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The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and eliminate the constitutional right abortion on Friday created a wave of reaction throughout the country, which included many prominent sports figures. Megan Rapinoe, who has never been afraid to speak out on what she believes, explicitly expressed her instant reaction to the decision.
Her remarks continued for over nine minutes, according to Yahoo Sports’s Henry Bushnell, and she touched many different areas of this decision.
“It’s hard to put into words how sad a day this is for me personally, for my teammates, for just all of the people out there this is going to affect,” she said. “Pro-Choice means that you get to choose. Pro-Choice allows other people to be pro-life if that is what works for them, or that is what their beliefs are, or if that is where they’re at in their life. Pro-life doesn’t allow anybody to make a choice.”
Rapinoe also called out men, specifically male athletes, for not doing enough publicly to change the direction of these views.
“You’ve been silent to us, as a whole. Stand up, say something,” she said. “This is your wife, this is your sister, this is your friend, this is your girlfriend, this is the mother of your children. This is all of us. And you are allowing a violent and consistent onslaught on the autonomy of women’s bodies, on women’s rights, on women’s minds, on our hearts, on our souls. We live in a country that tries to chip away at what you have enabled, at what you have been privileged enough to feel your entire life.”
She stressed “no woman should be the loudest voice in the room” and that speaking out is “what doing the right thing looks like.” Then, Rapinoe explained how this one decision impacts many groups of women in different communities.
“We know that this will disproportionately affect poor women, Black women, brown women, immigrants, women in abusive relationships, women who have been raped, women and girls who have been raped by family members, who, you know what, maybe didn’t make the best choice, and that’s no reason to be force to have a pregnancy,” she said. “We know that the lack of abortion [rights] does not stop people from having abortions, it stops people from having safe abortions.”
Finally, Rapinoe asked everyone to look at this with a warm-hearted mindset that allows people to live with different beliefs.
“I encourage people to take a step back and come from a place of compassion and humanity, and understand that just because I believe in something doesn’t mean everybody else has to,” she said. “And we all get to make our own choices, but ultimately we need to come from a place of love, respect and autonomy to do what we feel is best for us.”
