Why Abortions Must Be Legal Essay Research

Why Abortions Must Be Legal Essay, Research Paper

Why Abortions Must Be Legal

No matter how any of us feel about embryos and fetuses and their

“rights”…about women and sex and responsibility…about God’s will,

Karma, or the Bible…the fact still remains:

Women have always used abortion as a last resort to prevent the birth

of a child, and they always will, regardless of what the laws say or the

rest of us think.

But when abortion is illegal, it is unsafe and dangerous. Therefore, abortion

must be legal, and it must be accessible too.

Abortion is never an easy decision, but women have been making that

choice for thousands of years, for many good reasons. Whenever a

society has sought to outlaw abortions; it has only driven them into

back alleys where they became dangerous, expensive, and

humiliating. Thousands of American women died. Amazingly, this was the case in the United States until 1973, when abortion was legalized nationwide.

Thousands more were maimed. For this reason and others, women

and men fought for and achieved women’s legal right to make their

own decisions about abortion.

However, there are people in our society who still won’t accept this.

Some argue that even victims of rape or incest should be forced to

bear the child. And now, having failed to convince the public or the

lawmakers, certain of these people have become violent extremists,

engaging in a campaign of intimidation and terror aimed at women

seeking abortions and health professionals who work at family

planning clinics.

Some say these acts will stop abortions, but that is ridiculous. When

the smoke clears, the same urgent reasons will exist for safe, legal

abortions as have always existed. No nation committed to individual

liberty could seriously consider returning to the days of back-alley

abortions; to the revolting specter of a government forcing women to

bear children against their will. Still, amid such attacks, it is

worthwhile to repeat a few of the reasons why our society trusts each

woman to make the abortion decision herself.

Here are some reasons why legal abortion is necessary

1. Laws against abortion kill women.

To prohibit abortions does not stop them. When women feel it

is absolutely necessary, they will choose to have abortions,

even in secret, without medical care, in dangerous

circumstances. In the two decades before abortion was legal in

the U.S., it’s been estimated that nearly a million women per

year sought out illegal abortions. Thousands died. Tens of

thousands were mutilated. All were forced to behave as if they

were criminals.

Making abortion illegal has little effect on the number of

abortions, as history and present-day evidence from all over

the world show. But illegal abortion is much more dangerous.

According to the American Medical Association in the 1930s

there was “an epidemic of criminal abortion” in the

United States. The number of births dropped by about

half, as women who refused to bring children into a depressed

economy resorted to illegal abortion to end their pregnancies.

As a result, about 2500 women died each year from abortion

complications, accounting for nearly one in four maternal

deaths.

From 1950 to 1965 in the US, the National Center for Health

Statistics stated that there were 200 to 250

abortion-related deaths reported each year, a number that is

acknowledged to be lower than the true death count.2 But

even using these statistics, and assuming that illegal abortion

was two or three times as dangerous as legal abortion at that

time, a simple calculation shows that there were at least

500,000 illegal abortions each year. It’s not worth the death

of one woman if that’s what it would take to cut the number of

abortions by 60%, let alone fifty or a hundred women.

Thanks to changes in the law, today the mortality rate from

legal abortion is almost zero, and abortion accounts for only

3% of maternal deaths.

The publication Lancet said that “It is impossible to achieve a low maternal mortality without access to safe abortion.”

2. Legal abortions protect women’s health.

Legal abortion not only protects women’s lives, it also protects

their health. For tens of thousands of women with heart

disease, kidney disease, severe hypertension, sickle-cell

anemia and severe diabetes, and other illnesses that can be

life-threatening, the availability of legal abortion has helped avert

serious medical complications that could have resulted from

childbirth. Before legal abortion, such women’s choices were

limited to dangerous illegal abortion or dangerous childbirth.

In a case-controlled study women whose own health is

compromised during pregnancy

are more likely to miscarry and to deliver babies who are

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