“All I could think was, ‘Thank God I have, at least, a choice,'” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said at an abortion rally as she addressed being sexually assaulted and worrying she was pregnant
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is getting candid about her own experience in the fight for reproductive rights.
The New York Congresswoman, 32, opened up about being sexually assaulted during a rally Friday in Manhattan, following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn 1973’s Roe v. Wade and the constitutional right to abortion.
“We must start right now to be relentless to restore and guarantee all of our rights here in the United States of America, period. I want to take a moment and honor the spirit of this space and telling stories,” Ocasio-Cortez prefaced in a video captured by The Independent’s Jenna Amatulli.
She recounted working at a nearby coffee shop, which was two doors down from a free family health clinic.
“I took friends and I supported friends through abortions, when I had friends that were sexually assaulted, right after getting off of work,” she recalled. “I myself, when I was about 22 or 23 years old, was raped while I was living here in New York City. I was completely alone, I felt completely alone.
“In fact, I felt so alone that I had to take a pregnancy test in a public bathroom in Midtown Manhattan. And when I sat there waiting for what the result would be, all I could think was, ‘Thank God I have, at least, a choice. Thank God I could at least have the freedom to choose my destiny.’ I didn’t know then as I was waiting that it would come up negative. But it doesn’t matter … This is for all of us. This is not a women’s rights issue, this is an issue for all of us!” Ocasio-Cortez said.
Ocasio-Cortez then called on President Joe Biden to take action and open abortion clinics on federal lands in red states.
Friday’s 6-to-3 ruling reversed nearly 50 years of precedent, giving states the power to pass their own laws around abortion. Since the decision, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri and South Dakota have already banned abortion in their states, after putting “trigger bans” in place that governors enacted after the SCOTUS ruling.
Protests have since erupted around the country, and Biden, 79, has spoken out against the ruling, which he called the “realization of an extreme ideology and a tragic error by the Supreme Court.”
The decision comes after the SCOTUS opinion was leaked to Politico last month. A poll conducted by CNN has since found that 66 percent of Americans did not want Roe v. Wade to be overturned.
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