Dear Mr./Ms. President,

My name is Nathan M., I live in Seattle, WA but I was adopted from Seoul, South Korea. I’m a high-schooler, and I go to West Seattle High School. I am writing to you today about the topic Abortion. People get abortions in life and it’s just something that happens. Did you know that 1.1 million people get an abortion in the USA alone? That’s a lot of people who get them. A lot of these abortions are gotten because the parties involved can’t take care of a child. No birth control way is 100% so why would we make laws against abortions when we can’t even control to make sure that people who don’t want a baby absolutely won’t get one? Also, every 2 minutes, someone in America gets raped. What are we supposed to do if you were to get pregnant from that? I think that abortion should be legalized in places where it isn’t,  such as Colorado,Kansas,Louisiana,Mississippi,North Dakota,Oklahoma,South Dakota, and Texas, and in places where it is legal, it should stay legal. If you make it illegal, more people will try unsafe ways to get an abortion. Do you know what people will do if they get desperate enough? It could help save lives around the world not just in America. Also it is their body, their choice. It’s not the government's place to say that they can’t get an abortion and deal with their body. That’s an infringement of their rights. You are allowed to have freedom of speech right? Doesn’t that include the fact that there is more than one way to speak out. They have the right over their own body and no one can take that away because everyone is their own person. This should be a national mandate put in place just like clean water act. 

If you keep abortion legal, or make it legal where it is not, then less people will try to find an “unsafe” to get an abortion. As a result of abortion not being available to everyone, UN experts say, “In the 21st century, unsafe abortion is one of the leading causes of maternal mortality and morbidity,” they said, noting that according to the UN World Health Organization (WHO), about 22 million unsafe abortions take place each year globally and some 47,000 women die from complications from the resort to unsafe practices.” ("Abortion"). So if we want to keep more people safe, and keep the world’s population growing and keep specialization of labor, keep jobs open for people, and stop having families feel the grief and pain of losing a loved one, we need to make abortion be something available to everyone. When you place anti-abortion laws into the mix of laws citizens have to abide by, people will get desperate and want to get an abortion no matter the cause. There could be another black market open for this to get your baby aborted or people will just start taking matters into their own hands and more people around the world will start dying for a stupid reason put in place by a single law. Don’t we want more people to stay alive? If we also keep abortion available this will keep jobs open for so many people and open more up for more people. This could be good for the job market because it would open so many more options and places for jobs.  Unsafe ways don’t just harm the individual. It can harm so much more. It can have even greater effects that could affect anything.

Another reason is it will save lives in different ways than just unsafe abortion numbers going down. With more abortions in the world, the world’s population might not increase by so much allowing some problems to not get worse.  I feel like America should bring up this topic around the world too because we aren't the only country whose facing this.With more people comes more of a demand for housing and spaces for housing resulting in more and more ecosystems being destroyed to allow room for more and more people to have a nice house or apartment to live in. So I'm saying that abortion can help make not increase the world population as fast. When I go to school every year, each class below my grade keeps getting bigger and needing more schools and more of a demand for teachers and janitors and principles etc. to be in those schools. There is only so many people who want these jobs and so many places where you can build more schools. You can only fit so many people into a school building too. More people results in more and more other living organisms to lose their lives in order for more and more of ours to be able to live. 

Abortion also brings up the somewhat touchy topic of suicide. Desperate people will go for desperate matters no matter the cost. Pregnancy can be a huge stressor in life. Not everyone knows how to successfully deal with distress. For some pregnancy can cause eustress because the family is so happy but you still have some distress. There’s a lot to deal with and worry about to be pregnant and then have to raise a child. But then you come to a point where you hit the spot where you’re done and then now you don’t know what to do. Some people will turn to hurting themselves and in some cases suicide. You also have the times where people will sometimes not be able to function properly and turn to drugs and/or alcohol. You don’t always make the best decision when that happens. But when you put an anti-abortion law in place there, it’s always their fault when you can be accountable for what happens. People are humans and all humans make mistakes all the time every day, week, month etc.

Lastly, everyone has rights. No matter those rights, you are the one who has control over your body. It’s your body for crying out loud. An article that I recently read talked about this. It said, “In fact, 1 in 3 American women will have an abortion in her lifetime” (Starner). Do you know how many people there are in America? For example, the website  http://countrymeters.info/en/United_States_of_America_(USA), said that there are 164,530,182 women alive in the USA, with the total population of 324,918,758 as of 8:11pm on 10/17/16. That’s a lot of people who get an abortion in a lifetime. There are about 288,820 rape victims a year that are older than 12 based on www.rainn.org. That’s a lot of victims. If you got pregnant because you were raped, wouldn’t you want an abortion? Not everyone wants to keep their baby and sure there is adoption but not every child in life gets adopted. There are so many problems that can come with adoption. Every two minutes about someone else gets raped. There’s also the part about the Hyde Amendment. It says that Medicaid can’t cover an abortion. But there is the part mentioned in www.fundabortionnow.org, where it talks about how it is kind of has a racist impact because it’s sadly a proven fact that women of color have a higher likely chance of living in poverty and having to use Medicaid as their health care. So that results in abortions mainly not being available for women of color. People want to also impose a penalty on abortion and make it a criminal offense to get an abortion. Which is an issue because that would put so many innocent people at risk only because they want to keep being able to lives. They don’t need something to come along and ruin that.  This helps prove my claim because with these laws that don't allow you to get an abortion, that can put risk to your life. It tells us that abortion isn't available to everyone and putting these laws in place can actually affect live in many different ways than just saying that you can't get an abortion.

Let’s say you get pregnant, you try to get an abortion, but its illegal. You then have a mark on you record because you wanted to get of this baby that you didn’t want and possibly couldn’t support. You then sometimes can’t get a job because of this mark, and now you have this child to deal with. One thing leads to another and now your being arrested for something else like child neglect because you don’t know what the hell you’re doing because, hell, you didn’t have any support or anything.

Now some people might disagree because everybody can have their own opinion in life about anything. But it isn’t murder if you kill that unborn baby. This baby hasn’t been brought into the world. It hasn’t been introduced to everything life has in store for it. There’s a difference in getting abortion and killing your child. Technically that baby isn’t yours yet legally in the eye of the state. It hasn’t been born yet and thus doesn’t have a certificate of birth legally marking the said child as a person. Some special cases bring up the point where if you don’t get an abortion, that could have serious sometimes even grave consequences on the mother. There are so many things that you don’t have control over that you have to deal with. But rather you want that baby or not is something you do have control over so you should use that as much as you need.

After careful consideration, I see that people should really put some thought into the topic of abortion. We should make abortion legal and available to everyone who wants it. If you don’t that’s your business. You don’t have to get an abortion or support it. It’s your choice. But that doesn’t mean that you should make life miserable for everyone else who do not have the same opinion. Abortion is a touchy subject for some people. It isn't always heartbreaking to get an abortion for some people. It’s a choice that people can make with their lives. You can’t just conclude someone’s thoughts. You aren’t them so you have no clue what’s actually going on in their lives. Abortion is something that should be allowed. It can and will save lives. People have choices in their lives and rather or not they want an abortion should be one of them. There isn’t a way to have sex that isn’t 100% no pregnancy possible. So abortion needs to be legalized since you 100% can't have the possibility of a baby and still have sex. It’s just a fact of life people need to understand. Nothing in life is for sure so you just have to roll with it and accept it. People die every year from birth complications and from unsafe abortions when they can’t get one. We need to take action soon and have a change within abortion laws from not letting it be a choice to letting it be legal and letting everyone have a choice if they want to have one. Let’s not do it later, let’s take action now and change the world for better so other things can be dealt with too.