Quinonez 1

Ximena Quinonez
Holbrook
Work Cited
Walker, Nicole. “Opinion | My Abortion at 11 Wasn't a Choice. It Was My Life.” The
New York Times, 18 August 2022,
www.nytimes.com/2022/08/18/opinion/abortion-pregnancy-child-roe.html.
Accessed 6 September 2022.

A current controversy that has become quite a crisis over the last few months is over
abortion laws. Many have argued that abortion is a wrong thing to do, and many people have
stood up for the opposite side to argue that it’s their body, their choice. And in a way to stand up
for women’s rights, which were given in 1920, and now women are being deprived of them, that
brings up author Nicloe Walker. Nicole Walker is a teacher at Northern Arizona University
teaching creative writing and is a wife and mother of two, telling her own experience in the New
York Times to get her point across, she wrote her story “My abortion at age 11 wasn’t a choice. It
was my life.”
Throughout this article, she shares what she went through at age 11 when she got
molested and hopes to reach out to what others could go through during this time, and how
futures can be unforeseeable now. Her main point of the article was that abortions now being a
decision that is made for someone instead of themselves can lead to a path that is unknown, as
her story starts she described how her future wasn’t clear after her experience. “The babysitter
was not shunned and censured by our community. Most people didn’t even know what he had
done, though they seemed to know something bad had happened to me — or perhaps that I had
done something wrong. Only my mom and I were subject to the shame of entering that special
building for that special procedure. Although no one in the neighborhood or at school talked to
me about it, I could feel the electric gossip surge around me. I eventually skipped a grade” (
Walker, par. 7).
Walker then went on to talk about the facts that women and young girls can go through
giving birth and how it can affect them and the fetus as she described, “These girls, some of them
the age that I was when I was molested, are sometimes forced to give birth. The pelvis can be too
small for a fetus to pass through during birth. The fetus can die. The girl can suffer from a fistula,
where the pressure during prolonged labor creates a connection between the bladder or rectum
and the vagina. Bodily waste can then drip through the vagina” (Walker, par. 8). Soon she
explains how people should acknowledge the human anatomy when being pregnant and how it
becomes a challenge and could change different viewpoints. “They fear, could shift the fight
away from a more expansive battle for women’s rights and the obvious truth that bodily
autonomy should exist for all people” ( Walker, par. 9).
In conclusion, Walker’s point of view states how abortions can become a foreseeable
future nowadays and could affect many people’s lives, “ I felt the prison gates fall around me,
around my daughter, around everyone with a uterus. Pregnancy and childbirth change life
trajectories. Now, for many more Americans, trajectories are set. Paths defined. This future is
foreseeable. I ask that you look at it” (Walker, par. 12).