my baby.

The proposed amendment to the California Constitution through Proposition 1 on November’s ballot reads: “The state shall not deny or interfere with an individual’s reproductive freedom in their most intimate decisions, which includes their fundamental right to choose to have an abortion and their fundamental right to choose or refuse contraceptives.”

This amendment should raise questions to all. Doesn’t our state Constitution already protect our privacy in this space? It does. How do we define the term individual? How do we determine what is a fundamental right? Are some rights more important than others? Are all “fundamental rights” equal? Hard questions to answer.

Yet we are not asking these questions. Instead, the questions asked by the legislators are: How do we respond to the U.S. Supreme Court’s June decision overturning Roe v. Wade? How do we turn out voters in the November election? How do we make headlines? All miss the mark.

Shouldn’t our leaders be asking: How do we render abortion unnecessary? How do we support desperate men and women, like myself, so they can make informed decisions about their baby?

Truthfully, humanity is based on individual existence, and to exist, we must be alive. We become individuals by a unique biological process known as human reproduction. The Merriam-webster dictionary defines an individual as a particular being or thing as distinguished from a class, species or collection. Human reproduction delivers on its promise in the creation of an individual who contains its own beating heart, its own skeletal structure, its own nervous system and even reproductive functions.

In a 2014 report for the Charlotte Lozier Institute titled, “A