In 1985, I was living with my sister in Virginia, and since I was still in high school, I worked at McDonald's to save money to get an abortion. It sounds really terrible, but it was the best decision I ever made. It was the first time I took responsibility for my actions. I messed up, had sex without contraception, and got pregnant at 15.
You cannot have maternal health without reproductive health. And reproductive health includes contraception and family planning and access to legal, safe abortion.
The truth is that contraception saves lives, prevents unplanned pregnancies, improves outcomes for children and reduces the number of abortions.
The freedom that women were supposed to have found in the Sixties largely boiled down to easy contraception and abortion; things to make life easier for men, in fact.
Thankfully, President Obama has stood firmly behind women's health care issues by supporting coverage for contraception and reaffirming commitment to organizations like Planned Parenthood.
Teen pregnancy went way down in the '90s, and 75 percent of it was because of increased use of contraception.
I'm pro-responsible choice. There is choice to abstain, choice to do contraception. There are all kind of good choices.
Trying to block women from getting access to contraception or defunding Planned Parenthood is completely nonsensical from a policy standpoint.
I was proud to share the stories of my friends at Georgetown Law who have suffered dire medical consequences because our student insurance does not cover contraception for the purpose of preventing pregnancy.
There was a time when researchers imagined that Plan B, or the morning-after pill, might become not an emergency form of contraception but a routine one; women would take it once a month to induce a period and never even know whether they had gotten pregnant.