Democratic Rep. Cori Bush.Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
As an increasing number of statesenact bills that threaten the right to abortion, Rep. Cori Bush and two other congresswomen shared their personal stories about undergoing the procedure.
At a Thursday Oversight Committee hearing in the House of Representatives concerning theabortion ban in place in Texasand the upcoming Supreme Court hearings onMississippi’s 15-week ban, Bush spoke openly for the first time about getting an abortion after she was raped as a teenager.
Bush, the representative from Missouri’s 1st congressional district, said that she was raped while on a church trip, and talked about the fear she felt after realizing she was pregnant.
“About a month after the trip, I turned 18. A few weeks later, I realized I had missed my period,” she said. “I reached out to a friend and asked the guy from the church trip to contact me. I waited for him to reach out, but he never did. I never heard from him. I was 18, I was broke, and I felt so alone. I blamed myself for what had happened to me.”
“Choosing to have an abortion was the hardest decision I had ever made,” Bush said. “But at 18 years old, I knew it was the right decision for me. It was freeing knowing I had options.”
Along with Bush, Rep. Barbara Lee, from California’s 13th district spoke at the hearing about an abortion she had in a “back-alley clinic” in Mexico in the mid-1960’s, before it was legalized with the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.
“I was one of the lucky ones,” she said. “A lot of girls and women in my generation didn’t make it. They died from unsafe abortions — in the 1960s, unsafe septic abortions were the primary killer of African American women.”
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And Rep. Pramila Jayapal, from Washington’s 7th district,sharedthat her first child was a high-risk pregnancy and nearly died after they were born at 26 and a half weeks, weighing just 1 lb. 14 oz. When the congresswoman became pregnant again a few years later, despite being on birth control, she talked to her doctors and determined that it was too risky to go through another pregnancy.
“After discussions with my partner, who was completely supportive of whatever choice I made, I decided to have an abortion,” Jayapal said. “Two decades later I think about those moments on the table in the doctor’s office, a doctor who was kind and compassionate and skilled, performing abortions in a state that recognizes a person’s constitutional right to make their choices about their reproductive care.”
Rep. Pramila Jayapal.Doug Mills-Pool/Getty
The three women testified Thursday amid concerns that the conservative-leaning Supreme Court will overturnRoe v. Wade. They, along with Rep. Carolyn Maloney from New York’s 12th district, urged the Senate to pass the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would create federally-protected access to abortion nationwide.
“Nearly 1 in 4 women in the United States will have an abortion in their lifetime,” Chairwoman Carolyn B. Maloney said to start the hearing. “But with a hostile Supreme Court, extremist state governments are no longer chipping away at our constitutional rights — they are bulldozing right through them.”
source: people.com
