The other day while tabling for international women’s rights awareness for issues such as female infanticide, education for girls, female genital mutilation, honor killings and child marriage, a strange thing kept happening. I would walk up to women, ask them “May I give you some information about women’s rights?” and some of the women would walk away from me. Now, I totally understand being bombarded with quarter cards while walking through your student union can be an awkward and sometimes annoying experience, so I hope I can attribute their reactions to that. But at the same time, I also sometimes feel a level of apathy and indifference in young people to social justice campaigns that deal with women, sex or reproductive health (with the notable exception of the HIV/AIDS epidemic). Why is that?

I started to wonder why these seem to be issues that are almost universally challenging to address, from the most high-income countries like the US to some of the poorest countries like Liberia, where I am from. Perhaps it is because, like most things having to do with sex, once it gets involved; things get a lot more complicated.

I fail to understand how some people can be so apathetic when it comes to reproductive health activism. I know that not everyone feels the need to protest something or write a letter to a congressperson, but I just can not help feeling like there is some level of feeling like “this does not affect me.”  Or is it also that one can feel overwhelmed by the enormity and complexity of the problem?

I understand and can sympathize with these views, but I think the stakes are too high to let our fears or apathy stand in the way for fighting for our own rights and for those of our brothers and sisters around the world. Especially when many of us are benefiting from the actions that others once took on our behalf. 

I cannot speak for everyone, but I can speak for myself in saying that reproductive health activism has really affected me directly. I have been a victim of sexual violence and had I not gotten the proper education about reproductive health I would have not known to get myself tested. Or what would I have done without access to emergency contraception? What if the pharmacist I saw decided not to refill my prescription because she did not believe in contraception?

And imagine how much worse things would have been for me if I had not been fortunate enough to grow up in the richest country in the world. Women around the world cannot always negotiate safe sex, and cannot always get access to birth control or education about their bodies. These are things that I am willing to fight for, because if it were not for a sympathetic immigration official that could have been me.

However, I am not saying that I only believe in fighting for sexual healthcare access for straight women, just because that is the group I identify with! Absolutely not! I am very much a believer in this great quote by Elie Weisel, holocaust survivor:

“The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.”