The Question of Legalizing Abortion

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HUMN 1201 Critical Thinking & Communication        Lecturer: Ed Fletcher

TOPIC ESSAY – Abortion

Nirvana Menefield                        TR-8am,Sec.20                                October,2014

        There are many issues that we face as a society today. One of these dilemmas that has arose is the question of legalizing abortion. Are you pro – life or pro – choice? It is a question that has stirred up a lot of controversy especially in the most recent years. A difficult decision women and couples are faced with; getting an abortion is not something any woman wants to go through.  Though in many places and households it’s over looked and not acknowledged as a problem, it very much is. As a young woman myself, I feel that it is our right to do whatever we choose with our bodies. Abortion is about women having control not just over their bodies but over their destinies. Being pro – choice does not mean that I think that abortion is the first and only option but that only if a woman conceived that she has the choice in whether or not she wants to continue the pregnancy. There are many different views on abortion, mainly formed based on a person’s religion, beliefs, and cultural background.

Voting is no longer the site of struggle over the woman question. Yet this society has not settled the woman question. Instead, it has continued to debate the woman question in new contexts. For the lasts four decades, abortion has been the woman question, just as for decades. Schools were the site of struggles over

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the race question, or today the institution of marriage is the site of struggles over the standing of gays and lesbians. (Siegal)

        It is my belief that women should have the freedom to do whatever they want with their bodies. Even before the establishment of our government. Women have been oppressed by rules and being told what they can and cannot do. Stated by Representative Shirly Chrisholm “An historic occasion is the arduous struggle of American women to free themselves from oppression and circumstances,” She explained that “every woman must be guaranteed - as her unalienable right – the freedom to choose whether or not she will have children.” It must be reminded that women are more than a carrier for the fetus, but a person. If women had the choice or right to decide whether or not to bear children then only then can they attain equality with men. Because e a man cannot get pregnant or conceive, so therefore they aren’t limited the same as women are

Women are denigrated in this country, because women are not deciding the conditions of their own society and their own lives. Women are not seen seriously as people. So this is the new name of the game on the question of abortion: that women’s voices are heard. . . . [W]omen are the ones who therefore must decide, and what we are in the process of doing, it seems to me, is realizing that there are certain rights that have never been defined as rights, that are essential to equality for women, and they were not defined in the constitution of this, or any country, when that constitution was written only by

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men. The right of woman to control her reproductive process must be established as a basic and valuable human civil right not to be denied or abridged by the state. (Friedan)

        “Her suffering is too intimate and personal for the state to insist, without more, upon its own vision of the woman’s role, however dominant that vision has been in the course of our history and our culture. The destiny of the woman must be shaped to a large extent on her own conception of her spiritual imperatives and her place in society.” When it comes to women’s rights abortion is an important component, because women are more effected by abortion than men. If women weren’t allowed to have an abortion, they are not only forced to continue their pregnancy to birth, but are also expected by the community to support and raise the child for the next eighteen years. The kind of future the women has is given up as a result to an unwanted pregnancy. Women’s freedom an important life decisions are taken away by having children and the duties that come with it.