Anti-Abortion laws in North Carolina are among the strictest across the entire country, which comes as no surprise to pro-choice activists. These laws include required counseling designed to encourage women against having an abortion, a 72 hour waiting period, and a lack of insurance covering the procedure unless the abortion falls under the category of rape, incest or life endangerment, according to FindLaw.

In 1992, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the decision made in the infamous Roe v. Wade case in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which again declared that the state is not allowed to ban most abortions, as reported by the Guttmacher Institute. However, this case also allowed states to enact their own laws and restrictions against abortion, which are meant to protect the health of the mother, and save a “viable fetus”, meaning a fetus that has an equal chance of surviving inside or outside of a mother’s womb.

My issue with these state-by-state restrictions is simply this, they don’t stop abortion; they just make it incredibly more dangerous to get one. Most states with strict abortion laws don’t even have an abortion provider in over 95 percent of their counties, according to CBS News. This can lead women to take off days of work, just to get unsafe abortion hundreds of miles away in an unfamiliar place.

In fact, every year 78,000 women die due to the consequences of an unsafe abortion, as reported by Advocates for Youth. Pro-life individuals were truly pro-life in the literal sense; wouldn’t they care more about these 78,000 real people who die due to their agenda to save potential people?

Also, statistics say that throughout a woman’s life time, she has a 1 in 5 chance of being sexually assaulted, as reported by the Rape Response Services. Pro-life individuals would rather force women to have the baby of their rapist, put a year of their life on hold, relive the rape every single day and go through sickness and childbirth, rather than allowing women to receive an abortion, potentially saving that child from an unfit and unsafe home or the horrors of the broken foster care system.

Furthermore, it’s ironically found that the same people who are often pro-life, are also against things that actually curb abortion rates, such as comprehensive sexual education and contraceptives. Even more ironically, they are often males who obviously cannot get pregnant, and I have a feeling that if men were the ones able to get pregnant, we would have a lot less to be discussing.

It’s funny to me how concerned pro-life individuals are for a child those nine months they’re in the womb, but the second that child enters this world and comes out as gay, is black or adheres to a different religion, suddenly that overwhelming compassion disappears and is traded for bullying, impoverished neighborhoods and societal stigma.

This proves to me one thing, that pro-life individuals cannot claim to be pro-life, rather they can only claim to be anti-abortion.

Reproductive choice is a basic human right that every woman across the globe should have. I wouldn’t let a janitor tell a neurosurgeon how to operate on a brain and I will not let a man tell me what to do with my uterus.