In honor of Constitution Day, North Carolina Central University’s school of law held an all-day teach-in featuring five sessions about policies currently being debated about in federal government. Those five sessions included; the First Amendment, Second Amendment, Fourth Amendment, voting, and family and reproductive rights. I attended the family and reproductive rights session. My intentions were not to attend the session about family and reproductive rights, I originally wanted to attend the Fourth Amendment’s session, but I was given the wrong schedule. The US Constitution does not directly mention family and reproductive rights, also many court decisions have been made through the Fourteenth Amendment, which speaks of privacy.
Before attending the panel, I was and still am a firm believer that abortion is wrong and immoral. I came to this belief with common sense, most people believe that a fetus is only a “ball of cells”, which is false, but at the same time it holds some truth. A fetus is defined an unborn offspring of a mammal, which is merrily a stage of life, just like an adolescent, except one is unborn while the other is the puberty stage, and every living thing on Earth is made up of cells. I am a firm believer that the government should not have any interference with anyone’s personal lives, but a crime is defined as, a violation of a law in which there is injury to the public or a member of the public. Abortion does injure a member of the public by killing the fetus, I personally do not believe it should be legal, but I do not agree that the government should be involved in personal issues, which is the exact opposite of the beliefs of the panelist.
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I do not remember the names of the women that were on the panel, but they all have either worked for Planned Parenthood, organizations that challenge legislature that target reproductive rights, and as well as advocate for reproductive rights. All the women were very well informed and educated in women studies. The two most important point that stuck to me, were that they believe North Carolina does not have enough abortion clinics and that they did not find the abundant amount of minority communities compared to white communities to be an issue. To support the need for more clinics, one panelist mentioned that NC only has sixteen abortion providers in the state, as well as mentioning that it would take a female living on the NC island of Ocracoke a seven hour drive and ferry ride to get to the closest abortion clinic which would be in Fayetteville, NC. I asked the panelist a question about the racist views of Margret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, and how it could influence the high rate of abortion clinics in minority neighborhoods. The fact that the panelist downplayed the high rate of clinics in the neighborhoods of people of color, struck me negatively, because abortion is the number one killer to minorities.
The panelist believed that the high number of clinics targeting minorities exist to educate about reproduction. Personally, I feel that I did not learn much, because I felt that the panel was bias, because it only had women that were for abortion. The panelist, mention a bill that was passed in NC that primarily targeted motorcycle laws, but at the same time it had laws that shut down plenty abortion clinics. I personally do not believe that there will ever be a public policy that will completely fix the issue, because laws are created to help certain people make money, they will write the laws in favor of whichever side is making the most money at that time. I do not agree with any of the policies that have been made, because a solution has not been created yet, nor do I believe that a solution will ever be made. The panel has not changed my views on abortion, primarily because it was biased, and I felt that they actually were sympathizing with abortion, by saying that NC needed more clinics.
