Pro-Choice: Abortion

Pro-Choice: Abortion

Abortion is a very controversial issue. Abortion is the premature termination of pregnancy resulting in the death of any or all carried embryo(s) or fetus(es). Many people are either pro-life or pro-choice. Pro-life is against abortions and pro-choice is allowing women to decide whether she wants and abortion or not. I believe in being pro-choice and letting the woman decide. One question that comes to mind, however, is why are woman getting abortions? As I have done research, I came to find out the answer.

Every woman has the right to make any decision that involves her body. Our government has always respected the individual’s right to privacy. A woman’s reproductive system should not be regulated by the government. In the Supreme Court case, Roe v. Wade in 1973, the decision to make abortion legal came in effect (Frohock 1983). Before Roe, many women that were pregnant were forced to weigh their respect for the law against their positivism that they were not ready to be mothers. Many women chose to break the law, putting there lives and futures at risk, and decided to get unsafe and expensive procedures.

There are people who choose to get an abortion for several reasons. Some of these reasons are because they want to postpone childbearing, cannot afford a baby, had relationship problems, their partner does not want pregnancy, they are too young, there is risk to fetal health, risk to maternal health, incest, and or the person was raped. In a research done, the percentage of these reasons why people seek to get an abortion ranges from 2.1% because of rape and incest to 25.5% because these people want to postpone childbearing.

Laws against abortion kill woman. Even though abortion may be illegal, that does not mean woman will not go through with the abortion. If you look at the case of Becky Bell, for example, she was an innocent girl that did not want her child and ended up dieing because of an illegal abortion (http://tiger.towson.edu/users/bpahll/pros%20and%20cons%20page.html.) Legal abortion helps to protect a woman’s health. For thousands of woman with heart disease, kidney disease, and other sicknesses that can be life threatening, the availability of legal abortion has helped avert medical complication that could have resulted from childbirth. Before legal abortion, many women’s choices were limited to dangerous illegal abortions, or dangerous childbirth.

A woman is more than a fetus. Though a woman might be pregnant with a child, she is still her own person and has every right to decide what she wants to do with her body. Many people argue that having an abortion can be emotionally damaging, however, so can abortion. Women develop an emotional bond with a child when they carry it through the full term and go through an experience of delivery. Giving up that child for adoption might be the only reasonable option for a young girl too immature or poor to raise a kid. However, that woman has to live with a feeling of abandoning their child for the rest of her life (http://www.balancedpolitics.org/abortion.htm). In my opinion, having an abortion can be psychologically damaging to a woman, however giving up a child from adoption is a lot worse.

Outlawing abortion is discriminatory. Anti abortion laws discriminate against low income woman who are forced to back alley abortions, where they can become infected. Rich people can travel anywhere they need to go to find the