Judy Blume on Reproductive Rights

The Huffingtom Post has a great video of best-selling young adult author Judy Blume speaking out about reproductive choice in women, hoping to remind this generation what it was like to have no options in her time. It’s a needful reminder — we have the vote and we need to use it, to remind the government that we need to have authority over our bodies and ourselves.

Whether we would ever get an abortion ourselves if it came to that, whether our church supports the use of contraceptives — these should be our choices for us to select according to our consciences and our faith, not for someone to decide for us.

This is a transcript of what she says:

I don’t understand why young people think feminism is a bad word. Maybe they just don’t know. They don’t know. They don’t know what it was like to worry all the time about getting pregnant. To be terrified even within our marriages. That was such an enormous fear. There was nothing you could do about it, except a back alley kind of abortion — and that could kill you.

I went to an all-girls public high school. Two of the top girls were pregnant at graduation and those hasty marriages and having babies just changed their lives. For ever. It’s not a romantic thing. That’s why I hate that teenage — whatever reality show that is on reality television — teenage mothers. I mean it’s not — it’s not romantic. It’s not fun. It’s tough.