I am very, very worried about Proposition 4. I’m very worried because at the rally I was at tonight, they told us that it is super close – like, if we win, it will be by 1%. They tried to spin it positively, but it’s very scary. I’m also very worried because nobody’s been talking about Prop 4, and it makes me angry. It makes me angry because the people who will be most affected if Prop 4 passes are among the most vulnerable – teenage girls who are already in high-risk situations and who probably come from abusive homes, probably poor homes. It’s nice to know that those are people who apparently don’t matter.
Prop 4 sounds like an ok idea at the outset – let’s make minors let their parents know if they’re going to have an abortion. Ok, great, but – not every girl comes from a supportive family. Some girls come from abusive families. Some girls may have been impregnated by family members. Some girls could face being kicked out of their homes if they choose to have an abortion. And girls who are in these high-risk situations might take drastic measures to end an unwanted pregnancy (why, hello, back alley abortions!). And Prop 4 makes no allowances for pre-natal care for the girls it prevents from having abortions. And let’s not forget the plain and simple truth that everybody, regardless of age or gender, deserves the right to basic privacy over what is going on with their own body. I was making decisions about my health on my own when I was 18, and I was not telling my parents, because, no offense to my parents or anything, but it wasn’t actually their business.
The people pushing Prop 4 are doing so under the auspices of protecting young women from abusive predators who might force them to have abortions, but their very language demonstrates that they don’t care about girls at all. They’ve nicknamed Prop 4 “Sarah’s Law,” supposedly after an underage girl who died after a botched abortion. Well, guess what – there was no Sarah. Her real name was Jammie Garcia Yanez-Villegas, and while she was underage, she was also married, and she was already a mother, so not only would Prop 4 not have even played a part in her situation (Prop 4 only applies to unemancipated minors), nor could it prevented her death, but the pro-4 team is dehumanizing her and cruelly turning her into a campaign tool, trivializing her death. I think it’s also pretty sinister that they’ve nicknamed her Sarah – it seems to me to be an obvious attempt to whitewash her obviously Latina name, in an attempt to garner more sympathy to the cause. Cause, you know, good white girls don’t deserve to die tragic deaths, but who cares about women of color, right?
Proposition 4 is completely useless. Stats indicate that around 60% of teenage girls who are pregnant already go to their parents. Prop 4 won’t help create communication in unhappy families – the way parents will be notified is via a form letter. While the initiative allows for exceptions in cases of abuse, obtaining an exception involves going to court, which just delays access to abortion, which will just increase the rate of late-term abotions, which seems pretty stupid, because I thought anti-choice groups didn’t really like those very much. It’s a completely illogical, unnecessary proposition. Its proponents have no interest in protecting young women, only in pushing a very conservative agenda that will make safe, legal abortions harder to obtain. These kinds of initiatives are the kind of small changes that are gradually chipping away at Roe V. Wade, and at the control that women are able to have over their bodies. This is also the third time this initiative has been on the California ballot – by forcing pro-choice organizations to mobilize against this initiative every four years, anti-choice groups are weakening the ability of organizations like Planned Parenthood to actually perform their primary mission – which is providing sex education and inexpensive, vitally important health services to women who need them.
I don’t really even need to say this, but if we want to prevent abortions, we don’t need ass-backwards legislation that will make safe ones harder to come by. We need comprehensive sex ed. We need easy access to contraception.
So, dear Californian friends, please, please, please, when you are voting FUCK YES! for Obama and FUCK NO! for Proposition 8 (which is a whole other kettle of awful, disgusting, stinky fish – but really, it’s not that different from Prop 4 when it comes right down to it. They’re both part of this twisted, conservative illogic, that on one hand advocates for limited governement, but on the other hand wants to control everything that people are doing with their own bodies), please, please, please also vote no on Prop 4 because it is very, very, very important.