Abortion Research Paper

Submitted By Yaneth_022
Words: 1301
Pages: 6

Yaneth Gonzalez
Human 180/ ethics
Christiansen
4/11/2013
Abortion
For many years abortion has been one of the biggest controversies worldwide. Forty-two million abortions occur in the United States every year, and twenty million are unsafe. Almost all abortions are paid for by taxpayers. The reason for many of these abortions is because of the large number of unwanted pregnancies. Abortion is a moral decision in which the mother decides whether it is right or wrong to take away a fetus’ life. There are many ways to accomplish an abortion or prevent pregnancy, such as taking pills, birth control pills, the Mirena, the C section, the suction aspiration and the Depo-Provera shot. Abortion has two sides: the pro-life and the pro-choice. The pro-life side includes those people who are against abortion altogether and the pro-choice side are those individuals who believe it is the woman’s right to choose. The pro-choice opinion of abortion is ethically wrong and should be made illegal when we take the point of view of the fetus; however there are ethical consequences for the mother in some situations that would make abortion an option. Abortion poses a moral, social, religious and medical dilemma that stirs up emotional responses among disputants of the topic.
Abortion is the premature removal of an embryo or fetus from a woman’s uterus before it has adequately developed to survive. The most common method of abortion used in early pregnancy was the suction aspiration. The cervix was forced to open, and then a vacuum device was placed inside the vagina. The vacuum device was 29 times more powerful than a home vacuum cleaner, and it was used to suction out the contents of the uterus. As the vacuum was placed in the uterus, the baby was torn into pieces. Then the doctor used a special instrument to tear the baby into pieces and crush the skull (“Should Abortion Be Legal?”).
Is abortion moral? - or morally wrong? It is morally wrong to end the life of a fetus, but woman have moral self-determination. Women have the right to decide their future; it is morally repellent to force a woman to bear a child against her will. Abortion is a sin for many religions, but teens and adults still do it. The abortion industry was estimated in 2009 to make $831 million annually (Palmer). The abortion issue is a reflection of our society as a whole, which is why so many people insist on taking a position on it. Many of these people believe abortion is akin to murder, as it is the act of taking a human being’s life, and that it should not be used as another form of contraception We have the moral right to ownership of our bodies. One example is the Roe v. Wade case in 1973. Roe v. Wade was a Texas case that involved a pregnant, single woman who was suing the Dallas County district attorney, Henry Wade, to prevent him from enforcing Texas’s abortion prohibition because she said this was unconstitutional and was violating her First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth and Fourteenth Amendment rights. Even though her life was not perfect, it was not threatened by her pregnancy, and she had no legal basis for an abortion to save a mother’s life (“Roe v. Wade”). This case was taken to the Supreme Court, where the justices had to decide whether a woman is entitled to have an abortion until the end of the first trimester of pregnancy without any interference by the state. On January 22, 1973, the court made a 7-2 decision that Texas had to approve abortion because the Supreme Court struck down an 1857 statue that made abortion illegal in Texas. After the Supreme Court decision, women in Texas were still denied their rights and they used the Fourteenth Amendment to defend themselves because the Fourteenth Amendment gave them the right to privacy and to do whatever they chose to do with their bodies. Some women had no other choice than abortion because they were in financial need.
Don’t all mothers want the best for their children? Mothers will always want the best for