Paxton Smith, a Texas high school valedictorian, had thrown away her approved speech in order to blast Texas’ new anti-abortion bill.
She called it “dehumanizing,” and delivered an address to her peers.
Smith graduated at the top of her class at Lake Highlands High School located in Dallas, Texas. Her previous speech was to discuss about the effects of the media on fresh minds, but it had turned a complete 360 when she started to slam down on the bill.
Governor Greg Abbott had signed a law that would ban abortions as early as six weeks, and the eighteen-year-old decided to rewrite her speech to describe it as the “war” on women’s rights and pleaded for others to speak up against it.
She reads on a piece of paper, “As we leave high school, we need to make our voices heard. Today I was going to talk about TV and media and content, because it’s something that’s very important to me.
However, under light of recent events, it feels wrong to talk about anything but what is currently affecting me and millions of other women in the state.”
“Recently, the heartbeat bill was passed in Texas. Starting in September, there will be a ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, regardless of whether the pregnancy was a result of rape or incest.”
The bill outlaws any abortion after the first heartbeat can be detected. For most women, they might not even know that they are pregnant until four weeks in at minimum. It can be even longer if women have irregular menstrual cycles.
The law allows anyone to sue anyone in Texas that is an abortion provider, this also includes individuals who helped the mother-to-be get an abortion, up to $10,000.
Smith continues her speech, saying that they might not even have a chance to decide if they [the mother] are “emotionally, physically, and financially stable enough to carry out a full-term pregnancy… that decision is made for them by a stranger. A decision that will affect the rest of their lives is made by a stranger.”
“I am terrified that if my contraceptives fail, I am terrified that if I am raped, then my hopes and aspirations and dreams and efforts for my future will no longer matter.”
She speaks on behalf of her graduation day, an “honoring of 12 years of hard academic work… where you are most inclined to listen to a voice like mine — a woman’s voice — to tell you that this is a problem… I cannot give up this platform to promote complacency and peace when there is a war on my body and a war on my rights.
”
Smith explains why it was so important for her to speak up about it, and she responds that there was “no better group of people that I could talk to because I knew that in the audience there were people that were gonna disagree with what I had to say.”