Something that I've always noticed throughout my lifetime and studies is that womanhood is often thought of as indistinguishable with motherhood, and that those two roles cannot exist or be true without the other. We buy little girls baby dolls and praise them when they act like "little mommies" or expect them to be babysitters when they enter their tween years. When a girl reaches puberty and her body starts menstruating, we tell her "you're a woman now," subconsciously putting the notion in her head that she is a woman because she is now able to reproduce.

Throughout history, involuntary motherhood has always been a constant: on the slave plantations, where enslaved women were expected to reproduce to help maintain the slave population under their master's orders, and were regularly raped in order to do so; during the Victorian Era when a woman got married she was considered to be legally dead and was confined to fulfill her motherly duty inside of the home; to the 1960s when women were highly active in education and the labor force, but their commencement speeches were about how to apply their academic achievements to their future roles as mothers. It’s everywhere. It’s the biggest theme that I’ve noticed while studying women’s history, and it’s still so engrained into our present day culture that people are oblivious to its presence. I’m 20; I’m in the middle of my studies, building a foundation and constructing my future, and discovering myself, yet people ask me when my boyfriend and I plan on getting married and having children. I’m 20.

Involuntary motherhood is a toxic thing for so many reasons, and that is why I wholly support a woman’s right to choose whether or not she wants motherhood to be a part of her life. In a world where abstinence-only education is the majority and where birth control is not readily available, that’s already chipping away at a woman’s right to choose. When women are publicly shamed if they state that they do not want children that limits their right to choose. In a highly developed country where paid maternity leave ceases to exist, how would a lower-class woman choose? The same people that say she should have used protection or exerted more caution are the people that defund the places that provide those resources to her.

Being pro-choice is not just about abortion, but also about giving women the autonomy to decide if motherhood is something that they wish to pursue and providing those resources for them. In a country that has states where medical professionals can refuse to fill birth control prescriptions if it goes against their religious beliefs, I don’t want to hear anything about limiting a woman’s access to abortion. The anti-choice mentality that a lot possess has never made sense to me; you’d think those so keen on protecting a fetus would want to provide resources so that women would never have to make that decision, but they don’t. That’s why they are anti-choice, not “pro-life.” They don’t care about the quality and security of women’s lives.

Being a woman does not mean being a mother. Not all women have the desire to become mothers, or do not have the lives fit to be the mothers that they want to be. Young girls are not suddenly women because their reproductive organ is now able to reproduce. Tying motherhood to womanhood is a direct insult to women that are not able to bare children, women that were born with a male anatomy, and women that simply do not want to have children. A woman’s worth is not placed upon whether or not she can have children, despite that happening for hundreds of years in American history. Women deserve to make that choice and deserve to have access to birth control, authentic sexual education, and safe, legal access to abortion. Women should not be expected to become mothers and their choices should be respected, and they have fought long and hard for that to be the case; women have died trying to have autonomy over their own bodies.

That’s why I’m pro-choice.