“I refuse to give up this platform to promote complacency and peace, when there is a war on my body and a war on my rights,” Paxton Smith said.
“It feels wrong to talk about anything but what is currently affecting me and millions of other women in this state,” Paxton Smith, the 2021 valedictorian at Dallas’s Lake Highlands High School, said as she pulled a copy of her new speech from her graduation robe.Gov. Greg Abbott signed last month. It effectively bans abortion at six weeks into pregnancy, which is before many women even know they’re pregnant, and is slated to go into effect in September.
“I refuse to give up this platform to promote complacency and peace, when there is a war on my body and a war on my rights,” said Smith, who shared some of her decision-making process with Dallas’s on Tuesday. After getting the OK from her parents to proceed with a vastly different speech than the one that was approved by her school administrators, she practiced her new address until she’d nearly memorized it.“I have dreams, hopes, and ambitions. Every girl here does,” she said. “We have spent our whole lives working towards our futures, and without our consent or input, our control over our futures has been stripped away from us.
Footage of Smith’s speech began reaching a wider audience in the days following her address as media outlets, Hillary Clinton and other public figures applauded her.
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