Recently, a woman in Rio Grande City, Texas, was arrested on murder charges for “self-aborting” or terminating her pregnancy. Although her murder charges were dropped, access to safe abortions is becoming scarce around the state.
The new Heartbeat Bill in Texas makes it an illegal and punishable crime to have an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. Due to being illegal, if a woman proceeds with her abortion after this set time, they will be charged. However, it does not stop there.
Texas is also trying to make reporting women for these actions legal, too, pushing this issue beyond the conception debate it used to be. Therefore, this argument goes further than just abortion. It includes the restriction of health care and accessible birth control across the state.
If the government considered women’s healthcare a priority, there would be a higher chance for women to be given the healthcare they deserve.
However, if you want to limit the number of abortions women have, the state should provide proper sex education within school institutions as compensation. Texas schools are not required to teach satisfactory sex education. And, even if a school decides to move forward with sex education, abstinence is their main lesson plan, leaving the majority of our youth uneducated and prone to learn the wrong information without guidance.
Texas is too worried about political morals to teach teens safe sex and pregnancy prevention. Instead, their response is to restrict access to abortion with no improvements in the educational system to attack the root problem.
This issue is not just about the moral implications of abortion. Although everyone possesses the right to their opinion, should women be backed into a corner in the crossfire?
In other words, if this is a topic about life, why are women suffering tremendously in the process? Texas needs to reevaluate its current solutions and open its perspective to other answers, so Texas can fix the problem they desperately want to overcome.