Your body on the ballot – diycanadavisa

Human rights will be at stake in next week’s US elections.

We have already written about what American voters should be guided by in the Daily Brief thinking about his own family’s past AND wondering about the future of your family. We also looked at serious ones threats to the democratic process themselves in the USA.

Today we will talk in more detail and look at one key issue in this election: do you have the right to decide what happens to your body? Or should the government control your body and make medical decisions for you?

Wait, what kind of question is that anyway? Of course you have the right to your own body. If you don’t have this right, what rights do you have? It’s your body. The government should speak up.

And yet this is essentially the question being asked of voters voting initiatives in ten different US states in this election. Millions of people will be asked to defend this fundamental right of bodily autonomy.

The United States has been moving backwards on this issue for years, especially since the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to eliminate the constitutional right to abortion. Thirteen U.S. states completely ban abortion, and many others severely restrict access.

And wherever the government told people what to do with their bodies, it had an impact on health and life destructive. The horrors keep coming. Last month, for example, two women died because of the abortion ban in the US state of Georgia.

Just yesterday, information about the woman died in Texas after she was told it would be a crime for doctors to hasten an ongoing miscarriage. The medical team apparently said they couldn’t act until the fetal heartbeat stopped. She endured a 40-hour trauma and died of an infection three days later, leaving her husband a widower and her four-year-old daughter without a mother.

Laws written by politicians consciously unaware of human biology make doctors unable – or afraid – to provide needed care. These politicians have made the government take control of our bodies, which is completely against our basic rights.

In abortion-related measures on the ballot in ten US statesmost would enshrine abortion rights in state constitutions. Some ballot measures would expand abortion access in states where it is restricted. Other measures would protect abortion in states where it is already available.

In summary, most of these state ballot measures would do so help restore access to abortion for tens of millions of people.

Voters in these states are being asked to defend a fundamental right – bodily autonomy. Of course they shouldn’t. Such a fundamental right should be indisputable.

And yet, in 2024, we still have to fight the government for control over our bodies.