This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2017, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

The Women's March is an excellent starting point to do more good on behalf of women everywhere. My comments, however, are directed to the elephant in the room. I speak about an assumption made by many that to desire to protect the rights of women, one must be in support of sacrificing the lives of the unborn when it becomes an inconvenience to women (and after all, men don't have to suffer this inconvenience to near the same extent).

I realize that we are dealing with sensitive issues here, and a woman's body and sovereignty over her body are sacred and important matters. But we cannot let judgment be clouded by political party slogans. In pregnancy, we are also dealing with an entity every bit as sovereign and undeniable: a human being's existence, and while their existence may be connected to and terribly inconvenient to one or many, all human beings have a right to take their first breath.

I refuse to be party to the idea that we can decide for ourselves at what age of gestation it's okay to snuff out human life, no matter how inconvenient that life may be. I submit that just as taking a person's life in other situations comes with serious consequences, with few exceptions (i.e. self-defense, some freak accident), our society will be held accountable for facilitating the ending of these little lives, save for a few grave and specific cases (i.e. rape, incest, danger to a mother's life).

I submit that, rather than focusing our legislation and activism on enabling women the "right" to have unborn babies professionally eliminated (and working so hard to stroke their conscience until they believe it's their right), we should work hard, along with protecting the many inalienable rights of women, to create a society where a woman can carry and give birth to a baby — which she may or may not choose to raise as her own — without unfair threat to her freedom to live and be educated, to work and be a powerful part of her society, to do as she chooses.

While this isn't the quicker fix, it is the ideal the world should strive for. We as a society will rise to nobler heights when our attention moves away from making these unborn children's lives easier to end. Rather, as we focus our energy on facilitating the best life possible for both women everywhere and millions of unborn children, the unbounded potential of all these individuals will serve to strengthen and enrich society in ways we couldn't have imagined.

Cassie Wynn graduated from Brigham Young University in Family and Human Development Studies. She lives in Cottonwood Heights with her husband and five children.