Abortion Essay Research Paper Abortion is an

Abortion Essay, Research Paper

Abortion is an on-going problem, a source of social and legal discord, moral uncertainty, medical and psychiatric confusion, and personal anguish. If many individuals have worked through a position they find satisfactory, the world as a whole, and most societies have not. In 1973, the Supreme Court legalized abortion nationwide. Many people, particularly women s rights supporters believed the decision would put an end to dangerous self-induced and back alley abortions performed by unqualified abortionists. Abortion is becoming the great moral issue of the century. Approximately 1.6 million abortions are performed annually in the United States. The vast majority of these abortions are performed because women are too young or too poor to raise a child. Other women may decide on abortion because they are without a partner, or they are in school or in a demanding career. Supporters of abortion see individual choice as central to the debate of being regulated, if a women cannot choose to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, a condition which affects her own body and possibly her entire life, then she has lost one of her most basic human rights. These supporters of abortion believe that while the fetus is a potential life, its life cannot be placed on the same level with that of the woman. On the other side opponents, of abortion argue that the fetus is human and therefore endowed with the same human rights as the mother. Stated simple, they believe that when a society doesn t regulate and legalizes abortion, it is sanctioning murder. For many people actively involved in the issue of regulating abortion, the most important issue is whether abortion is moral. Activists who oppose abortion believe it is the killing of an unborn child and can never be justified. Opponents of abortion believe the unborn child s right to life outweighs the woman s right to choose abortion. Abortion is not merely the removal of some tissue from a woman s body. Abortion is not the removal of a living thing that would become human if it were allowed to remain inside the woman s body. Abortion is the destruction of an unborn baby. A new human life begins as soon as the egg has been fertilized. Pregnancy is the period for this new human life to mature, not to become human , it already is. The church understands that there are circumstances in which some people believe that abortion is the lesser of evils. The church recognizes that many hardships can occur with pregnancy. No matter how difficult the alternatives, they cannot justify the direct killing of an innocent human being.A child unwanted in the pre-born phase may become wanted later. There are many times when we have heard of women with unplanned pregnancies on the one hand considering abortions on the other hand rejecting the idea of keeping the baby now and then giving him up for adoption after birth. The same child unwanted in the womb will then be very much wanted when he has emerged from the womb, when he can be seen and touched, when it is psychologically easier to identify with the baby. A child unwanted by his natural mother even after his birth may be wanted by others to adopt him. Thousands of couples would like to adopt babies. The person recommending the abortion should ask himself how he would feel if someone forced such a decision on him. A woman s freedom over her own body stops where another body, another life begins. The life of her child. Choice also implicitly requires a decision-making process, with knowledge of all the facts and the options and not made through by social regulation. Yet, those who advocate abortion protest vehemently against informed consent legislation, which would require a woman to know exactly what is involved in abortion. They argue that to give a woman information about the developing life within her and the procedure involved clouds the decision making process. Certainly facts such as babies have beating hearts at eighteen days, have brain waves at forty days and suck their thumbs at six weeks might have the effect of dissuading a woman from choosing to destroy life. Babies are born at twenty and twenty-one weeks have survived and close to one-third of babies born at twenty-four weeks survive. Yet abortions are performed throughout the entire stage of pregnancy. Americans are shocked to learn that forty percent of all abortions, 640,000 each year, are second, third and fourth abortions. Most people are decidedly against abortion as means of birth control, yet half of all women getting abortions admit neither they nor their partner used any form of birth control. The pro-life movement exists because abortion is not just a political position or a choice, but a life and death moral issue. Abortion is a surgical procedure in which a woman s body is forcibly entered and her pregnancy is forcibly terminated . Because it is intrusive, and because it disrupts a natural process (pregnancy), abortion poses both short term and long term risks to the health and well being of the aborting woman. Abortion is never without risks. Over one hundred potential complications have been associated with abortion. Some of these complications can be immediately spotted, such as a puncture of the uterus or other organs, convulsions or cardiac arrest. Other complications reveal themselves within a few days such as slow hemorrhage, pulmonary embolisms, infection and fever. Women who may appear unaffected by an aborti