conclusion for an abortion essay

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6 Conclusion

For important issues, we need well-developed reasons or arguments to decide what to believe and do about the issues. Many people say they just “feel” that abortion is wrong or their “opinion” is that it’s not wrong. But complex issues require informed, fair and honest critical thinking, not just mere “feelings” or “opinions,” and we hope this essay has modeled this type of systematic and serious engagement with the arguments and evidence. We hope that readers’ reflective observations about how we have stated and evaluated arguments will help them improve their own skills at engaging arguments on this and other issues, on their own and in discussion with others.

We have focused on disagreements about abortion, but we want to end on an agreement. Everyone agrees there should be fewer abortions. Even people who believe abortions are generally not wrong don’t think that having an abortion is just a great way to spend time and resources. So everyone could agree that we, as a society, should do more to reduce the “demand” for abortions: we could address the many causes that lead women to seek abortions. [1] Some other countries don’t have as many abortions as the US does. In many cases this is because of deliberate choices they have made to make their countries more supportive of all of their citizens and make it easier for them to meet their economic, medical and familial needs. We too could be Good Samaritans, in these ways and more. This would be very good, not just for this issue but for who we are as people.

[1] For examples, see this 2012 Washington University Press release “ Access to free birth control reduces abortion rates ” and the Guttmacher Institute’s 2016 “ New Clarity for the U.S. Abortion Debate: A Steep Drop in Unintended Pregnancy Is Driving Recent Abortion Declines ,” and other proposals for what types of efforts would reduce the number of abortions.

Thinking Critically About Abortion Copyright © 2019 by nathannobis and Kristina Grob is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.22595/mc.ir.fac.pub:2019_nobis_book

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Abortion Argumentative Essay: Definitive Guide

Academic writing

Abortion remains a debatable issue even today, especially in countries like the USA, where a controversial ban was upheld in 13 states at the point this article was written. That’s why an essay on abortion has become one of the most popular tasks in schools, colleges, and universities. When writing this kind of essay, students learn to express their opinion, find and draw arguments and examples, and conduct research.

It’s very easy to speculate on topics like this. However, this makes it harder to find credible and peer-reviewed information on the topic that isn’t merely someone’s opinion. If you were assigned this kind of academic task, do not lose heart. In this article, we will provide you with all the tips and tricks for writing about abortion.

Where to begin?

Conversations about abortion are always emotional. Complex stories, difficult decisions, bitter moments, and terrible diagnoses make this topic hard to cover. Some young people may be shocked by this assignment, while others would be happy to express their opinion on the matter.

One way or another, this topic doesn't leave anyone indifferent. However, it shouldn’t have an effect on the way you approach the research and writing process. What should you remember when working on an argumentative essay about abortion?

Don’t let your emotions take over. As this is an academic paper, you have to stay impartial and operate with facts. The topic is indeed sore and burning, causing thousands of scandals on the Internet, but you are writing it for school, not a Quora thread.
Try to balance your opinions. There are always two sides to one story, even if the story is so fragile. You need to present an issue from different angles. This is what your tutors seek to teach you.
Be tolerant and mind your language. It is very important not to hurt anybody with the choice of words in your essay. So make sure you avoid any possible rough words. It is important to respect people with polar opinions, especially when it comes to academic writing.
Use facts, not claims. Your essay cannot be based solely on your personal ideas – your conclusions should be derived from facts. Roe v. Wade case, WHO or Mayo Clinic information, and CDC are some of the sources you can rely on.

Speaking of Outline

An argumentative essay on abortion outline is a must-have even for experienced writers. In general, each essay, irrespective of its kind or topic, has a strict outline. It may be brief or extended, but the major parts are always the same:

Introduction. This is a relatively short paragraph that starts with a hook and presents the background information on the topic. It should end with a thesis statement telling your reader what your main goal or idea is.
Body. This section usually consists of 2-4 paragraphs. Each one has its own structure: main argument + facts to support it + small conclusion and transition into the next paragraph.
Conclusion. In this part, your task is to summarize all your thoughts and come to a general conclusive idea. You may have to restate some info from the body and your thesis statement and add a couple of conclusive statements without introducing new facts.

Why is it important to create an outline?

You will structure your ideas. We bet you’ve got lots on your mind. Writing them down and seeing how one can flow logically into the other will help you create a consistent paper. Naturally, you will have to abandon some of the ideas if they don’t fit the overall narrative you’re building.
You can get some inspiration. While creating your outline, which usually consists of some brief ideas, you can come up with many more to research. Some will add to your current ones or replace them with better options.
You will find the most suitable sources. Argumentative essay writing requires you to use solid facts and trustworthy arguments built on them. When the topic is as controversial as abortion, these arguments should be taken from up-to-date, reliable sources. With an outline, you will see if you have enough to back up your ideas.
You will write your text as professionals do. Most expert writers start with outlines to write the text faster and make it generally better. As you will have your ideas structured, the general flow of thoughts will be clear. And, of course, it will influence your overall grade positively.

Abortion Essay Introduction

The introduction is perhaps the most important part of the whole essay. In this relatively small part, you will have to present the issue under consideration and state your opinion on it. Here is a typical introduction outline:

The first sentence is a hook grabbing readers' attention.
A few sentences that go after elaborate on the hook. They give your readers some background and explain your research.
The last sentence is a thesis statement showing the key idea you are building your text around.

Before writing an abortion essay intro, first thing first, you will need to define your position. If you are in favor of this procedure, what exactly made you think so? If you are an opponent of abortion, determine how to argue your position. In both cases, you may research the point of view in medicine, history, ethics, and other fields.

When writing an introduction, remember:

Never repeat your title. First of all, it looks too obvious; secondly, it may be boring for your reader right from the start. Your first sentence should be a well-crafted hook. The topic of abortion worries many people, so it’s your chance to catch your audience’s attention with some facts or shocking figures.
Do not make it too long. Your task here is to engage your audience and let them know what they are about to learn. The rest of the information will be disclosed in the main part. Nobody likes long introductions, so keep it short but informative.
Pay due attention to the thesis statement. This is the central sentence of your introduction. A thesis statement in your abortion intro paragraph should show that you have a well-supported position and are ready to argue it. Therefore, it has to be strong and convey your idea as clearly as possible. We advise you to make several options for the thesis statement and choose the strongest one.

Hooks for an Abortion Essay

Writing a hook is a good way to catch the attention of your audience, as this is usually the first sentence in an essay. How to start an essay about abortion? You can begin with some shocking fact, question, statistics, or even a quote. However, always make sure that this piece is taken from a trusted resource.

Here are some examples of hooks you can use in your paper:

As of July 1, 2022, 13 states banned abortion, depriving millions of women of control of their bodies.
According to WHO, 125,000 abortions take place every day worldwide.
Is abortion a woman’s right or a crime?
Since 1994, more than 40 countries have liberalized their abortion laws.
Around 48% of all abortions are unsafe, and 8% of them lead to women’s death.
The right to an abortion is one of the reproductive and basic rights of a woman.
Abortion is as old as the world itself – women have resorted to this method since ancient times.
Only 60% of women in the world live in countries where pregnancy termination is allowed.

Body Paragraphs: Pros and Cons of Abortion

The body is the biggest part of your paper. Here, you have a chance to make your voice concerning the abortion issue heard. Not sure where to start? Facts about abortion pros and cons should give you a basic understanding of which direction to move in.

First things first, let’s review some brief tips for you on how to write the best essay body if you have already made up your mind.

Make a draft

It’s always a good idea to have a rough draft of your writing. Follow the outline and don’t bother with the word choice, grammar, or sentence structure much at first. You can polish it all later, as the initial draft will not likely be your final. You may see some omissions in your arguments, lack of factual basis, or repetitiveness that can be eliminated in the next versions.

Trust only reliable sources

This part of an essay includes loads of factual information, and you should be very careful with it. Otherwise, your paper may look unprofessional and cost you precious points. Never rely on sources like Wikipedia or tabloids – they lack veracity and preciseness.

Edit rigorously

It’s best to do it the next day after you finish writing so that you can spot even the smallest mistakes. Remember, this is the most important part of your paper, so it has to be flawless. You can also use editing tools like Grammarly.

Determine your weak points

Since you are writing an argumentative essay, your ideas should be backed up by strong facts so that you sound convincing. Sometimes it happens that one argument looks weaker than the other. Your task is to find it and strengthen it with more or better facts.

Add an opposing view

Sometimes, it’s not enough to present only one side of the discussion. Showing one of the common views from the opposing side might actually help you strengthen your main idea. Besides, making an attempt at refuting it with alternative facts can show your teacher or professor that you’ve researched and analyzed all viewpoints, not just the one you stand by.

If you have chosen a side but are struggling to find the arguments for or against it, we have complied abortion pro and cons list for you. You can use both sets if you are writing an abortion summary essay covering all the stances.

Why Should Abortion Be Legal

If you stick to the opinion that abortion is just a medical procedure, which should be a basic health care need for each woman, you will definitely want to write the pros of abortion essay. Here is some important information and a list of pros about abortion for you to use:

Since the fetus is a set of cells – not an individual, it’s up to a pregnant woman to make a decision concerning her body. Only she can decide whether she wants to keep the pregnancy or have an abortion. The abortion ban is a violation of a woman’s right to have control over her own body.
The fact that women and girls do not have access to effective contraception and safe abortion services has serious consequences for their own health and the health of their families.
The criminalization of abortion usually leads to an increase in the number of clandestine abortions. Many years ago, fetuses were disposed of with improvised means, which included knitting needles and half-straightened metal hangers. 13% of women’s deaths are the result of unsafe abortions.
Many women live in a difficult financial situation and cannot support their children financially. Having access to safe abortion takes this burden off their shoulders. This will also not decrease their quality of life as the birth and childcare would.
In countries where abortion is prohibited, there is a phenomenon of abortion tourism to other countries where it can be done without obstacles. Giving access to this procedure can make the lives of women much easier.
Women should not put their lives or health in danger because of the laws that were adopted by other people.
Girls and women who do not have proper sex education may not understand pregnancy as a concept or determine that they are pregnant early on. Instead of educating them and giving them a choice, an abortion ban forces them to become mothers and expects them to be fit parents despite not knowing much about reproduction.
There are women who have genetic disorders or severe mental health issues that will affect their children if they're born. Giving them an option to terminate ensures that there won't be a child with a low quality of life and that the woman will not have to suffer through pregnancy, birth, and raising a child with her condition.
Being pro-choice is about the freedom to make decisions about your body so that women who are for termination can do it safely, and those who are against it can choose not to do it. It is an inclusive option that caters to everyone.
Women and girls who were raped or abused by their partner, caregiver, or stranger and chose to terminate the pregnancy can now be imprisoned for longer than their abusers. This implies that the system values the life of a fetus with no or primitive brain function over the life of a living woman.
People who lived in times when artificial termination of pregnancy was scarcely available remember clandestine abortions and how traumatic they were, not only for the physical but also for the mental health of women. Indeed, traditionally, in many countries, large families were a norm. However, the times have changed, and supervised abortion is a safe and accessible procedure these days. A ban on abortion will simply push humanity away from the achievements of the civilized world.

Types of abortion

There are 2 main types of abortions that can be performed at different pregnancy stages and for different reasons:

Medical abortion. It is performed by taking a specially prescribed pill. It does not require any special manipulations and can even be done at home (however, after a doctor’s visit and under supervision). It is considered very safe and is usually done during the very first weeks of pregnancy.
Surgical abortion. This is a medical operation that is done with the help of a suction tube. It then removes the fetus and any related material. Anesthesia is used for this procedure, and therefore, it can only be done in a hospital. The maximum time allowed for surgical abortion is determined in each country specifically.

Cases when abortion is needed

Center for Reproductive Rights singles out the following situations when abortion is required:

When there is a risk to the life or physical/mental health of a pregnant woman.
When a pregnant woman has social or economic reasons for it.
Upon the woman's request.
If a pregnant woman is mentally or cognitively disabled.
In case of rape and/or incest.
If there were congenital anomalies detected in the fetus.

Countries and their abortion laws

Countries where abortion is legalized in any case: Australia, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Sweden, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Hungary, the Netherlands, Norway, Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Lithuania, etc.
Countries where abortion is completely prohibited: Angola, Venezuela, Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq, Lebanon, Nicaragua, Oman, Paraguay, Palau, Jamaica, Laos, Haiti, Honduras, Andorra, Aruba, El Salvador, Dominican Republic, Sierra Leone, Senegal, etc.
Countries where abortion is allowed for medical reasons: Afghanistan, Israel, Argentina, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Ghana, Israel, Morocco, Mexico, Bahamas, Central African Republic, Ecuador, Ghana, Algeria, Monaco, Pakistan, Poland, etc.
Countries where abortion is allowed for both medical and socioeconomic reasons: England, India, Spain, Luxembourg, Japan, Finland, Taiwan, Zambia, Iceland, Fiji, Cyprus, Barbados, Belize, etc.

Why Abortion Should Be Banned

Essays against abortions are popular in educational institutions since we all know that many people – many minds. So if you don’t want to support this procedure in your essay, here are some facts that may help you to argument why abortion is wrong:

Abortion at an early age is especially dangerous because a young woman with an unstable hormonal system may no longer be able to have children throughout her life. Termination of pregnancy disrupts the hormonal development of the body.
Health complications caused by abortion can occur many years after the procedure. Even if a woman feels fine in the short run, the situation may change in the future.
Abortion clearly has a negative effect on reproductive function. Artificial dilation of the cervix during an abortion leads to weak uterus tonus, which can cause a miscarriage during the next pregnancy.
Evidence shows that surgical termination of pregnancy significantly increases the risk of breast cancer.
In December 1996, the session of the Council of Europe on bioethics concluded that a fetus is considered a human being on the 14th day after conception.

You are free to use each of these arguments for essays against abortions. Remember that each claim should not be supported by emotions but by facts, figures, and so on.

Health complications after abortion

One way or another, abortion is extremely stressful for a woman’s body. Apart from that, it can even lead to various health problems in the future. You can also cover them in your cons of an abortion essay:

Continuation of pregnancy. If the dose of the drug is calculated by the doctor in the wrong way, the pregnancy will progress.
Uterine bleeding, which requires immediate surgical intervention.
Severe nausea or even vomiting occurs as a result of a sharp change in the hormonal background.
Severe stomach pain. Medical abortion causes miscarriage and, as a result, strong contractions of the uterus.
High blood pressure and allergic reactions to medicines.
Depression or other mental problems after a difficult procedure.

Abortion Essay Conclusion

After you have finished working on the previous sections of your paper, you will have to end it with a strong conclusion. The last impression is no less important than the first one. Here is how you can make it perfect in your conclusion paragraph on abortion:

It should be concise. The conclusion cannot be as long as your essay body and should not add anything that cannot be derived from the main section. Reiterate the key ideas, combine some of them, and end the paragraph with something for the readers to think about.
It cannot repeat already stated information. Restate your thesis statement in completely other words and summarize your main points. Do not repeat anything word for word – rephrase and shorten the information instead.
It should include a call to action or a cliffhanger. Writing experts believe that a rhetorical question works really great for an argumentative essay. Another good strategy is to leave your readers with some curious ideas to ponder upon.

Abortion Facts for Essay

Abortion is a topic that concerns most modern women. Thousands of books, research papers, and articles on abortion are written across the world. Even though pregnancy termination has become much safer and less stigmatized with time, it still worries millions. What can you cover in your paper so that it can really stand out among others? You may want to add some shocking abortion statistics and facts:

40-50 million abortions are done in the world every year (approximately 125,000 per day).
According to UN statistics, women have 25 million unsafe abortions each year. Most of them (97%) are performed in the countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. 14% of them are especially unsafe because they are done by people without any medical knowledge.
Since 2017, the United States has shown the highest abortion rate in the last 30 years.
The biggest number of abortion procedures happen in the countries where they are officially banned. The lowest rate is demonstrated in the countries with high income and free access to contraception.
Women in low-income regions are three times more susceptible to unplanned pregnancies than those in developed countries.
In Argentina, more than 38,000 women face dreadful health consequences after unsafe abortions.
The highest teen abortion rates in the world are seen in 3 countries: England, Wales, and Sweden.
Only 31% of teenagers decide to terminate their pregnancy. However, the rate of early pregnancies is getting lower each year.
Approximately 13 million children are born to mothers under the age of 20 each year.
5% of women of reproductive age live in countries where abortions are prohibited.

We hope that this abortion information was useful for you, and you can use some of these facts for your own argumentative essay. If you find some additional facts, make sure that they are not manipulative and are taken from official medical resources.

Abortion Essay Topics

Do you feel like you are lost in the abundance of information? Don’t know what topic to choose among the thousands available online? Check our short list of the best abortion argumentative essay topics:

Why should abortion be legalized essay
Abortion: a murder or a basic human right?
Why we should all support abortion rights
Is the abortion ban in the US a good initiative?
The moral aspect of teen abortions
Can the abortion ban solve birth control problems?
Should all countries allow abortion?
What consequences can abortion have in the long run?
Is denying abortion sexist?
Why is abortion a human right?
Are there any ethical implications of abortion?
Do you consider abortion a crime?
Should women face charges for terminating a pregnancy?

Want to come up with your own? Here is how to create good titles for abortion essays:

Write down the first associations. It can be something that swirls around in your head and comes to the surface when you think about the topic. These won’t necessarily be well-written headlines, but each word or phrase can be the first link in the chain of ideas that leads you to the best option.
Irony and puns are not always a good idea. Especially when it comes to such difficult topics as abortion. Therefore, in your efforts to be original, remain sensitive to the issue you want to discuss.
Never make a quote as your headline. First, a wordy quote makes the headline long. Secondly, readers do not understand whose words are given in the headline. Therefore, it may confuse them right from the start. If you have found a great quote, you can use it as your hook, but don’t forget to mention its author.
Try to briefly summarize what is said in the essay. What is the focus of your paper? If the essence of your argumentative essay can be reduced to one sentence, it can be used as a title, paraphrased, or shortened.
Write your title after you have finished your text. Before you just start writing, you might not yet have a catchy phrase in mind to use as a title. Don’t let it keep you from working on your essay – it might come along as you write.

Abortion Essay Example

We know that it is always easier to learn from a good example. For this reason, our writing experts have complied a detailed abortion essay outline for you. For your convenience, we have created two options with different opinions.

Topic: Why should abortion be legal?

Introduction – hook + thesis statement + short background information

Essay hook: More than 59% of women in the world do not have access to safe abortions, which leads to dreading health consequences or even death.

Thesis statement: Since banning abortions does not decrease their rates but only makes them unsafe, it is not logical to ban abortions.

Body – each paragraph should be devoted to one argument

Argument 1: Woman’s body – women’s rules. + example: basic human rights.

Argument 2: Banning abortion will only lead to more women’s death. + example: cases of Polish women.

Argument 3: Only women should decide on abortion. + example: many abortion laws are made by male politicians who lack knowledge and first-hand experience in pregnancies.

Conclusion – restated thesis statement + generalized conclusive statements + cliffhanger

Restated thesis: The abortion ban makes pregnancy terminations unsafe without decreasing the number of abortions, making it dangerous for women.

Cliffhanger: After all, who are we to decide a woman’s fate?

Topic: Why should abortion be banned?

Essay hook: Each year, over 40 million new babies are never born because their mothers decide to have an abortion.

Thesis statement: Abortions on request should be banned because we cannot decide for the baby whether it should live or die.

Argument 1: A fetus is considered a person almost as soon as it is conceived. Killing it should be regarded as murder. + example: Abortion bans in countries such as Poland, Egypt, etc.

Argument 2: Interrupting a baby’s life is morally wrong. + example: The Bible, the session of the Council of Europe on bioethics decision in 1996, etc.

Argument 3: Abortion may put the reproductive health of a woman at risk. + example: negative consequences of abortion.

Restated thesis: Women should not be allowed to have abortions without serious reason because a baby’s life is as priceless as their own.

Cliffhanger: Why is killing an adult considered a crime while killing an unborn baby is not?

Argumentative essay on pros and cons of abortion

Examples of Essays on Abortion

There are many great abortion essays examples on the Web. You can easily find an argumentative essay on abortion in pdf and save it as an example. Many students and scholars upload their pieces to specialized websites so that others can read them and continue the discussion in their own texts.

In a free argumentative essay on abortion, you can look at the structure of the paper, choice of the arguments, depth of research, and so on. Reading scientific papers on abortion or essays of famous activists is also a good idea. Here are the works of famous authors discussing abortion.

A Defense of Abortion by Judith Jarvis Thomson

Published in 1971, this essay by an American philosopher considers the moral permissibility of abortion. It is considered the most debated and famous essay on this topic, and it’s definitely worth reading no matter what your stance is.

Abortion and Infanticide by Michael Tooley

It was written in 1972 by an American philosopher known for his work in the field of metaphysics. In this essay, the author considers whether fetuses and infants have the same rights. Even though this work is quite complex, it presents some really interesting ideas on the matter.

Some Biological Insights into Abortion by Garret Hardin

This article by American ecologist Garret Hardin, who had focused on the issue of overpopulation during his scholarly activities, presents some insights into abortion from a scientific point of view. He also touches on non-biological issues, such as moral and economic. This essay will be of great interest to those who support the pro-choice stance.

H4 Hidden in Plain View: An Overview of Abortion in Rural Illinois and Around the Globe by Heather McIlvaine-Newsad

In this study, McIlvaine-Newsad has researched the phenomenon of abortion since prehistoric times. She also finds an obvious link between the rate of abortions and the specifics of each individual country. Overall, this scientific work published in 2014 is extremely interesting and useful for those who want to base their essay on factual information.

H4 Reproduction, Politics, and John Irving’s The Cider House Rules: Women’s Rights or “Fetal Rights”? by Helena Wahlström

In her article of 2013, Wahlström considers John Irving’s novel The Cider House Rules published in 1985 and is regarded as a revolutionary work for that time, as it acknowledges abortion mostly as a political problem. This article will be a great option for those who want to investigate the roots of the abortion debate.

FAQs On Abortion Argumentative Essay

Is abortion immoral?

This question is impossible to answer correctly because each person independently determines their own moral framework. One group of people will say that abortion is a woman’s right because only she has power over her body and can make decisions about it. Another group will argue that the embryo is also a person and has the right to birth and life.

In general, the attitude towards abortion is determined based on the political and religious views of each person. Religious people generally believe that abortion is immoral because it is murder, while secular people see it as a normal medical procedure. For example, in the US, the ban on abortion was introduced in red states where the vast majority have conservative views, while blue liberal states do not support this law. Overall, it’s up to a person to decide whether they consider abortion immoral based on their own values and beliefs.

Is abortion legal?

The answer to this question depends on the country in which you live. There are countries in which pregnancy termination is a common medical procedure and is performed at the woman's request. There are also states in which there must be a serious reason for abortion: medical, social, or economic. Finally, there are nations in which abortion is prohibited and criminalized. For example, in Jamaica, a woman can get life imprisonment for abortion, while in Kenya, a medical worker who volunteers to perform an abortion can be imprisoned for up to 14 years.

Is abortion safe?

In general, modern medicine has reached such a level that abortion has become a common (albeit difficult from various points of view) medical procedure. There are several types of abortion, as well as many medical devices and means that ensure the maximum safety of the pregnancy termination. Like all other medical procedures, abortion can have various consequences and complications.

Abortions – whether safe or not - exist in all countries of the world. The thing is that more than half of them are dangerous because women have them in unsuitable conditions and without professional help. Only universal access to abortion in all parts of the world can make it absolutely safe. In such a case, it will be performed only after a thorough assessment and under the control of a medical professional who can mitigate the potential risks.

How safe is abortion?

If we do not talk about the ethical side of the issue related to abortion, it still has some risks. In fact, any medical procedure has them to a greater or lesser extent.

The effectiveness of the safe method in a medical setting is 80-99%. An illegal abortion (for example, the one without special indications after 12 weeks) can lead to a patient’s death, and the person who performed it will be criminally liable in this case.

Doctors do not have universal advice for all pregnant women on whether it is worth making this decision or not. However, many of them still tend to believe that any contraception - even one that may have negative side effects - is better than abortion. That’s why spreading awareness on means of contraception and free access to it is vital.

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Abortion - List of Free Essay Examples And Topic Ideas

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Don Marquis begins his argument of abortion being immoral by mentioning the pro-choice premise, which was that the statement of a fetus is never a person being too narrow. It's too narrow because if the fetus is never a person, then what would be the difference of a 9-month-old fetus and a newborn baby? That would just mean that infanticide isn't considered murder because a 9-month-old fetus and newborn weren't ever considered to be a person. Marquis further mentions that […]

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Premature birth ends a pregnancy by killing an actual existence yet the mother isn't accused of homicide. Is this right? Shockingly, this has happened roughly twenty million times in the previous twenty years. Tragically, in South Africa, an unborn human has been slaughtered lawfully because of the nation's insufficient laws! The enemy of a honest unprotected human is a killer, accordingly, the individual merits the discipline proportional to a killer by law. Premature birth on interest just gives a mother […]

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Let’s Talk about my Abortion Article

Why is something that requires two people, almost always considered the woman's problem? Every answer to this question is different, more aggressive in some cases, but it narrows down to basic human rights. Now you may be asking "What the hell is she talking about?" and I can assure you, we will get to that. I'd like for you to first put yourself in a situation: You're given a puppy, yet you're allergic to dogs and absolutely do not have […]

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Am sure we have all heard of the girl meets boy story, where the girl falls in love with the boy despite receiving plenty of warnings and criticism from any person who has ever mattered in the girl's life. Everything is merry and life is good for the girl until one day she realizes she has missed her period and rushes to her man's home telling herself that everything will be okay. Reality checks in, hard, when the boy declines […]

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For Gwendolyn Brooks, writing poetry that would be considered out of the ordinary and frowned upon was a common theme for her. Her widespread knowledge on subjects like race, ethnicity, gender, and even abortion placed this African American poet apart from many others. Like many poets, Brooks based many of her works on her own life experiences. Although it's unclear whether or not Brooks had an abortion herself, she creates hints and provokes strong feelings towards the issue, revealing the […]

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We hold these truths to be self-evident: that men and women are created equal (Elizabeth Cady Stanton). In America this has been the basis of what our nation stands for. It is stated that every citizen has the right to equality that shall not be stripped away, in many cases that is not true. Whether man or women you should possess the same rights, but more often than not the women's rights are taken away. There are many instances in […]

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Every year, approximately 40-50 million abortions are conducted. That's about 125,000 little human beings being vacuumed, sucked out, and dissolved, everyday. That's 1 baby being aborted every 26 seconds. As of 58% of Americans think abortion should be legal.. Only 37% thinks it should be illegal in all, Or most cases. Abortion should be eliminated because it is murder, gives women mental health issues, and can cause high risks in the mother's future baby's health. There are two different types […]

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My Beliefs on Abortion

Society today condones the killing of a life, they call it abortion, but I will try to show you why this is wrong. Life begins at conception. The Bible provides proof that God knew us before we were even formed. This provides truth that what is inside a woman's body is a human life. I believe that when you decide to have an abortion, you are deciding to kill an innocent baby. Whether you're doing it because the baby may […]

Research on Abortion Issues

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Abortion Issues in Modern World

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Abortion and Fathers Rights

In this section I will be focusing on the fathers' situation before and after conception, and bring out arguments how he could effectively avoid becoming a parent in any way (biological, bearer of financial costs, emotional). The father after conception has no alternatives left, unlike the mother has. She is in a position that can terminate the pregnancy by opting for an abortion, or she can carry out (or at least try to) the pregnancy until the end. The father […]

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Frequently Asked Questions

Why abortion is legal.

Due to the outcome of a Supreme Court hearing, abortion is completely legal. In 1973, the Supreme Court's ruling on Roe vs Wade provided people legal access to abortion across the entire country. While legal, some doctors will not perform abortions.

How Abortion Affects Economy?

Women who have access to legal abortion will have the ability to continue their education and careers. Women denied an abortion because of gestational limits are more than 80% more likely to experience bankruptcy or face eviction.

Where Abortion is Illegal?

Abortion is legal in the entire country of the US, but some states have restrictions based on gestational status, fetal fatal conditions, and even rape. Other countries around the world have different laws and some have completely outlawed abortion, including Honduras, the Dominican Republic, and El Salvador.

Will Abortion Affect Health?

Women who have an abortion by a medical professional are at no risk for future pregnancies and there are no risks to overall health. Abortions do not increase any risk of breast cancer or have any effect on fertility.

Is Abortion Morally Justifiable?

This will depend on the person and their beliefs. Many women find abortion to be moral and a choice they are allowed to make in regards to their own bodies. Some religions have a strict stance on abortion and deem it immoral, regardless of the reason.

How To Write an Essay About Abortion

Introduction to the topic of abortion.

Abortion is a deeply complex and often controversial topic, encompassing a range of ethical, legal, and social issues. In your essay's introduction, it is important to define abortion and the various viewpoints and ethical considerations surrounding it. This introduction should establish the scope of your essay, whether you are focusing on the moral arguments, the legal aspects, the impact on individuals and society, or a combination of these. Your introduction should set a respectful and scholarly tone, acknowledging the sensitivity of the topic and the diverse opinions held by different groups.

Developing a Balanced Argument

The body of your essay should be dedicated to presenting a balanced and well-reasoned argument. Whether your essay is persuasive, analytical, or exploratory in nature, each paragraph should focus on a specific aspect of the abortion debate. This could include the ethical implications of abortion, the legal history and current laws regarding abortion in different regions, the psychological and physical effects on individuals, or the societal impacts. It's crucial to back up your points with evidence, such as statistical data, legal texts, ethical theories, medical research, and sociological studies. Addressing counterarguments is also important to show that you have considered multiple viewpoints and to strengthen your own argument.

Exploring Ethical and Societal Implications

An essay on abortion should also delve into the ethical dilemmas and societal implications surrounding the topic. This might involve discussing the moral philosophies related to the right to life, bodily autonomy, and the definition of personhood. The societal perspective might include the impact of abortion laws on different socio-economic groups, public health considerations, and the role of education and family planning. This section of your essay should challenge readers to think critically about their own values and the role of societal norms and laws in shaping the abortion debate.

Concluding the Discussion

In your conclusion, bring together all the threads of your argument, emphasizing the complexity of the abortion debate. This is your final opportunity to reinforce your main points and leave a lasting impression on your readers. Reflect on the broader implications of the debate and the ongoing challenges in finding a consensus in such a polarized issue. You might also offer recommendations for future policy, research, or public discourse. Remember, a strong conclusion doesn't just restate what has been said; it provides closure and offers new insights, prompting readers to continue thinking about the topic long after they have finished reading your essay.

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Persuasive Essay Guide

Persuasive Essay About Abortion

Crafting a Convincing Persuasive Essay About Abortion

How To Write a Persuasive Essay About Abortion?

Abortion is a controversial topic, with people having differing points of view and opinions on the matter. There are those who oppose abortion, while some people endorse pro-choice arguments.

It is also an emotionally charged subject, so you need to be extra careful when crafting your persuasive essay .

Before you start writing your persuasive essay, you need to understand the following steps.

Step 1: Choose Your Position

The first step to writing a persuasive essay on abortion is to decide your position. Do you support the practice or are you against it? You need to make sure that you have a clear opinion before you begin writing.

Once you have decided, research and find evidence that supports your position. This will help strengthen your argument.

Check out the video below to get more insights into this topic:

Step 2: Choose Your Audience

The next step is to decide who your audience will be. Will you write for pro-life or pro-choice individuals? Or both?

Knowing who you are writing for will guide your writing and help you include the most relevant facts and information.

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Step 3: Define Your Argument

Now that you have chosen your position and audience, it is time to craft your argument.

Start by defining what you believe and why, making sure to use evidence to support your claims. You also need to consider the opposing arguments and come up with counter arguments. This helps make your essay more balanced and convincing.

Step 4: Format Your Essay

Once you have the argument ready, it is time to craft your persuasive essay. Follow a standard format for the essay, with an introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion.

Make sure that each paragraph is organized and flows smoothly. Use clear and concise language, getting straight to the point.

Step 5: Proofread and Edit

The last step in writing your persuasive essay is to make sure that you proofread and edit it carefully. Look for spelling, grammar, punctuation, or factual errors and correct them. This will help make your essay more professional and convincing.

These are the steps you need to follow when writing a persuasive essay on abortion. It is a good idea to read some examples before you start so you can know how they should be written.

Continue reading to find helpful examples.

Persuasive Essay About Abortion Examples

To help you get started, here are some example persuasive essays on abortion that may be useful for your own paper.

Short Persuasive Essay About Abortion

Persuasive Essay About No To Abortion

What Is Abortion? - Essay Example

Persuasive Speech on Abortion

Legal Abortion Persuasive Essay

Persuasive Essay About Abortion in the Philippines

Persuasive Essay about legalizing abortion

You can also read m ore persuasive essay examples to imp rove your persuasive skills.

Examples of Argumentative Essay About Abortion

An argumentative essay is a type of essay that presents both sides of an argument. These essays rely heavily on logic and evidence.

Here are some examples of argumentative essay with introduction, body and conclusion that you can use as a reference in writing your own argumentative essay.

Abortion Persuasive Essay Introduction

Argumentative Essay About Abortion Conclusion

Argumentative Essay About Abortion Pdf

Argumentative Essay About Abortion in the Philippines

Argumentative Essay About Abortion - Introduction

Abortion Persuasive Essay Topics

If you are looking for some topics to write your persuasive essay on abortion, here are some examples:

Should abortion be legal in the United States?
Is it ethical to perform abortions, considering its pros and cons?
What should be done to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies that lead to abortions?
Is there a connection between abortion and psychological trauma?
What are the ethical implications of abortion on demand?
How has the debate over abortion changed over time?
Should there be legal restrictions on late-term abortions?
Does gender play a role in how people view abortion rights?
Is it possible to reduce poverty and unwanted pregnancies through better sex education?
How is the anti-abortion point of view affected by religious beliefs and values?

These are just some of the potential topics that you can use for your persuasive essay on abortion. Think carefully about the topic you want to write about and make sure it is something that interests you.

Check out m ore persuasive essay topics that will help you explore other things that you can write about!

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Facts About Abortion You Need to Know

Here are some facts about abortion that will help you formulate better arguments.

According to the Guttmacher Institute , 1 in 4 pregnancies end in abortion.
The majority of abortions are performed in the first trimester.
Abortion is one of the safest medical procedures, with less than a 0.5% risk of major complications.
In the United States, 14 states have laws that restrict or ban most forms of abortion after 20 weeks gestation.
Seven out of 198 nations allow elective abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy.
In places where abortion is illegal, more women die during childbirth and due to complications resulting from pregnancy.
A majority of pregnant women who opt for abortions do so for financial and social reasons.
According to estimates, 56 million abortions occur annually.

In conclusion, these are some of the examples, steps, and topics that you can use to write a persuasive essay. Make sure to do your research thoroughly and back up your arguments with evidence. This will make your essay more professional and convincing.

Need the services of a persuasive essay writing service ? We've got your back!

MyPerfectWords.com that provides help to students in the form of professionally written essays. Our persuasive essay writer can craft quality persuasive essays on any topic, including abortion.

So, just ask our experts ' do my essay ' and get professional help.

Frequently Asked Questions

What should i talk about in an essay about abortion.

When writing an essay about abortion, it is important to cover all the aspects of the subject. This includes discussing both sides of the argument, providing facts and evidence to support your claims, and exploring potential solutions.

What is a good argument for abortion?

A good argument for abortion could be that it is a woman’s choice to choose whether or not to have an abortion. It is also important to consider the potential risks of carrying a pregnancy to term.

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5.1: Arguments Against Abortion

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Page ID 35918

Nathan Nobis & Kristina Grob
Morehouse College & University of South Carolina Sumter via Open Philosophy Press

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We will begin with arguments for the conclusion that abortion is generally wrong , perhaps nearly always wrong . These can be seen as reasons to believe fetuses have the “right to life” or are otherwise seriously wrong to kill.

5.1.1 Fetuses are human

First, there is the claim that fetuses are “human” and so abortion is wrong. People sometimes debate whether fetuses are human , but fetuses found in (human) women clearly are biologically human : they aren’t cats or dogs. And so we have this argument, with a clearly true first premise:

Fetuses are biologically human.

All things that are biologically human are wrong to kill.

Therefore, fetuses are wrong to kill.

The second premise, however, is false, as easy counterexamples show. Consider some random living biologically human cells or tissues in a petri dish. It wouldn’t be wrong at all to wash those cells or tissues down the drain, killing them; scratching yourself or shaving might kill some biologically human skin cells, but that’s not wrong; a tumor might be biologically human, but not wrong to kill. So just because something is biologically human, that does not at all mean it’s wrong to kill that thing. We saw this same point about what’s merely biologically alive.

This suggests a deficiency in some common understandings of the important idea of “human rights.” “Human rights” are sometimes described as rights someone has just because they are human or simply in virtue of being human .

But the human cells in the petri dish above don’t have “human rights” and a human heart wouldn’t have “human rights” either. Many examples would make it clear that merely being biologically human doesn’t give something human rights. And many human rights advocates do not think that abortion is wrong, despite recognizing that (human) fetuses are biologically human.

The problem about what is often said about human rights is that people often do not think about what makes human beings have rights or why we have them, when we have them. The common explanation, that we have (human) rights just because we are (biologically) human , is incorrect, as the above discussion makes clear. This misunderstanding of the basis or foundation of human rights is problematic because it leads to a widespread, misplaced fixation on whether fetuses are merely biologically “human” and the mistaken thought that if they are, they have “human rights.” To address this problem, we need to identify better, more fundamental, explanations why we have rights, or why killing us is generally wrong, and see how those explanations might apply to fetuses, as we are doing here.

It might be that when people appeal to the importance and value of being “human,” the concern isn’t our biology itself, but the psychological characteristics that many human beings have: consciousness, awareness, feelings and so on. We will discuss this different meaning of “human” below. This meaning of “human” might be better expressed as conscious being , or “person,” or human person. This might be what people have in mind when they argue that fetuses aren’t even “human.”

Human rights are vitally important, and we would do better if we spoke in terms of “conscious-being rights” or “person-rights,” not “human rights.” This more accurate and informed understanding and terminology would help address human rights issues in general, and help us better think through ethical questions about biologically human embryos and fetuses.

5.1.2 Fetuses are human beings

Some respond to the arguments above—against the significance of being merely biologically human—by observing that fetuses aren’t just mere human cells, but are organized in ways that make them beings or organisms . (A kidney is part of a “being,” but the “being” is the whole organism.) That suggests this argument:

Fetuses are human beings or organisms .

All human beings or organisms are wrong to kill.

Therefore, fetuses are wrong to kill, so abortion is wrong.

The first premise is true: fetuses are dependent beings, but dependent beings are still beings.

The second premise, however, is the challenge, in terms of providing good reasons to accept it. Clearly many human beings or organisms are wrong to kill, or wrong to kill unless there’s a good reason that would justify that killing, e.g., self-defense. (This is often described by philosophers as us being prima facie wrong to kill, in contrast to absolutely or necessarily wrong to kill.) Why is this though? What makes us wrong to kill? And do these answers suggest that all human beings or organisms are wrong to kill?

Above it was argued that we are wrong to kill because we are conscious and feeling: we are aware of the world, have feelings and our perspectives can go better or worse for us —we can be harmed— and that’s what makes killing us wrong. It may also sometimes be not wrong to let us die, and perhaps even kill us, if we come to completely and permanently lacking consciousness, say from major brain damage or a coma, since we can’t be harmed by death anymore: we might even be described as dead in the sense of being “brain dead.” 10

So, on this explanation, human beings are wrong to kill, when they are wrong to kill, not because they are human beings (a circular explanation), but because we have psychological, mental or emotional characteristics like these. This explains why we have rights in a simple, common-sense way: it also simply explains why rocks, microorganisms and plants don’t have rights. The challenge then is explaining why fetuses that have never been conscious or had any feeling or awareness would be wrong to kill. How then can the second premise above, general to all human organisms, be supported, especially when applied to early fetuses?

One common attempt is to argue that early fetuses are wrong to kill because there is continuous development from fetuses to us, and since we are wrong to kill now , fetuses are also wrong to kill, since we’ve been the “same being” all along. 11 But this can’t be good reasoning, since we have many physical, cognitive, emotional and moral characteristics now that we lacked as fetuses (and as children). So even if we are the “same being” over time, even if we were once early fetuses, that doesn’t show that fetuses have the moral rights that babies, children and adults have: we, our bodies and our rights sometimes change.

A second attempt proposes that rights are essential to human organisms: they have them whenever they exist. This perspective sees having rights, or the characteristics that make someone have rights, as essential to living human organisms. The claim is that “having rights” is an essential property of human beings or organisms, and so whenever there’s a living human organism, there’s someone with rights, even if that organism totally lacks consciousness, like an early fetus. (In contrast, the proposal we advocate for about what makes us have rights understands rights as “accidental” to our bodies but “essential” to our minds or awareness, since our bodies haven’t always “contained” a conscious being, so to speak.)

Such a view supports the premise above; maybe it just is that premise above. But why believe that rights are essential to human organisms? Some argue this is because of what “kind” of beings we are, which is often presumed to be “rational beings.” The reasoning seems to be this: first, that rights come from being a rational being: this is part of our “nature.” Second, that all human organisms, including fetuses, are the “kind” of being that is a “rational being,” so every being of the “kind” rational being has rights. 12

In response, this explanation might seem question-begging: it might amount to just asserting that all human beings have rights. This explanation is, at least, abstract. It seems to involve some categorization and a claim that everyone who is in a certain category has some of the same moral characteristics that others in that category have, but because of a characteristic (actual rationality) that only these others have: so, these others profoundly define what everyone else is . If this makes sense, why not also categorize us all as not rational beings , if we are the same kind of beings as fetuses that are actually not rational?

This explanation might seem to involve thinking that rights somehow “trickle down” from later rationality to our embryonic origins, and so what we have later we also have earlier , because we are the same being or the same “kind” of being. But this idea is, in general, doubtful: we are now responsible beings, in part because we are rational beings, but fetuses aren’t responsible for anything. And we are now able to engage in moral reasoning since we are rational beings, but fetuses don’t have the “rights” that uniquely depend on moral reasoning abilities. So that an individual is a member of some general group or kind doesn’t tell us much about their rights: that depends on the actual details about that individual, beyond their being members of a group or kind.

To make this more concrete, return to the permanently comatose individuals mentioned above: are we the same kind of beings, of the same “essence,” as these human beings? If so, then it seems that some human beings can be not wrong to let die or kill, when they have lost consciousness. Therefore, perhaps some other human beings, like early fetuses, are also not wrong to kill before they have gained consciousness . And if we are not the same “kind” of beings, or have different essences, then perhaps we also aren’t the same kind of beings as fetuses either.

Similar questions arise concerning anencephalic babies, tragically born without most of their brains: are they the same “kind” of beings as “regular” babies or us? If so, then—since such babies are arguably morally permissible to let die, even when they could be kept alive, since being alive does them no good—then being of our “kind” doesn’t mean the individual has the same rights as us, since letting us die would be wrong. But if such babies are a different “kind” of beings than us, then pre-conscious fetuses might be of a relevantly different kind also.

So, in general, this proposal that early fetuses essentially have rights is suspect, if we evaluate the reasons given in its support. Even if fetuses and us are the same “kind” of beings (which perhaps we are not!) that doesn’t immediately tell us what rights fetuses would have, if any. And we might even reasonably think that, despite our being the same kind of beings as fetuses (e.g., the same kind of biology), we are also importantly different kinds of beings (e.g., one kind with a mental life and another kind which has never had it). This photograph of a 6-week old fetus might help bring out the ambiguity in what kinds of beings we all are:

In sum, the abstract view that all human organisms have rights essentially needs to be plausibly explained and defended. We need to understand how it really works. We need to be shown why it’s a better explanation, all things considered, than a consciousness and feelings-based theory of rights that simply explains why we, and babies, have rights, why racism, sexism and other forms of clearly wrongful discrimination are wrong, and , importantly, how we might lose rights in irreversible coma cases (if people always retained the right to life in these circumstances, presumably, it would be wrong to let anyone die), and more.

5.1.3 Fetuses are persons

Finally, we get to what some see as the core issue here, namely whether fetuses are persons , and an argument like this:

Fetuses are persons, perhaps from conception.

Persons have the right to life and are wrong to kill.

So, abortion is wrong, as it involves killing persons.

The second premise seems very plausible, but there are some important complications about it that will be discussed later. So let’s focus on the idea of personhood and whether any fetuses are persons. What is it to be a person ? One answer that everyone can agree on is that persons are beings with rights and value . That’s a fine answer, but it takes us back to the initial question: OK, who or what has the rights and value of persons? What makes someone or something a person?

Answers here are often merely asserted , but these answers need to be tested: definitions can be judged in terms of whether they fit how a word is used. We might begin by thinking about what makes us persons. Consider this:

We are persons now. Either we will always be persons or we will cease being persons. If we will cease to be persons, what can end our personhood? If we will always be persons, how could that be?

Both options yield insight into personhood. Many people think that their personhood ends at death or if they were to go into a permanent coma: their body is (biologically) alive but the person is gone: that is why other people are sad. And if we continue to exist after the death of our bodies, as some religions maintain, what continues to exist? The person , perhaps even without a body, some think! Both responses suggest that personhood is defined by a rough and vague set of psychological or mental, rational and emotional characteristics: consciousness, knowledge, memories, and ways of communicating, all psychologically unified by a unique personality.

A second activity supports this understanding:

Make a list of things that are definitely not persons . Make a list of individuals who definitely are persons . Make a list of imaginary or fictional personified beings which, if existed, would be persons: these beings that fit or display the concept of person, even if they don’t exist. What explains the patterns of the lists?

Rocks, carrots, cups and dead gnats are clearly not persons. We are persons. Science fiction gives us ideas of personified beings: to give something the traits of a person is to indicate what the traits of persons are, so personified beings give insights into what it is to be a person. Even though the non-human characters from, say, Star Wars don’t exist, they fit the concept of person: we could befriend them, work with them, and so on, and we could only do that with persons. A common idea of God is that of an immaterial person who has exceptional power, knowledge, and goodness: you couldn’t pray to a rock and hope that rock would respond: you could only pray to a person. Are conscious and feeling animals, like chimpanzees, dolphins, cats, dogs, chickens, pigs, and cows more relevantly like us, as persons, or are they more like rocks and cabbages, non-persons? Conscious and feeling animals seem to be closer to persons than not. 13 So, this classificatory and explanatory activity further supports a psychological understanding of personhood: persons are, at root, conscious, aware and feeling beings.

Concerning abortion, early fetuses would not be persons on this account: they are not yet conscious or aware since their brains and nervous systems are either non-existent or insufficiently developed. Consciousness emerges in fetuses much later in pregnancy, likely after the first trimester or a bit beyond. This is after when most abortions occur. Most abortions, then, do not involve killing a person , since the fetus has not developed the characteristics for personhood. We will briefly discuss later abortions, that potentially affect fetuses who are persons or close to it, below.

It is perhaps worthwhile to notice though that if someone believed that fetuses are persons and thought this makes abortion wrong, it’s unclear how they could coherently believe that a pregnancy resulting from rape or incest could permissibly be ended by an abortion. Some who oppose abortion argue that, since you are a person, it would be wrong to kill you now even if you were conceived because of a rape, and so it’s wrong to kill any fetus who is a person, even if they exist because of a rape: whether someone is a person or not doesn’t depend on their origins: it would make no sense to think that, for two otherwise identical fetuses, one is a person but the other isn’t, because that one was conceived by rape. Therefore, those who accept a “personhood argument” against abortion, yet think that abortions in cases of rape are acceptable, seem to have an inconsistent view.

5.1.4 Fetuses are potential persons

If fetuses aren’t persons, they are at least potential persons, meaning they could and would become persons. This is true. This, however, doesn’t mean that they currently have the rights of persons because, in general, potential things of a kind don’t have the rights of actual things of that kind : potential doctors, lawyers, judges, presidents, voters, veterans, adults, parents, spouses, graduates, moral reasoners and more don’t have the rights of actual individuals of those kinds.

Some respond that potential gives the right to at least try to become something. But that trying sometimes involves the cooperation of others: if your friend is a potential medical student, but only if you tutor her for many hours a day, are you obligated to tutor her? If my child is a potential NASCAR champion, am I obligated to buy her a race car to practice? ‘No’ to both and so it is unclear that a pregnant woman would be obligated to provide what’s necessary to bring about a fetus’s potential. (More on that below, concerning the what obligations the right to life imposes on others, in terms of obligations to assist other people.)

5.1.5 Abortion prevents fetuses from experiencing their valuable futures

The argument against abortion that is likely most-discussed by philosophers comes from philosopher Don Marquis. 14 He argues that it is wrong to kill us, typical adults and children, because it deprives us from experiencing our (expected to be) valuable futures, which is a great loss to us . He argues that since fetuses also have valuable futures (“futures like ours” he calls them), they are also wrong to kill. His argument has much to recommend it, but there are reasons to doubt it as well.

First, fetuses don’t seem to have futures like our futures , since—as they are pre-conscious—they are entirely psychologically disconnected from any future experiences: there is no (even broken) chain of experiences from the fetus to that future person’s experiences. Babies are, at least, aware of the current moment, which leads to the next moment; children and adults think about and plan for their futures, but fetuses cannot do these things, being completely unconscious and without a mind.

Second, this fact might even mean that the early fetus doesn’t literally have a future: if your future couldn’t include you being a merely physical, non-conscious object (e.g., you couldn’t be a corpse: if there’s a corpse, you are gone), then non-conscious physical objects, like a fetus, couldn’t literally be a future person. 15 If this is correct, early fetuses don’t even have futures, much less futures like ours. Something would have a future, like ours, only when there is someone there to be psychologically connected to that future: that someone arrives later in pregnancy, after when most abortions occur.

A third objection is more abstract and depends on the “metaphysics” of objects. It begins with the observation that there are single objects with parts with space between them . Indeed almost every object is like this, if you could look close enough: it’s not just single dinette sets, since there is literally some space between the parts of most physical objects. From this, it follows that there seem to be single objects such as an-egg-and-the-sperm-that-would-fertilize-it . And these would also seem to have a future of value, given how Marquis describes this concept. (It should be made clear that sperm and eggs alone do not have futures of value, and Marquis does not claim they do: this is not the objection here). The problem is that contraception, even by abstinence , prevents that thing’s future of value from materializing, and so seems to be wrong when we use Marquis’s reasoning. Since contraception is not wrong, but his general premise suggests that it is , it seems that preventing something from experiencing its valuable future isn’t always wrong and so Marquis’s argument appears to be unsound. 16

In sum, these are some of the most influential arguments against abortion. Our discussion was brief, but these arguments do not appear to be successful: they do not show that abortion is wrong, much less make it clear and obvious that abortion is wrong.

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How to Write an Abortion Argumentative Essay?

Table of Contents

According to different views, the abortion essay topic is very popular to discuss in various papers on abortion. If you have to create this document, there are various methods to build it, depending on the task and your opinion. When you’re required to complete a custom essay but get no idea about how to fulfill this work properly, read our guide and get some help from real professionals!

5 Successful Abortion Essay Writing Tips

Abortion is an interesting subject that is always hotly debated in various sides of life of any country. People argue about the main advantages and disadvantages of the termination of a pregnancy. Needless to say, it is possible to view and discuss abortion from various positions.

Sometimes woman’s health condition doesn’t allow her to carry a healthy child, and the doctor could even recommend abortion. This could also happen if they discovered the fetus has some abnormalities, so without making an abortion, a woman would have a baby with mental or/and physical injuries. Sometimes, such babies wouldn’t be able to live for long.

But some religious views are totally against abortion, and they suppose only God could give and take lives. Follow our useful tips on creating a successful abortion argumentative essay.

Tip 1 – Create the Paper Structure

At the start, you should know that a paper must be well-structured to keep it solid and logical. We suggest using a 5-paragraphs structure that contains next points:

Introduction – it’s quite important to create a bright start to involve people in reading a whole argumentative essay on abortion. Here you should place a thesis statement of your document.
The main part – the most important and the biggest part of your work that should contain at least three paragraphs. Remember that each part should cover one idea.
Conclusion – it is the final part of your paper where you need to restate a thesis briefly and finish your work logically.

Tip 2 – Outline Your Work

Before you have started to create your paper, it’s important to outline your future abortion arguments essay. It is an important step that will keep your work well-structured. You won’t lose any important thought or idea with the prepared outline, so don’t neglect this stage if you really want to create a successful paper.

Tip 3 – Plan Your Time Wisely

Plan your time during writing, so you’d never appear in a situation when you will have to write the whole work last night. Try to plan some time for brainstorming ideas and creating an outline, some time for writing your paper, and some time for proofreading and making corrections. Only in this way your argumentative essay about abortion will look professional and interesting to read.

Tip 4 – Find Good Sources

When you create an argumentative paper, it’s quite important to find trustworthy sources to support your argument. No matter which position you take – for or against abortion, it’s not enough just to tell your opinion to readers. You need strong arguments to make a successful document that will help to persuade people.

Tip 5 – Read Abortion Essays Examples

It’s useful to find online and read successful argumentative essay on abortion examples. You can find many interesting persuasive techniques and see the structure of other authors’ documents to make your own paper. There are many free services with various types of manuscripts online, including essays on abortions.

Do’s and Don’ts of Abortion Essay Writing

As we already said before, there are many ways in argumentative abortion essay topics. Here are some examples of papers you could choose:

Essay against abortion – in this work, you should put a thesis statement that making abortion is a huge mistake and support this idea with strong evidence;
Essay on abortion – this paper proofs that some cases are really needed termination of the pregnancy;
Abortion argument essay – this type of work should discuss if this is right or wrong to make abortion;
Persuasive essay against abortion – here, an author should bring as many as possible arguments, ideas, and research to get the audience to agree with their point of view;
Abortion pro-choice essay – shows to the readers the ideas why, in some cases, a pregnancy terminating is really necessary.

And here are several do’s and don’ts tips that will help create your paper without wasting time:

When you’re writing a paper about abortion, you can put in the document any facts from trustworthy sources, including stories from real life. Maybe you know a woman who didn’t make an abortion and how it changed her life for the better in the future. Tell readers a bright and interesting story to persuade them.

Abortion essays are quite complex papers to create that require good skills in writing persuasive papers. We do not recommend including a long and boring introduction in this paper. Start by highlighting a problem and then go to the “action.” People like to read interesting stories from life, so give them what they want!

Abortion Essay Sample

It goes without saying, it’s quite important to protect human rights because every person can select how to live their life, and nobody else cannot intrude. But when there is too much freedom, it can lead to disorder and chaos. One of the important social issues that have been discussed by many people all over the world is abortion.

For many years, the subject of abortion keeps the first position when it’s going about different opinions. Some people act for legalization when others think it’s just impossible to let someone decide if their future child will die or not. Both sides have their arguments, but overall, abortion is a complex thing that harms both baby and mother, and it’s not just about physical things.

People who keep the position for abortions are ensured the life of the baby begins at his birth, so the unborn baby isn’t a human, so a woman can terminate her pregnancy. But is it true that life begins only at birth? If so, then a fetus would be dead when it’s inside the mother. As all people know, a fetus feels and even hears music being in the womb. So, when does life begin? Where is the line between a dead and alive child? Where is a position between termination and killing?

Understandably, any normal woman wouldn’t kill her child after birth. Everyone would say that a mother who has killed her 1-year old child is a murder and she should go to jail, but nobody thinks the same about a woman who did an abortion because she didn’t want to have a baby. The thing of destroying the baby inside the woman doesn’t look like an act of killing for many people.

Many people think abortion is a standard procedure like any other operation, but it’s not true. We make various operations to stay healthy, but it’s not about abortion. This kind of operation doesn’t bring any positive impact to the woman because it affects health badly and may cause many bad things in the future, including ectopic pregnancy, infertility, and cancer. A woman who made an abortion once gets a risk of ectopic pregnancy for 30%, and a woman who made 2-3 abortions gets about 160% probability of the same problem. For example, in America, when abortion was legalized, women get an increase in ectopic pregnancies.

Apart from this, women suffer psychologically when they make an abortion. Maybe some of them do not understand the whole importance of the problem, but it’s not normal for a healthy woman to destroy her baby, even if it’s unborn yet, even if it’s very tiny if it’s just appeared inside her and starts to grow up and develop. According to the statistics, about 28% of women who made abortions attempted suicide at least once.

A mother shouldn’t decide if to have or to kill her future baby, except for complex situations when a pregnancy can cause serious damage to the woman’s life or there are some serious problems with a fetus, and it cannot develop and grow normally.

Need Practical Abortion Argument Essay Help? Ask GradeMiners.com!

Of course, not every person has such great abilities and talent to do a successful paper. If you dream about creating the best custom abortion essay, why not order this work at a professional writing service like ours? Contact our support team, we are ready to help you 24/7 with your abortion argumentative essays. Our authors are specialized in custom against/pro-abortion essays, so we guarantee you will get a brilliant paper within the deadline!

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Comparison/Contrast Essays: Two Patterns

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First Pattern: Block-by-Block

By Rory H. Osbrink

Abortion is an example of a very controversial issue. The two opposing viewpoints surrounding abortion are like two sides of a coin. On one side, there is the pro-choice activist and on the other is the pro-life activist.

The argument is a balanced one; for every point supporting abortion there is a counter-point condemning abortion. This essay will delineate the controversy in one type of comparison/contrast essay form: the “”Argument versus Argument,”” or, “”Block-by-Block”” format. In this style of writing, first you present all the arguments surrounding one side of the issue, then you present all the arguments surrounding the other side of the issue. You are generally not expected to reach a conclusion, but simply to present the opposing sides of the argument.

Introduction: (the thesis is underlined) Explains the argument

The Abortion Issue: Compare and Contrast Block-by-Block Format

One of the most divisive issues in America is the controversy surrounding abortion. Currently, abortion is legal in America, and many people believe that it should remain legal. These people, pro-choice activists, believe that it is the women’s right to chose whether or not to give birth. However, there are many groups who are lobbying Congress to pass laws that would make abortion illegal. These people are called the pro-life activists.

Explains pro-choice

Abortion is a choice that should be decided by each individual, argues the pro-choice activist. Abortion is not murder since the fetus is not yet fully human, therefore, it is not in defiance against God. Regardless of the reason for the abortion, it should be the woman’s choice because it is her body. While adoption is an option some women chose, many women do not want to suffer the physical and emotional trauma of pregnancy and labor only to give up a child. Therefore, laws should remain in effect that protect a woman’s right to chose.

Explains pro-life

Abortion is an abomination, argues the pro-life activist. It makes no sense for a woman to murder a human being not even born. The bible says, “”Thou shalt not kill,”” and it does not discriminate between different stages of life. A fetus is the beginning of life. Therefore, abortion is murder, and is in direct defiance of God’s will. Regardless of the mother’s life situation (many women who abort are poor, young, or drug users), the value of a human life cannot be measured. Therefore, laws should be passed to outlaw abortion. After all, there are plenty of couples who are willing to adopt an unwanted child.

If we take away the woman’s right to chose, will we begin limiting her other rights also? Or, if we keep abortion legal, are we devaluing human life? There is no easy answer to these questions. Both sides present strong, logical arguments. Though it is a very personal decision, t he fate of abortion rights will have to be left for the Supreme Court to decide.

Second Pattern: Point-by-Point

This second example is also an essay about abortion. We have used the same information and line of reasoning in this essay, however, this one will be presented in the “”Point-by-Point”” style argument. The Point-by-Point style argument presents both sides of the argument at the same time. First, you would present one point on a specific topic, then you would follow that up with the opposing point on the same topic. Again, you are generally not expected to draw any conclusions, simply to fairly present both sides of the argument.

Introduction: (the thesis is underlined)

Explains the argument

The Abortion Issue: Compare and Contrast Point-by-Point Format

Point One: Pro-life and Pro-choice

Supporters of both pro-life and pro-choice refer to religion as support for their side of the argument. Pro-life supporters claim that abortion is murder, and is therefore against God’s will. However, pro-choice defenders argue that abortion is not murder since the fetus is not yet a fully formed human. Therefore, abortion would not be a defiance against God.

Point Two: Pro-life and Pro-choice

Another main point of the argument is over the woman’s personal rights, versus the rights of the unborn child. Pro-choice activists maintain that regardless of the individual circumstances, women should have the right to chose whether or not to abort. The pregnancy and labor will affect only the woman’s body, therefore it should be the woman’s decision. Pro-life supporters, on the other hand, believe that the unborn child has the right to life, and that abortion unlawfully takes away that right.

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America’s Abortion Quandary

1. Americans’ views on whether, and in what circumstances, abortion should be legal

Table of contents.

Abortion at various stages of pregnancy
Abortion and circumstances of pregnancy
Parental notification for minors seeking abortion
Penalties for abortions performed illegally
Public views of what would change the number of abortions in the U.S.
A majority of Americans say women should have more say in setting abortion policy in the U.S.
How do certain arguments about abortion resonate with Americans?
In their own words: How Americans feel about abortion
Personal connections to abortion
Religion’s impact on views about abortion
Acknowledgments
The American Trends Panel survey methodology

A chart showing Americans’ views of abortion, 1995-2022

As the long-running debate over abortion reaches another key moment at the Supreme Court and in state legislatures across the country , a majority of U.S. adults continue to say that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. About six-in-ten Americans (61%) say abortion should be legal in “all” or “most” cases, while 37% think abortion should be illegal in all or most cases. These views have changed little over the past several years: In 2019, for example, 61% of adults said abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while 38% said it should be illegal in all or most cases. Most respondents in the new survey took one of the middle options when first asked about their views on abortion, saying either that abortion should be legal in most cases (36%) or illegal in most cases (27%).

Respondents who said abortion should either be legal in all cases or illegal in all cases received a follow-up question asking whether there should be any exceptions to such laws. Overall, 25% of adults initially said abortion should be legal in all cases, but about a quarter of this group (6% of all U.S. adults) went on to say that there should be some exceptions when abortion should be against the law.

Large share of Americans say abortion should be legal in some cases and illegal in others

One-in-ten adults initially answered that abortion should be illegal in all cases, but about one-in-five of these respondents (2% of all U.S. adults) followed up by saying that there are some exceptions when abortion should be permitted.

Altogether, seven-in-ten Americans say abortion should be legal in some cases and illegal in others, including 42% who say abortion should be generally legal, but with some exceptions, and 29% who say it should be generally illegal, except in certain cases. Much smaller shares take absolutist views when it comes to the legality of abortion in the U.S., maintaining that abortion should be legal in all cases with no exceptions (19%) or illegal in all circumstances (8%).

There is a modest gender gap in views of whether abortion should be legal, with women slightly more likely than men to say abortion should be legal in all cases or in all cases but with some exceptions (63% vs. 58%).

Sizable gaps by age, partisanship in views of whether abortion should be legal

Younger adults are considerably more likely than older adults to say abortion should be legal: Three-quarters of adults under 30 (74%) say abortion should be generally legal, including 30% who say it should be legal in all cases without exception.

But there is an even larger gap in views toward abortion by partisanship: 80% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, compared with 38% of Republicans and GOP leaners. Previous Center research has shown this gap widening over the past 15 years.

Still, while partisans diverge in views of whether abortion should mostly be legal or illegal, most Democrats and Republicans do not view abortion in absolutist terms. Just 13% of Republicans say abortion should be against the law in all cases without exception; 47% say it should be illegal with some exceptions. And while three-in-ten Democrats say abortion should be permitted in all circumstances, half say it should mostly be legal – but with some exceptions.

There also are sizable divisions within both partisan coalitions by ideology. For instance, while a majority of moderate and liberal Republicans say abortion should mostly be legal (60%), just 27% of conservative Republicans say the same. Among Democrats, self-described liberals are twice as apt as moderates and conservatives to say abortion should be legal in all cases without exception (42% vs. 20%).

Regardless of partisan affiliation, adults who say they personally know someone who has had an abortion – such as a friend, relative or themselves – are more likely to say abortion should be legal than those who say they do not know anyone who had an abortion.

Religion a significant factor in attitudes about whether abortion should be legal

Views toward abortion also vary considerably by religious affiliation – specifically among large Christian subgroups and religiously unaffiliated Americans.

For example, roughly three-quarters of White evangelical Protestants say abortion should be illegal in all or most cases. This is far higher than the share of White non-evangelical Protestants (38%) or Black Protestants (28%) who say the same.

Despite Catholic teaching on abortion , a slim majority of U.S. Catholics (56%) say abortion should be legal. This includes 13% who say it should be legal in all cases without exception, and 43% who say it should be legal, but with some exceptions.

Compared with Christians, religiously unaffiliated adults are far more likely to say abortion should be legal overall – and significantly more inclined to say it should be legal in all cases without exception. Within this group, atheists stand out: 97% say abortion should be legal, including 53% who say it should be legal in all cases without exception. Agnostics and those who describe their religion as “nothing in particular” also overwhelmingly say that abortion should be legal, but they are more likely than atheists to say there are some circumstances when abortion should be against the law.

Although the survey was conducted among Americans of many religious backgrounds, including Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus, it did not obtain enough respondents from non-Christian groups to report separately on their responses.

As a growing number of states debate legislation to restrict abortion – often after a certain stage of pregnancy – Americans express complex views about when abortion should generally be legal and when it should be against the law. Overall, a majority of adults (56%) say that how long a woman has been pregnant should matter in determining when abortion should be legal, while far fewer (14%) say that this should not be a factor. An additional one-quarter of the public says that abortion should either be legal (19%) or illegal (8%) in all circumstances without exception; these respondents did not receive this question.

Among men and women, Republicans and Democrats, and Christians and religious “nones” who do not take absolutist positions about abortion on either side of the debate, the prevailing view is that the stage of the pregnancy should be a factor in determining whether abortion should be legal.

A majority of U.S. adults say how long a woman has been pregnant should be a factor in determining whether abortion should be legal

Americans broadly are more likely to favor restrictions on abortion later in pregnancy than earlier in pregnancy. Many adults also say the legality of abortion depends on other factors at every stage of pregnancy.

Overall, a plurality of adults (44%) say that abortion should be legal six weeks into a pregnancy, which is about when cardiac activity (sometimes called a fetal heartbeat) may be detected and before many women know they are pregnant; this includes 19% of adults who say abortion should be legal in all cases without exception, as well as 25% of adults who say it should be legal at that point in a pregnancy. An additional 7% say abortion generally should be legal in most cases, but that the stage of the pregnancy should not matter in determining legality. 1

One-in-five Americans (21%) say abortion should be illegal at six weeks. This includes 8% of adults who say abortion should be illegal in all cases without exception as well as 12% of adults who say that abortion should be illegal at this point. Additionally, 6% say abortion should be illegal in most cases and how long a woman has been pregnant should not matter in determining abortion’s legality. Nearly one-in-five respondents, when asked whether abortion should be legal six weeks into a pregnancy, say “it depends.”

Americans are more divided about what should be permitted 14 weeks into a pregnancy – roughly at the end of the first trimester – although still, more people say abortion should be legal at this stage (34%) than illegal (27%), and about one-in-five say “it depends.”

Fewer adults say abortion should be legal 24 weeks into a pregnancy – about when a healthy fetus could survive outside the womb with medical care. At this stage, 22% of adults say abortion should be legal, while nearly twice as many (43%) say it should be illegal . Again, about one-in-five adults (18%) say whether abortion should be legal at 24 weeks depends on other factors.

Respondents who said that abortion should be illegal 24 weeks into a pregnancy or that “it depends” were asked a follow-up question about whether abortion at that point should be legal if the pregnant woman’s life is in danger or the baby would be born with severe disabilities. Most who received this question say abortion in these circumstances should be legal (54%) or that it depends on other factors (40%). Just 4% of this group maintained that abortion should be illegal in this case.

More adults support restrictions on abortion later in pregnancy, with sizable shares saying ‘it depends’ at multiple points in pregnancy

This pattern in views of abortion – whereby more favor greater restrictions on abortion as a pregnancy progresses – is evident across a variety of demographic and political groups.

Democrats are far more likely than Republicans to say that abortion should be legal at each of the three stages of pregnancy asked about on the survey. For example, while 26% of Republicans say abortion should be legal at six weeks of pregnancy, more than twice as many Democrats say the same (61%). Similarly, while about a third of Democrats say abortion should be legal at 24 weeks of pregnancy, just 8% of Republicans say the same.

However, neither Republicans nor Democrats uniformly express absolutist views about abortion throughout a pregnancy. Republicans are divided on abortion at six weeks: Roughly a quarter say it should be legal (26%), while a similar share say it depends (24%). A third say it should be illegal.

Democrats are divided about whether abortion should be legal or illegal at 24 weeks, with 34% saying it should be legal, 29% saying it should be illegal, and 21% saying it depends.

There also is considerable division among each partisan group by ideology. At six weeks of pregnancy, just one-in-five conservative Republicans (19%) say that abortion should be legal; moderate and liberal Republicans are twice as likely as their conservative counterparts to say this (39%).

At the same time, about half of liberal Democrats (48%) say abortion at 24 weeks should be legal, while 17% say it should be illegal. Among conservative and moderate Democrats, the pattern is reversed: A plurality (39%) say abortion at this stage should be illegal, while 24% say it should be legal.

A third of Republicans say abortion should be illegal six weeks into pregnancy; among Democrats, a third say abortion should be legal at 24 weeks

Christian adults are far less likely than religiously unaffiliated Americans to say abortion should be legal at each stage of pregnancy.

Among Protestants, White evangelicals stand out for their opposition to abortion. At six weeks of pregnancy, for example, 44% say abortion should be illegal, compared with 17% of White non-evangelical Protestants and 15% of Black Protestants. This pattern also is evident at 14 and 24 weeks of pregnancy, when half or more of White evangelicals say abortion should be illegal.

At six weeks, a plurality of Catholics (41%) say abortion should be legal, while smaller shares say it depends or it should be illegal. But by 24 weeks, about half of Catholics (49%) say abortion should be illegal.

Among adults who are religiously unaffiliated, atheists stand out for their views. They are the only group in which a sizable majority says abortion should be legal at each point in a pregnancy. Even at 24 weeks, 62% of self-described atheists say abortion should be legal, compared with smaller shares of agnostics (43%) and those who say their religion is “nothing in particular” (31%).

As is the case with adults overall, most religiously affiliated and religiously unaffiliated adults who originally say that abortion should be illegal or “it depends” at 24 weeks go on to say either it should be legal or it depends if the pregnant woman’s life is in danger or the baby would be born with severe disabilities. Few (4% and 5%, respectively) say abortion should be illegal at 24 weeks in these situations.

Majority of atheists say abortion should be legal at 24 weeks of pregnancy

The stage of the pregnancy is not the only factor that shapes people’s views of when abortion should be legal. Sizable majorities of U.S. adults say that abortion should be legal if the pregnancy threatens the life or health of the pregnant woman (73%) or if pregnancy is the result of rape (69%).

There is less consensus when it comes to circumstances in which a baby may be born with severe disabilities or health problems: 53% of Americans overall say abortion should be legal in such circumstances, including 19% who say abortion should be legal in all cases and 35% who say there are some situations where abortions should be illegal, but that it should be legal in this specific type of case. A quarter of adults say “it depends” in this situation, and about one-in-five say it should be illegal (10% who say illegal in this specific circumstance and 8% who say illegal in all circumstances).

There are sizable divides between and among partisans when it comes to views of abortion in these situations. Overall, Republicans are less likely than Democrats to say abortion should be legal in each of the three circumstances outlined in the survey. However, both partisan groups are less likely to say abortion should be legal when the baby may be born with severe disabilities or health problems than when the woman’s life is in danger or the pregnancy is the result of rape.

Just as there are wide gaps among Republicans by ideology on whether how long a woman has been pregnant should be a factor in determining abortion’s legality, there are large gaps when it comes to circumstances in which abortions should be legal. For example, while a clear majority of moderate and liberal Republicans (71%) say abortion should be permitted when the pregnancy is the result of rape, conservative Republicans are more divided. About half (48%) say it should be legal in this situation, while 29% say it should be illegal and 21% say it depends.

The ideological gaps among Democrats are slightly less pronounced. Most Democrats say abortion should be legal in each of the three circumstances – just to varying degrees. While 77% of liberal Democrats say abortion should be legal if a baby will be born with severe disabilities or health problems, for example, a smaller majority of conservative and moderate Democrats (60%) say the same.

Democrats broadly favor legal abortion in situations of rape or when a pregnancy threatens woman’s life; smaller majorities of Republicans agree

White evangelical Protestants again stand out for their views on abortion in various circumstances; they are far less likely than White non-evangelical or Black Protestants to say abortion should be legal across each of the three circumstances described in the survey.

While about half of White evangelical Protestants (51%) say abortion should be legal if a pregnancy threatens the woman’s life or health, clear majorities of other Protestant groups and Catholics say this should be the case. The same pattern holds in views of whether abortion should be legal if the pregnancy is the result of rape. Most White non-evangelical Protestants (75%), Black Protestants (71%) and Catholics (66%) say abortion should be permitted in this instance, while White evangelicals are more divided: 40% say it should be legal, while 34% say it should be illegal and about a quarter say it depends.

Mirroring the pattern seen among adults overall, opinions are more varied about a situation where a baby might be born with severe disabilities or health issues. For instance, half of Catholics say abortion should be legal in such cases, while 21% say it should be illegal and 27% say it depends on the situation.

Most religiously unaffiliated adults – including overwhelming majorities of self-described atheists – say abortion should be legal in each of the three circumstances.

White evangelicals less likely than other Christians to say abortion should be legal in cases of rape, health concerns

Seven-in-ten U.S. adults say that doctors or other health care providers should be required to notify a parent or legal guardian if the pregnant woman seeking an abortion is under 18, while 28% say they should not be required to do so.

Women are slightly less likely than men to say this should be a requirement (67% vs. 74%). And younger adults are far less likely than those who are older to say a parent or guardian should be notified before a doctor performs an abortion on a pregnant woman who is under 18. In fact, about half of adults ages 18 to 24 (53%) say a doctor should not be required to notify a parent. By contrast, 64% of adults ages 25 to 29 say doctors should be required to notify parents of minors seeking an abortion, as do 68% of adults ages 30 to 49 and 78% of those 50 and older.

A large majority of Republicans (85%) say that a doctor should be required to notify the parents of a minor before an abortion, though conservative Republicans are somewhat more likely than moderate and liberal Republicans to take this position (90% vs. 77%).

The ideological divide is even more pronounced among Democrats. Overall, a slim majority of Democrats (57%) say a parent should be notified in this circumstance, but while 72% of conservative and moderate Democrats hold this view, just 39% of liberal Democrats agree.

By and large, most Protestant (81%) and Catholic (78%) adults say doctors should be required to notify parents of minors before an abortion. But religiously unaffiliated Americans are more divided. Majorities of both atheists (71%) and agnostics (58%) say doctors should not be required to notify parents of minors seeking an abortion, while six-in-ten of those who describe their religion as “nothing in particular” say such notification should be required.

Public split on whether woman who had an abortion in a situation where it was illegal should be penalized

Americans are divided over who should be penalized – and what that penalty should be – in a situation where an abortion occurs illegally.

Overall, a 60% majority of adults say that if a doctor or provider performs an abortion in a situation where it is illegal, they should face a penalty. But there is less agreement when it comes to others who may have been involved in the procedure.

While about half of the public (47%) says a woman who has an illegal abortion should face a penalty, a nearly identical share (50%) says she should not. And adults are more likely to say people who help find and schedule or pay for an abortion in a situation where it is illegal should not face a penalty than they are to say they should.

Views about penalties are closely correlated with overall attitudes about whether abortion should be legal or illegal. For example, just 20% of adults who say abortion should be legal in all cases without exception think doctors or providers should face a penalty if an abortion were carried out in a situation where it was illegal. This compares with 91% of those who think abortion should be illegal in all cases without exceptions. Still, regardless of how they feel about whether abortion should be legal or not, Americans are more likely to say a doctor or provider should face a penalty compared with others involved in the procedure.

Among those who say medical providers and/or women should face penalties for illegal abortions, there is no consensus about whether they should get jail time or a less severe punishment. Among U.S. adults overall, 14% say women should serve jail time if they have an abortion in a situation where it is illegal, while 16% say they should receive a fine or community service and 17% say they are not sure what the penalty should be.

A somewhat larger share of Americans (25%) say doctors or other medical providers should face jail time for providing illegal abortion services, while 18% say they should face fines or community service and 17% are not sure. About three-in-ten U.S. adults (31%) say doctors should lose their medical license if they perform an abortion in a situation where it is illegal.

Men are more likely than women to favor penalties for the woman or doctor in situations where abortion is illegal. About half of men (52%) say women should face a penalty, while just 43% of women say the same. Similarly, about two-thirds of men (64%) say a doctor should face a penalty, while 56% of women agree.

Republicans are considerably more likely than Democrats to say both women and doctors should face penalties – including jail time. For example, 21% of Republicans say the woman who had the abortion should face jail time, and 40% say this about the doctor who performed the abortion. Among Democrats, far smaller shares say the woman (8%) or doctor (13%) should serve jail time.

White evangelical Protestants are more likely than other Protestant groups to favor penalties for abortions in situations where they are illegal. Fully 24% say the woman who had the abortion should serve time in jail, compared with just 12% of White non-evangelical Protestants or Black Protestants. And while about half of White evangelicals (48%) say doctors who perform illegal abortions should serve jail time, just 26% of White non-evangelical Protestants and 18% of Black Protestants share this view.

Relatively few say women, medical providers should serve jail time for illegal abortions, but three-in-ten say doctors should lose medical license

Only respondents who said that abortion should be legal in some cases but not others and that how long a woman has been pregnant should matter in determining whether abortion should be legal received questions about abortion’s legality at specific points in the pregnancy. ↩

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Important conclusions from abortion studies

PMID: 12287992

In general, it can be concluded that the initiative on the determinants and consequences of induced abortion has shown some important patterns. For example, induced abortion is not restricted to adolescents but occurs also within marriage to limit family size. Induced abortion is prevalent both where family planning services are available and contraceptive prevalence is high as well as where family planning is not common, but for different reasons. In the former, motivation to limit family size is high and women would use any option if contraception fails or an unwanted pregnancy occurs. In the latter case, induced abortion forms part of a mix of incipient fertility regulation alternatives, most of which are traditional and of little effectiveness but including some use or improper use of modern methods. Few abortion seekers, and among them even fewer adolescents, were using a modern contraceptive at the time the pregnancy started. High use of traditional methods in some countries leads to abortion as women/couples fail to follow proper instructions with regards to the safe period. Unsafe clandestine abortions are more likely to be sought by poorer women and by adolescents. The findings of this research are increasingly being used to question the legal status of abortion in countries where the law is restrictive, or to strengthen family planning efforts in order to reduce abortion incidence.

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There’s a Better Way to Debate Abortion

Caution and epistemic humility can guide our approach.

Opponents and proponents of abortion arguing outside the Supreme Court

If Justice Samuel Alito’s draft majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization becomes law, we will enter a post– Roe v. Wade world in which the laws governing abortion will be legislatively decided in 50 states.

In the short term, at least, the abortion debate will become even more inflamed than it has been. Overturning Roe , after all, would be a profound change not just in the law but in many people’s lives, shattering the assumption of millions of Americans that they have a constitutional right to an abortion.

This doesn’t mean Roe was correct. For the reasons Alito lays out, I believe that Roe was a terribly misguided decision, and that a wiser course would have been for the issue of abortion to have been given a democratic outlet, allowing even the losers “the satisfaction of a fair hearing and an honest fight,” in the words of the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Instead, for nearly half a century, Roe has been the law of the land. But even those who would welcome its undoing should acknowledge that its reversal could convulse the nation.

From the December 2019 issue: The dishonesty of the abortion debate

If we are going to debate abortion in every state, given how fractured and angry America is today, we need caution and epistemic humility to guide our approach.

We can start by acknowledging the inescapable ambiguities in this staggeringly complicated moral question. No matter one’s position on abortion, each of us should recognize that those who hold views different from our own have some valid points, and that the positions we embrace raise complicated issues. That realization alone should lead us to engage in this debate with a little more tolerance and a bit less certitude.

Many of those on the pro-life side exhibit a gap between the rhetoric they employ and the conclusions they actually seem to draw. In the 1990s, I had an exchange, via fax, with a pro-life thinker. During our dialogue, I pressed him on what he believed, morally speaking , should be the legal penalty for a woman who has an abortion and a doctor who performs one.

My point was a simple one: If he believed, as he claimed, that an abortion even moments after conception is the killing of an innocent child—that the fetus, from the instant of conception, is a human being deserving of all the moral and political rights granted to your neighbor next door—then the act ought to be treated, if not as murder, at least as manslaughter. Surely, given what my interlocutor considered to be the gravity of the offense, fining the doctor and taking no action against the mother would be morally incongruent. He was understandably uncomfortable with this line of questioning, unwilling to go to the places his premises led. When it comes to abortion, few people are.

Humane pro-life advocates respond that while an abortion is the taking of a human life, the woman having the abortion has been misled by our degraded culture into denying the humanity of the child. She is a victim of misinformation; she can’t be held accountable for what she doesn’t know. I’m not unsympathetic to this argument, but I think it ultimately falls short. In other contexts, insisting that people who committed atrocities because they truly believed the people against whom they were committing atrocities were less than human should be let off the hook doesn’t carry the day. I’m struggling to understand why it would in this context.

There are other complicating matters. For example, about half of all fertilized eggs are aborted spontaneously —that is, result in miscarriage—usually before the woman knows she is pregnant. Focus on the Family, an influential Christian ministry, is emphatic : “Human life begins at fertilization.” Does this mean that when a fertilized egg is spontaneously aborted, it is comparable—biologically, morally, ethically, or in any other way—to when a 2-year-old child dies? If not, why not? There’s also the matter of those who are pro-life and contend that abortion is the killing of an innocent human being but allow for exceptions in the case of rape or incest. That is an understandable impulse but I don’t think it’s a logically sustainable one.

The pro-choice side, for its part, seldom focuses on late-term abortions. Let’s grant that late-term abortions are very rare. But the question remains: Is there any point during gestation when pro-choice advocates would say “slow down” or “stop”—and if so, on what grounds? Or do they believe, in principle, that aborting a child up to the point of delivery is a defensible and justifiable act; that an abortion procedure is, ethically speaking, the same as removing an appendix? If not, are those who are pro-choice willing to say, as do most Americans, that the procedure gets more ethically problematic the further along in a pregnancy?

Read: When a right becomes a privilege

Plenty of people who consider themselves pro-choice have over the years put on their refrigerator door sonograms of the baby they are expecting. That tells us something. So does biology. The human embryo is a human organism, with the genetic makeup of a human being. “The argument, in which thoughtful people differ, is about the moral significance and hence the proper legal status of life in its early stages,” as the columnist George Will put it.

These are not “gotcha questions”; they are ones I have struggled with for as long as I’ve thought through where I stand on abortion, and I’ve tried to remain open to corrections in my thinking. I’m not comfortable with those who are unwilling to grant any concessions to the other side or acknowledge difficulties inherent in their own position. But I’m not comfortable with my own position, either—thinking about abortion taking place on a continuum, and troubled by abortions, particularly later in pregnancy, as the child develops.

The question I can’t answer is where the moral inflection point is, when the fetus starts to have claims of its own, including the right to life. Does it depend on fetal development? If so, what aspect of fetal development? Brain waves? Feeling pain? Dreaming? The development of the spine? Viability outside the womb? Something else? Any line I might draw seems to me entirely arbitrary and capricious.

Because of that, I consider myself pro-life, but with caveats. My inability to identify a clear demarcation point—when a fetus becomes a person—argues for erring on the side of protecting the unborn. But it’s a prudential judgment, hardly a certain one.

At the same time, even if one believes that the moral needle ought to lean in the direction of protecting the unborn from abortion, that doesn’t mean one should be indifferent to the enormous burden on the woman who is carrying the child and seeks an abortion, including women who discover that their unborn child has severe birth defects. Nor does it mean that all of us who are disturbed by abortion believe it is the equivalent of killing a child after birth. In this respect, my view is similar to that of some Jewish authorities , who hold that until delivery, a fetus is considered a part of the mother’s body, although it does possess certain characteristics of a person and has value. But an early-term abortion is not equivalent to killing a young child. (Many of those who hold this position base their views in part on Exodus 21, in which a miscarriage that results from men fighting and pushing a pregnant woman is punished by a fine, but the person responsible for the miscarriage is not tried for murder.)

“There is not the slightest recognition on either side that abortion might be at the limits of our empirical and moral knowledge,” the columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote in 1985. “The problem starts with an awesome mystery: the transformation of two soulless cells into a living human being. That leads to an insoluble empirical question: How and exactly when does that occur? On that, in turn, hangs the moral issue: What are the claims of the entity undergoing that transformation?”

That strikes me as right; with abortion, we’re dealing with an awesome mystery and insoluble empirical questions. Which means that rather than hurling invective at one another and caricaturing those with whom we disagree, we should try to understand their views, acknowledge our limitations, and even show a touch of grace and empathy. In this nation, riven and pulsating with hate, that’s not the direction the debate is most likely to take. But that doesn’t excuse us from trying.

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Is Abortion Sacred?

By Jia Tolentino

The silhouettes of two women made from the negative space of a rosary.

Twenty years ago, when I was thirteen, I wrote an entry in my journal about abortion, which began, “I have this huge thing weighing on me.” That morning, in Bible class, which I’d attended every day since the first grade at an evangelical school, in Houston, my teacher had led us in an exercise called Agree/Disagree. He presented us with moral propositions, and we stood up and physically chose sides. “Abortion is always wrong,” he offered, and there was no disagreement. We all walked to the wall that meant “agree.”

Then I raised my hand and, according to my journal, said, “I think it is always morally wrong and absolutely murder, but if a woman is raped, I respect her right to get an abortion.” Also, I said, if a woman knew the child would face a terrible life, the child might be better off. “Dead?” the teacher asked. My classmates said I needed to go to the other side, and I did. “I felt guilty and guilty and guilty,” I wrote in my journal. “I didn’t feel like a Christian when I was on that side of the room. I felt terrible, actually. . . . But I still have that thought that if a woman was raped, she has her right. But that’s so strange—she has a right to kill what would one day be her child? That issue is irresolved in my mind and it will eat at me until I sort it out.”

I had always thought of abortion as it had been taught to me in school: it was a sin that irresponsible women committed to cover up another sin, having sex in a non-Christian manner. The moral universe was a stark battle of virtue and depravity, in which the only meaningful question about any possible action was whether or not it would be sanctioned in the eyes of God. Men were sinful, and the goodness of women was the essential bulwark against the corruption of the world. There was suffering built into this framework, but suffering was noble; justice would prevail, in the end, because God always provided for the faithful. It was these last tenets, prosperity-gospel principles that neatly erase the material causes of suffering in our history and our social policies—not only regarding abortion but so much else—which toppled for me first. By the time I went to college, I understood that I was pro-choice.

America is, in many ways, a deeply religious country—the only wealthy Western democracy in which more than half of the population claims to pray every day. (In Europe, the figure is twenty-two per cent.) Although seven out of ten American women who get abortions identify as Christian, the fight to make the procedure illegal is an almost entirely Christian phenomenon. Two-thirds of the national population and nearly ninety per cent of Congress affirm a tradition in which a teen-age girl continuing an unplanned pregnancy allowed for the salvation of the world, in which a corrupt government leader who demanded a Massacre of the Innocents almost killed the baby Jesus and damned us all in the process, and in which the Son of God entered the world as what the godless dare to call a “clump of cells.”

For centuries, most Christians believed that human personhood began months into the long course of pregnancy. It was only in the twentieth century that a dogmatic narrative, in which every pregnancy is an iteration of the same static story of creation, began both to shape American public policy and to occlude the reality of pregnancy as volatile and ambiguous—as a process in which creation and destruction run in tandem. This newer narrative helped to erase an instinctive, long-held understanding that pregnancy does not begin with the presence of a child, and only sometimes ends with one. Even within the course of the same pregnancy, a person and the fetus she carries can shift between the roles of lover and beloved, host and parasite, vessel and divinity, victim and murderer; each body is capable of extinguishing the other, although one cannot survive alone. There is no human relationship more complex, more morally unstable than this.

The idea that a fetus is not just a full human but a superior and kinglike one—a being whose survival is so paramount that another person can be legally compelled to accept harm, ruin, or death to insure it—is a recent invention. For most of history, women ended unwanted pregnancies as they needed to, taking herbal or plant-derived preparations on their own or with the help of female healers and midwives, who presided over all forms of treatment and care connected with pregnancy. They were likely enough to think that they were simply restoring their menstruation, treating a blockage of blood. Pregnancy was not confirmed until “quickening,” the point at which the pregnant person could feel fetal movement, a measurement that relied on her testimony. Then as now, there was often nothing that distinguished the result of an abortion—the body expelling fetal tissue—from a miscarriage.

Ancient records of abortifacient medicine are plentiful; ancient attempts to regulate abortion are rare. What regulations existed reflect concern with women’s behavior and marital propriety, not with fetal life. The Code of the Assura, from the eleventh century B.C.E., mandated death for married women who got abortions without consulting their husbands; when husbands beat their wives hard enough to make them miscarry, the punishment was a fine. The first known Roman prohibition on abortion dates to the second century and prescribes exile for a woman who ends her pregnancy, because “it might appear scandalous that she should be able to deny her husband of children without being punished.” Likewise, the early Christian Church opposed abortion not as an act of murder but because of its association with sexual sin. (The Bible offers ambiguous guidance on the question of when life begins: Genesis 2:7 arguably implies that it begins at first breath; Exodus 21:22-24 suggests that, in Old Testament law, a fetus was not considered a person; Jeremiah 1:5 describes God’s hand in creation even “before I formed you in the womb.” Nowhere does the Bible clearly and directly address abortion.) Augustine, in the fourth century, favored the idea that God endowed a fetus with a soul only after its body was formed—a point that Augustine placed, in line with Aristotelian tradition, somewhere between forty and eighty days into its development. “There cannot yet be a live soul in a body that lacks sensation when it is not formed in flesh, and so not yet endowed with sense,” he wrote. This was more or less the Church’s official position; it was affirmed eight centuries later by Thomas Aquinas.

In the early modern era, European attitudes began to change. The Black Death had dramatically lowered the continent’s population, and dealt a blow to most forms of economic activity; the Reformation had weakened the Church’s position as the essential intermediary between the layman and God. The social scientist Silvia Federici has argued, in her book “ Caliban and the Witch ,” that church and state waged deliberate campaigns to force women to give birth, in service of the emerging capitalist economy. “Starting in the mid-16th century, while Portuguese ships were returning from Africa with their first human cargoes, all the European governments began to impose the severest penalties against contraception, abortion, and infanticide,” Federici notes. Midwives and “wise women” were prosecuted for witchcraft, a catchall crime for deviancy from procreative sex. For the first time, male doctors began to control labor and delivery, and, Federici writes, “in the case of a medical emergency” they “prioritized the life of the fetus over that of the mother.” She goes on: “While in the Middle Ages women had been able to use various forms of contraceptives, and had exercised an undisputed control over the birthing process, from now on their wombs became public territory, controlled by men and the state.”

Martin Luther and John Calvin, the most influential figures of the Reformation, did not address abortion at any length. But Catholic doctrine started to shift, albeit slowly. In 1588, Pope Sixtus V labelled both abortion and contraception as homicide. This pronouncement was reversed three years later, by Pope Gregory XIV, who declared that abortion was only homicide if it took place after ensoulment, which he identified as occurring around twenty-four weeks into a pregnancy. Still, theologians continued to push the idea of embryonic humanity; in 1621, the physician Paolo Zacchia, an adviser to the Vatican, proclaimed that the soul was present from the moment of conception. Still, it was not until 1869 that Pope Pius IX affirmed this doctrine, proclaiming abortion at any point in pregnancy to be a sin punishable by excommunication.

When I found out I was pregnant, at the beginning of 2020, I wondered how the experience would change my understanding of life, of fetal personhood, of the morality of reproduction. It’s been years since I traded the echo chamber of evangelical Texas for the echo chamber of progressive Brooklyn, but I can still sometimes feel the old world view flickering, a photographic negative underneath my vision. I have come to believe that abortion should be universally accessible, regulated only by medical codes and ethics, and not by the criminal-justice system. Still, in passing moments, I can imagine upholding the idea that our sole task when it comes to protecting life is to end the practice of abortion; I can imagine that seeming profoundly moral and unbelievably urgent. I would only need to think of the fetus in total isolation—to imagine that it were not formed and contained by another body, and that body not formed and contained by a family, or a society, or a world.

As happens to many women, though, I became, if possible, more militant about the right to an abortion in the process of pregnancy, childbirth, and caregiving. It wasn’t just the difficult things that had this effect—the paralyzing back spasms, the ragged desperation of sleeplessness, the thundering doom that pervaded every cell in my body when I weaned my child. And it wasn’t just my newly visceral understanding of the anguish embedded in the facts of American family life. (A third of parents in one of the richest countries in the world struggle to afford diapers ; in the first few months of the pandemic , as Jeff Bezos’s net worth rose by forty-eight billion dollars, sixteen per cent of households with children did not have enough to eat.) What multiplied my commitment to abortion were the beautiful things about motherhood: in particular, the way I felt able to love my baby fully and singularly because I had chosen to give my body and life over to her. I had not been forced by law to make another person with my flesh, or to tear that flesh open to bring her into the world; I hadn’t been driven by need to give that new person away to a stranger in the hope that she would never go to bed hungry. I had been able to choose this permanent rearrangement of my existence. That volition felt sacred.

Abortion is often talked about as a grave act that requires justification, but bringing a new life into the world felt, to me, like the decision that more clearly risked being a moral mistake. The debate about abortion in America is “rooted in the largely unacknowledged premise that continuing a pregnancy is a prima facie moral good,” the pro-choice Presbyterian minister Rebecca Todd Peters writes . But childbearing, Peters notes, is a morally weighted act, one that takes place in a world of limited and unequally distributed resources. Many people who get abortions—the majority of whom are poor women who already have children—understand this perfectly well. “We ought to take the decision to continue a pregnancy far more seriously than we do,” Peters writes.

I gave birth in the middle of a pandemic that previewed a future of cross-species viral transmission exacerbated by global warming, and during a summer when ten million acres on the West Coast burned . I knew that my child would not only live in this degrading world but contribute to that degradation. (“Every year, the average American emits enough carbon to melt ten thousand tons of ice in the Antarctic ice sheets,” David Wallace-Wells writes in his book “ The Uninhabitable Earth .”) Just before COVID arrived, the science writer Meehan Crist published an essay in the London Review of Books titled “Is it OK to have a child?” (The title alludes to a question that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez once asked in a live stream, on Instagram.) Crist details the environmental damage that we are doing, and the costs for the planet and for us and for those who will come after. Then she turns the question on its head. The idea of choosing whether or not to have a child, she writes, is predicated on a fantasy of control that “quickly begins to dissipate when we acknowledge that the conditions for human flourishing are distributed so unevenly, and that, in an age of ecological catastrophe, we face a range of possible futures in which these conditions no longer reliably exist.”

In late 2021, as Omicron brought New York to another COVID peak, a Gen Z boy in a hoodie uploaded a TikTok , captioned “yall better delete them baby names out ya notes its 60 degrees in december.” By then, my baby had become a toddler. Every night, as I set her in the crib, she chirped good night to the elephants, koalas, and tigers on the wall, and I tried not to think about extinction. My decision to have her risked, or guaranteed, additional human suffering; it opened up new chances for joy and meaning. There is unknowability in every reproductive choice.

As the German historian Barbara Duden writes in her book “ Disembodying Women ,” the early Christians believed that both the bodies that created life and the world that sustained it were proof of the “continual creative activity of God.” Women and nature were aligned, in this view, as the material sources of God’s plan. “The word nature is derived from nascitura , which means ‘birthing,’ and nature is imagined and felt to be like a pregnant womb, a matrix, a mother,” Duden writes. But, in recent decades, she notes, the natural world has begun to show its irreparable damage. The fetus has been left as a singular totem of life and divinity, to be protected, no matter the costs, even if everything else might fall.

The scholar Katie Gentile argues that, in times of cultural crisis and upheaval, the fetus functions as a “site of projected and displaced anxieties,” a “fantasy of wholeness in the face of overwhelming anxiety and an inability to have faith in a progressive, better future.” The more degraded actual life becomes on earth, the more fervently conservatives will fight to protect potential life in utero. We are locked into the destruction of the world that birthed all of us; we turn our attention, now, to the worlds—the wombs—we think we can still control.

By the time that the Catholic Church decided that abortion at any point, for any reason, was a sin, scientists had identified the biological mechanism behind human reproduction, in which a fetus develops from an embryo that develops from a zygote, the single-celled organism created by the union of egg and sperm. With this discovery, in the mid-nineteenth century, women lost the most crucial point of authority over the stories of their pregnancies. Other people would be the ones to tell us, from then on, when life began.

At the time, abortion was largely unregulated in the United States, a country founded and largely populated by Protestants. But American physicians, through the then newly formed American Medical Association, mounted a campaign to criminalize it, led by a gynecologist named Horatio Storer, who once described the typical abortion patient as a “wretch whose account with the Almighty is heaviest with guilt.” (Storer was raised Unitarian but later converted to Catholicism.) The scholars Paul Saurette and Kelly Gordon have argued that these doctors, whose profession was not as widely respected as it would later become, used abortion “as a wedge issue,” one that helped them portray their work “as morally and professionally superior to the practice of midwifery.” By 1910, abortion was illegal in every state, with exceptions only to save the life of “the mother.” (The wording of such provisions referred to all pregnant people as mothers, whether or not they had children, thus quietly inserting a presumption of fetal personhood.) A series of acts known as the Comstock laws had rendered contraception, abortifacient medicine, and information about reproductive control widely inaccessible, by criminalizing their distribution via the U.S. Postal Service. People still sought abortions, of course: in the early years of the Great Depression, there were as many as seven hundred thousand abortions annually. These underground procedures were dangerous; several thousand women died from abortions every year.

This is when the contemporary movements for and against the right to abortion took shape. Those who favored legal abortion did not, in these years, emphasize “choice,” Daniel K. Williams notes in his book “ Defenders of the Unborn .” They emphasized protecting the health of women, protecting doctors, and preventing the births of unwanted children. Anti-abortion activists, meanwhile, argued, as their successors do, that they were defending human life and human rights. The horrors of the Second World War gave the movement a lasting analogy: “Logic would lead us from abortion to the gas chamber,” a Catholic clergyman wrote, in October, 1962.

Ultrasound imaging, invented in the nineteen-fifties, completed the transformation of pregnancy into a story that, by default, was narrated to women by other people—doctors, politicians, activists. In 1965, Life magazine published a photo essay by Lennart Nilsson called “ Drama of Life Before Birth ,” and put the image of a fetus at eighteen weeks on its cover. The photos produced an indelible, deceptive image of the fetus as an isolated being—a “spaceman,” as Nilsson wrote, floating in a void, entirely independent from the person whose body creates it. They became totems of the anti-abortion movement; Life had not disclosed that all but one had been taken of aborted fetuses, and that Nilsson had lit and posed their bodies to give the impression that they were alive.

In 1967, Colorado became the first state to allow abortion for reasons other than rape, incest, or medical emergency. A group of Protestant ministers and Jewish rabbis began operating an abortion-referral service led by the pastor of Judson Memorial Church, in Manhattan; the resulting network of pro-choice clerics eventually spanned the country, and referred an estimated four hundred and fifty thousand women to safe abortions. The evangelical magazine Christianity Today held a symposium of prominent theologians, in 1968, which resulted in a striking statement: “Whether or not the performance of an induced abortion is sinful we are not agreed, but about the necessity and permissibility for it under certain circumstances we are in accord.” Meanwhile, the priest James McHugh became the director of the National Right to Life Committee, and equated fetuses to the other vulnerable people whom faithful Christians were commanded to protect: the old, the sick, the poor. As states began to liberalize their abortion laws, the anti-abortion movement attracted followers—many of them antiwar, pro-welfare Catholics—using the language of civil rights, and adopted the label “pro-life.”

W. A. Criswell, a Dallas pastor who served as president of the Southern Baptist Convention from 1968 to 1970, said, shortly after the Supreme Court issued its decision in Roe v. Wade , that “it was only after a child was born and had life separate from his mother that it became an individual person,” and that “it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and the future should be allowed.” But the Court’s decision accelerated a political and theological transformation that was already under way: by 1979, Criswell, like the S.B.C., had endorsed a hard-line anti-abortion stance. Evangelical leadership, represented by such groups as Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority , joined with Catholics to oppose the secularization of popular culture, becoming firmly conservative—and a powerful force in Republican politics. Bible verses that express the idea of divine creation, such as Psalm 139 (“For you created my innermost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb,” in the New International Version’s translation), became policy explanations for prohibiting abortion.

In 1984, scientists used ultrasound to detect fetal cardiac activity at around six weeks’ gestation—a discovery that has been termed a “fetal heartbeat” by the anti-abortion movement, though a six-week-old fetus hasn’t yet formed a heart, and the electrical pulses are coming from cell clusters that can be replicated in a petri dish. At six weeks, in fact, medical associations still call the fetus an embryo; as I found out in 2020, you generally can’t even schedule a doctor’s visit to confirm your condition until you’re eight weeks along.

So many things that now shape the cultural experience of pregnancy in America accept and reinforce the terms of the anti-abortion movement, often with the implicit goal of making pregnant women feel special, or encouraging them to buy things. “Your baby,” every app and article whispered to me sweetly, wrongly, many months before I intuited personhood in the being inside me, or felt that the life I was forming had moved out of a liminal realm.

I tried to learn from that liminality. Hope was always predicated on uncertainty; there would be no guarantees of safety in this or any other part of life. Pregnancy did not feel like soft blankets and stuffed bunnies—it felt cosmic and elemental, like volcanic rocks grinding, or a wild plant straining toward the sun. It was violent even as I loved it. “Even with the help of modern medicine, pregnancy still kills about 800 women every day worldwide,” the evolutionary biologist Suzanne Sadedin points out in an essay titled “War in the womb.” Many of the genes that activate during embryonic development also activate when a body has been invaded by cancer, Sadedin notes; in ectopic pregnancies, which are unviable by definition and make up one to two per cent of all pregnancies, embryos become implanted in the fallopian tube rather than the uterus, and “tunnel ferociously toward the richest nutrient source they can find.” The result, Sadedin writes, “is often a bloodbath.”

The Book of Genesis tells us that the pain of childbearing is part of the punishment women have inherited from Eve. The other part is subjugation to men: “Your desire will be for your husband and he will rule over you,” God tells Eve. Tertullian, a second-century theologian, told women, “You are the devil’s gateway: you are the unsealer of the (forbidden) tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack.” The idea that guilt inheres in female identity persists in anti-abortion logic: anything a woman, or a girl, does with her body can justify the punishment of undesired pregnancy, including simply existing.

If I had become pregnant when I was a thirteen-year-old Texan , I would have believed that abortion was wrong, but I am sure that I would have got an abortion. For one thing, my Christian school did not allow students to be pregnant. I was aware of this, and had, even then, a faint sense that the people around me grasped, in some way, the necessity of abortion—that, even if they believed that abortion meant taking a life, they understood that it could preserve a life, too.

One need not reject the idea that life in the womb exists or that fetal life has meaning in order to favor the right to abortion; one must simply allow that everything, not just abortion, has a moral dimension, and that each pregnancy occurs in such an intricate web of systemic and individual circumstances that only the person who is pregnant could hope to evaluate the situation and make a moral decision among the options at hand. A recent survey found that one-third of Americans believe life begins at conception but also that abortion should be legal. This is the position overwhelmingly held by American Buddhists, whose religious tradition casts abortion as the taking of a human life and regards all forms of life as sacred but also warns adherents against absolutism and urges them to consider the complexity of decreasing suffering, compelling them toward compassion and respect.

There is a Buddhist ritual practiced primarily in Japan, where it is called mizuko kuyo : a ceremony of mourning for miscarriages, stillbirths, and aborted fetuses. The ritual is possibly ersatz; critics say that it fosters and preys upon women’s feelings of guilt. But the scholar William LaFleur argues, in his book “ Liquid Life ,” that it is rooted in a medieval Japanese understanding of the way the unseen world interfaces with the world of humans—in which being born and dying are both “processes rather than fixed points.” An infant was believed to have entered the human world from the realm of the gods, and move clockwise around a wheel as she grew older, eventually passing back into the spirit realm on the other side. But some infants were mizuko , or water babies: floating in fluids, ontologically unstable. These were the babies who were never born. A mizuko , whether miscarried or aborted—and the two words were similar: kaeru , to go back, and kaesu , to cause to go back—slipped back, counterclockwise, across the border to the realm of the gods.

There is a loss, I think, entailed in abortion—as there is in miscarriage, whether it occurs at eight or twelve or twenty-nine weeks. I locate this loss in the irreducible complexity of life itself, in the terrible violence and magnificence of reproduction, in the death that shimmered at the edges of my consciousness in the shattering moment that my daughter was born. This understanding might be rooted in my religious upbringing—I am sure that it is. But I wonder, now, how I would square this: that fetuses were the most precious lives in existence, and that God, in His vision, already chooses to end a quarter of them. The fact that a quarter of women, regardless of their beliefs, also decide to end pregnancies at some point in their lifetimes: are they not acting in accordance with God’s plan for them, too? ♦

More on Abortion and Roe v. Wade

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When abortion is criminalized, women make desperate choices .

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Argumentative Essay on Abortion – Sample Essay

Published by gudwriter on October 24, 2017 October 24, 2017

A Break Down of my Abortion Argumentative Essay

Styling format: APA 6th Edition

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Title: Abortion Should Be Legal

Introduction.

The introduction paragraph of an argumentative essay constitutes of 4 parts. Topic introduction, a reason why the topic is important, accepting there is a difference of opinion on this topic and lastly a statement that gives the writer’s main premises, popularly known as a thesis statement.

The body of my abortion argumentative essay contains reasons + evidence to support my thesis. I have also included opposing arguments to show the reader that I have considered both sides of the argument and that am able to anticipate and criticize any opposing arguments before they are even stated. I have made sure to show the reader that though I have written opposing arguments and that I do not agree with them.

The conclusion paragraph of this abortion essay constitutes of three main parts. The first part restates the main premises: The decision to terminate a pregnancy should generally lie with pregnant women. The second part presents 1 – 2 sentences which summarizes the arguments that support my thesis. And lastly my personal position.

I tried to use credible resources for this essay. Books from respectable publishers on this subject. Peer reviewed articles and journals are also acceptable.

Argumentative Essay on Abortion

The abortion debate is an ongoing controversy, continually dividing Americans along moral, legal, and religious lines. Most people tend to assume one of two positions: “pro-life” (an embryo or fetus should be given the right to gestate to term and be born. Simply put, women should not be given the right to abort as that constitutes murder) or “pro-choice” (women should be given the right to decide whether or not to terminate a pregnancy).

When you are writing an abortion argumentative essay , you are free to support any side that you want. Whichever position you take, make sure you have good points and supporting facts.

In this abortion essay, I have decided to take the pro-choice position: a woman carrying a fetus should be given the right to abort it or carry the baby to term. In fact, my thesis statement for this argumentative essay is abortion should be legal and women should have the right to decide whether or not to terminate a pregnancy.

My essay is divided into three basic parts, the introduction, the body, and the conclusion. Read till the end to find the brief analysis of the parts /sections.

Here is my abortion argumentative essay. Enjoy!

Abortion Should Be Legal

A heated debate continues to surround the question of whether or not abortion should be legal. Those who feel it should be legal have branded themselves “pro-choice” while those opposed to its legality fall under the banner of “pro-life.” In the United States of America, not even the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court case (Parker, 2017) that declared abortion as a fundamental human right has served to bring this debate to an end. The pro-choice brigade front an argument that abortion is a right that should be enjoyed by all women and one that should not be taken away by religious authority or even governments. They claim that this right cannot be superseded by the perceived right that should be enjoyed by a fetus or embryo. If not legalized, the pro-choice claim, women would resort to unsafe means. However, to pro-life, the life of a human being begins at fertilization and therefore abortion condemns an innocent human being to immoral murder. They further argue that the practice exposes the unborn human to pain and suffering. This paper argues that abortion should be legal and women should have the right to decide whether or not to terminate a pregnancy.

Perhaps you may find comparing and contrasting the higher education between England and Kenya interesting .

Just as was observed by the US Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade, an individual should be allowed certain privacy zones or areas. The decision of a pregnant woman to terminate her pregnancy or not should fall within this fundamental right (Parker, 2017). Interfering with this right is a kin to deciding for a person the kind of people they may associate with or the kind of a person they may fall in love with. These kinds of private matters are very sensitive and any decision touching on them should be left at the discretion of an individual. After all, it is the woman who knows why they would want to terminate a pregnancy. It could be that seeing the pregnancy to its maturity and eventual delivery would endanger the life of the bearer. It could also be that a woman is not comfortable with having a baby due to some reason(s). Whatever reason a woman might have, it is their private affair; they should be left to handle it in private.

On the same note, women get empowered by reproductive choice as they get the opportunity to freely exercise control over their bodies. Just like male members of the society, women should be allowed to be independent and be able to determine their future. This includes the freewill of determining whether or not to have children. The ability to control their productive lives would ensure that women are well placed to take part equally in the social and economic matters of the society (Mooney, 2013). It should not be that upon conceiving, a woman has no otherwise but to deliver the baby. What if the conception was accidental? Even if it was not accidental, a woman can realize or determine before delivery that she is just not ready to have the baby as she might have initially planned. At that point, they should have the freedom to terminate the pregnancy.

The pro-life’s argument that abortion is murder is a bit far fetched. The fetus or embryo may be innocent as they claim. However, it is noteworthy that it is only after the fetus becomes able to survive outside the womb that personhood begins (Ziegler, 2015). This is definitely after birth and not during the pregnancy or at conception. In this respect, the claim that abortion kills innocent human beings is actually not valid. On the contrary, this stance or statement culminates in the victimization of innocent women who have committed no wrong but exercised their right of controlling their reproductive life. Ideally, an embryo or fetus should not be considered a human being just yet. There should thus be nothing like “unborn babies” but fetuses or embryos.

Legal abortion also ensures that women may avoid maternal injury or death by securing professional and safe means of performing abortion. The point here is that illegalizing abortion would compel some women to resort to unsafe abortion means. In the process, they might sustain life threatening injuries or even lose their lives (Schwarz & Latimer, 2012). Whether legal or not, a woman would make up their mind and terminate her pregnancy! The only difference is that in a “legal” environment, she would be safe. Why then endanger the lives of pregnant women who may like to have an abortion by illegalizing the practice? In addition, the pro-life argument that a fetus feels pain during the procedure of abortion is less convincing. It may be that the reason a mother is terminating a pregnancy is to prevent the yet to be born child from facing the pains of the world. If a mother feels she may not accord her child all the necessities of life, she would be right to subject the child to the “short-term pain” during abortion.

Those opposed to abortion further argue that the practice brews a traumatic experience for women as it involves the death of a human being. Specifically, they contend that the experience emanates from a woman witnessing how she intentionally and violently condemns her unborn child to death by physically destroying it. They hold that it also subjects the woman to unacknowledged grief and thoughts of severed maternal attachments and as well violates her parental responsibility and instinct (Major et al., 2009). According to this argument, this experience can be as traumatic as to plunge a woman into serious mental health problems, in what may be called post-abortion syndrome (PAS). This syndrome may attract symptoms similar to those of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), they say. Anti-abortion crusaders further contend that the aftermath of undergoing the procedure may see a woman experience such PTSD related symptoms as substance abuse, guilt, shame, anger, grief, depression, denial, and flashbacks (Major et al., 2009). While all these may seem to be sensible to some extent, they fail to recognize that a woman who willfully secures an abortion would not have to worry about having “killed” her unborn baby. Instead, she would appreciate that she was able to successfully terminate the pregnancy before it could grow to maturity.

The decision to terminate a pregnancy should generally lie with pregnant women. It is a private decision that should not be interfered with. Women should be able to determine when to have a child. If she deems it not yet time, she should be allowed to abort. A woman actually kills nobody by aborting but rather prevents the fetus from being able to survive outside the womb. The reason for aborting should not be questioned, whether medical, involving incest or rape, or just personal. Whatever reason it might be, it falls within the right of a woman to determine and control their productive life.

Major, B. et al. (2009). Abortion and mental health. American Psychologist , 64 (9), 863-890.

Mooney, C. (2013). Should abortion be legal? San Diego, CA: ReferencePoint Press, Incorporated.

Parker, W. (2017). Life’s work: a moral argument for choice . New York City, NY: Simon and Schuster.

Schwarz, S. D., & Latimer, K. (2012). Understanding abortion: from mixed feelings to rational thought . Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Ziegler, M. (2015). After Roe . Cambridge , MA: Harvard University Press.

Argumentative Essay against Abortion 2, with Outline

Abortion argumentative essay outline.

Thesis: Abortion is wrong and should not be legalized since its disadvantages far outweigh its advantages, if any.

Paragraph 1:

It is wrong to condemn an innocent human being to murder.

Human life begins at conception and this implies that at whatever stage a pregnancy may be terminated, an innocent being would have been killed.
The fetus is a human being and should be allowed to grow and be born and live their life to the fullest.
A fetus has a unique genetic code and thus it is a unique individual person.

Paragraph 2:

It is wrong to deliberately cause pain.

Whatever process is used to secure an abortion subjects the developing human to untold suffering before they eventually die.
By 18 weeks, a fetus has undergone sufficient development to feel pain.
Aborting a fetus is the same as physically attacking an innocent person and causing them fatal physical bodily harm.

Paragraph 3:

Abortion increases tolerance of killing which is a wrong precedence for the human race.

To legalize abortion and to view it as being right is like to legalize killing and see nothing wrong with it.
The respect people have for human life would be reduced if killing would be legalized.
Loss of society’s respect for human life may result into increased murder rates, genocide, and euthanasia.

Paragraph 4:

Abortion is can seriously harm a woman’s body and in some cases lead to the death of that woman.

It yields both anticipated physical side effects as well as potentially more serious complications.
In other instances, a woman may experience serious complications that may even threaten her life as a result of having an abortion.

Paragraph 5:

People who believe abortion is not morally wrong argue that the fetus should not necessarily be considered a person with the right to life.

This is wrong because the collection of human cells that is the fetus, if given the opportunity to grow, eventually becomes a complete human being.
The beginning of human life should be considered to be at conception.
A conceived human should be allowed to see out their life.

Paragraph 6:

The pro-choice group argues that pregnant women have moral rights too and that these rights may override the right of the fetus to live.

This argument fails to acknowledge that the moral rights of one human being should not deny another human being their moral rights.
Both the woman and fetus’ rights should be respected.

Argumentative Essay against Abortion Example 2

People across the world have strong opinions for and against abortion. Those who argue for its legalization fall under the “pro-choice” group while those who oppose its legalization are under the “pro-life” group. Even after the practice was declared a fundamental human right in the United States by the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court case, the debate about it is still going on in the country. According to pro-choice arguments, all women should enjoy abortion as a human right and no religious and/or government authorities should take that away from them. On the other hand, pro-life brigade argue that abortion immorally murders innocent human beings since the life of a human being begins at fertilization. This paper argues that abortion is wrong and should not be legalized since its disadvantages far outweigh its advantages, if any.

The major reason why abortion is wrong is because it is wrong to condemn an innocent human being to murder. Human life begins once they are conceived and this implies that at whatever stage a pregnancy may be terminated, an innocent being would have been killed. The fetus is in itself a human being and should be allowed to grow and be born and live their life to the fullest. As pointed out by Kaczor (2014), a fetus has a unique genetic code and thus it is a unique individual person. It is a potential human being with a future just like people who are already born. It would be wrong to destroy their future on the account of being killed through abortion.

Abortion is also wrong because it is wrong to deliberately cause pain. Whatever process is used to secure an abortion subjects the developing human to untold suffering before they eventually die. By 18 weeks, a fetus has undergone sufficient development to feel pain (Meyers, 2010). Thus, aborting it would be the same as physically attacking an innocent person and causing them fatal physical bodily harm. Under normal circumstances, such an attack would attract condemnation and the person or people involved would be punished accordingly as per the law. This is the exact same way abortion should be viewed and treated. It should be legally prohibited and those who do it should be punished for causing pain on an innocent person.

Further, abortion increases tolerance of killing and this is a wrong precedence being created for the human race. Just as Kershnar (2017) warns, to legalize abortion and to view it as being right is like to legalize killing and see nothing wrong with it. The respect people have for human life would be reduced if killing was legalized. It would be wrong and detrimental to reduce society’s respect for human life as it may result in increased murder rates, genocide, and euthanasia. Just like such measures as vaccination and illegalization of murder are taken to preserve human life, prohibiting abortion should be considered an important way of increasing human respect for life. Society should not tolerate killing in whatever form and should discourage it through every available opportunity.

Another detrimental effect of abortion is that it can seriously harm a woman’s body and in some cases lead to the death of that woman. It yields both anticipated physical side effects as well as potentially more serious complications. Some of the side effects a woman is likely to experience after securing an abortion include bleeding and spotting, diarrhea, vomiting, nausea, and cramping and abdominal pain. Worse is that these side effects can continue occurring two to four weeks after the procedure is completed (“Possible Physical Side Effects,” 2019). In other instances, a woman may experience serious complications that may even threaten her life as a result of having an abortion. These complications may include damage to other body organs, perforation of the uterus, the uterine wall sustaining scars, the cervix being damaged, sepsis or infection, and persistent or heavy bleeding. In the worst case scenario, a woman undergoing the abortion process might lose her life instantly (“Possible Physical Side Effects,” 2019). While such cases are rare, it is still not sensible to expose a woman to these experiences. A practice that has the potential to endanger human life in this manner should be considered wrong both legally and morally. It is the responsibility of individuals to care for and not expose their lives to harm.

People who believe abortion is not morally wrong argue that the fetus should not necessarily be considered a person who has the right to life. They hold that the fetus is just a collection of human cells and thus does not deserve the express right to live (Bailey, 2011). This argument is misinformed because the fact is that this collection of human cells that is the fetus, if given the opportunity to grow, eventually becomes a complete human being. This is why the beginning of human life should be considered to be at conception and not at birth or after some time after conception. A conceived human should be allowed to see out their life and only die naturally.

Another argument by the pro-choice group is that pregnant women have moral rights too and that these rights may override the right of the fetus to live under certain circumstances. These rights, according to this argument, include the right to take decision without legal or moral interference, the right to decide one’s own future, the right to ownership of one’s own body, and the right to life (Bailey, 2011). This argument fails to acknowledge that the moral rights of one human being should not deny another human being their moral rights. Even in cases where carrying a pregnancy to delivery would endanger the life of a pregnant woman, the fetus should be separated from the mother and be allowed to grow through such other mechanisms as being placed in an incubator.

Abortion is absolutely wrong and no arguments can justify its morality or legality. It kills innocent human beings before they can develop and experience life. It also causes untold pain and suffering to an innocent fetus. It further increases tolerance to killing, a precedence that would make people throw away their respect to human life and kill without a second thought. Even worse is that the practice exposes aborting women to serious bodily harm and could even claim their lives. Those who do not consider the fetus as a moral person who deserves to live are wrong because upon complete development, the fetus indeed becomes a human being. Similarly, those who feel the moral rights of a pregnant woman should override those of the fetus ignore the fact that both the woman and the fetus are human beings with equal rights.

Bailey, J. (2011). Abortion . New York, NY: The Rosen Publishing Group.

Kaczor, C. (2014). The ethics of abortion: women’s rights, human life, and the question of justice . New York, NY: Routledge.

Kershnar, S. (2017). Does the pro-life worldview make sense?: Abortion, hell, and violence against abortion doctors . New York, NY: Taylor & Francis.

Meyers, C. (2010). The fetal position: a rational approach to the abortion issue . Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

“Possible Physical Side Effects after Abortion”. (2019). In American Pregnancy Association , Retrieved July 5, 2020.

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Made by History

How Doctors Came to Play a Key Role in the Abortion Debate

Emergency Abortion Clash at Supreme Court Tests Strictest Bans

O n June 13, The Supreme Court announced its unanimous decision in FDA vs . Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine , governing access to a critical drug used in medication (non-surgical) abortions and to manage miscarriages. The decision preserves access (for now) to the widely used drug mifepristone, currently legal in 36 states. The court decided the case on procedural grounds, concluding that the plaintiffs, a coalition of anti-abortion physicians and medical associations, lacked standing.

Reproductive-justice advocates cautioned that challenges to the availability of the drug are likely to make their way back to the court, threatening access to a medication that has proved extraordinarily safe and effective.

Yet this case goes far beyond issues of legal standing and procedure. The plaintiffs explicitly deployed their authority as doctors and medical providers to frame their interests as rooted in safety, patient care, and public health, rather than in their religious or moral opposition to abortion.

The complex history of how physicians have organized to legitimate their authority over the reproductive lives of their patients is worth examining, as it reveals how anti-abortion forces are building on a well-worn path that has been at least partially cleared by abortion-rights advocates.

The familiar claim that the decision to have an abortion should be made “between a woman and her doctor” has long been associated with abortion-rights rhetoric as a right to privacy from the state. This principle was at the heart of the Roe majority opinion authored by Justice Blackmun. The “and her doctor” part of this formulation has received less attention, but is at the heart of the argument in the mifepristone case.

Read More: Supreme Court Unanimously Strikes Down Challenge to Abortion Drug Mifepristone

Physicians’ assertions of authority over the right to terminate a pregnancy and other issues of reproductive health did not begin with Roe . As the Roe opinion noted, in the late 19th century, the American Medical Association’s Committee on Criminal Abortion had denounced abortion and asserted that it should only be permitted if “at least one respectable consulting physician” also concurred with the decision. Thus, even when physicians took positions allowing for some access to abortion, they insisted that medical professionals hold an an outsized voice in the process.

In the early 20th century, elites associated with the American Eugenics movement advocated for laws permitting states to sterilize individuals without their consent, in their efforts to rid the population of those they deemed “undesirable” or “unfit.” Doctors were again critical to this effort to supervise and legitimate curbs on reproductive freedom.

In the 1930s, a group called the American Eugenics Society organized meetings of doctors to encourage them to play an active role in the eugenic sterilization programs as an extension of their responsibility as medical professionals. Having doctors on state eugenic boards gave these sterilization schemes the aura of respectability, as they were overseen by medical professionals. As one physician explained to his colleagues at a 1937 conference on the subject, “There is no longer any doubt but that the physician has a eugenic responsibility. In any eugenic scheme of society, the physician, and particularly those concerned with preventive medicine, must play an important part. He will function most in the therapeutic measures of sterilization and birth control.” Doctors thus framed their role not only as treating individual patients but as also having authority over policy and law, especially over issues related to reproduction.

Appeals to physicians to use their authority in this manner continued well after the public respectability of the American eugenics movement waned. In the 1950s and 1960s, some obstetricians and other doctors advanced similar arguments about their obligation to advocate for population control policies. Dr. C. Lee Buxton, Chief of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Yale School of Medicine argued in a medical journal in 1966 that “the medical profession should accept a major responsibility in matters related to human reproduction as they affect the total population and the individual family.” Doctors would play a significant role in the growing population control movement , again deploying their medical expertise and authority to advance laws rooted in social control.

Read More: 'I Don't Have Faith in Doctors Anymore.' Women Say They Were Pressured Into Long-Term Birth Control

This authority was not just a legal right; by this logic it was a professional obligation that doctors could not refuse. Consequently, doctors served on state eugenics boards that oversaw systematic non-consensual sterilizations until into the 1970s. At least 60,000 documented involuntary sterilizations were approved and performed by state bodies in the 20th century.

Obstetricians like Buxton also supported the framework eventually enshrined in Roe that physicians, rather than the state, possessed the authority to determine whether a pregnancy should be terminated or carried to term. In 1970, an AMA committee revised its position opposing access to abortion but still cautioned against "mere acquiescence to the patient's demand" for an abortion, a sentiment expressed elsewhere by doctors who also supported Roe . Again, we see skepticism from medical authorities that a pregnant person be trusted to make reproductive decisions for themselves.

Most state eugenic laws were repealed by the 1970s, but non-consensual sterilizations continued under certain circumstances. Notably, the federal government continued to approve the procedure for Native American women under the auspices of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Elsewhere, physicians, rather than state authorities, oversaw non-consensual sterilizations.

For example, in the 1970s, doctors at Los Angeles County Hospital, the teaching hospital of the USC School of Medicine, performed hundreds of tubal ligations on Mexican-origin women, many of whom later stated they never provided their consent.

Ten of these women eventually sued the hospital, naming Dr. Edward Quilligan, the Chief of ob/gyn at the time, as the defendant. The women offered heart-wrenching testimonies about the profound damage these non-consensual sterilizations caused them and their families. Quilligan told a journalist at the time (and to producers of a documentary on the case 40 years later) that he had done nothing wrong: “We were practicing good medicine.”

The judge agreed . In other words, physicians were not only entitled to abridge the reproductive autonomy of their patients, but they were also sometimes required to do so in the name of “good medicine.” Indeed, Quilligan suffered few professional repercussions and he has been honored at the highest level by prestigious medical schools and professional associations.

Read More: Abortion Rights Benefit People Who Want Kids, Too

When a group of anti-abortion medical providers incorporated as the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine with the express purpose of filing a lawsuit to ban mifepristone, the briefs they submitted all built on this history. They too were doctors drawing on the principle valorized in Roe that decisions regarding the termination of pregnancy required their authority and involvement.

These briefs are largely free of religious and moral arguments, focusing instead on estimates of gestational development, safety of medication, and the efficacy of review processes, among others that fall under the authority of medical providers. And their language often centers on issues between a woman and her doctor, sometimes in paternalistic terms. One brief insisted that their interest in banning the drug stemmed from their ethical commitment to “protect women and girls from the documented danger of chemical abortion drugs,” against all evidence about the safety of the drugs.

Such arguments draw on the troubling history of deference that (historically largely male) physicians have demanded to sometimes supersede the autonomy of their (female) patients.

Abortion and reproductive health providers do face significant legal, political, and personal threats for their work; their safety and professional right to practice must be protected vigorously. Nor should medical expertise and evidence-based research be dismissed. They are a vital part of reproductive health and care.

But a reliance on medical expertise need not be rooted in reflexive deference to that expertise, as Justice Blackmun envisioned. Indeed, the Women’s Health Movement of the 1970s developed approaches to reproductive health, including contraception, access to abortion, care and support during pregnancy and delivery, and child raising that demonstrated how medical expertise and reproductive autonomy can work together. Many reproductive justice groups today advocate similar practices, including advocating for legal access to self-managed abortions that do not require a physician’s involvement.

But the framing of reproductive decisions as lying “between a woman and a doctor” has opened the door for foes of reproductive autonomy to advance their arguments in the neutral language of medical authority. To secure a more expansive vision of reproductive justice will require retiring this phrase in favor of a vision of reproductive justice that does not reject medical experience or advice, but guards against any potential coercion, even when it comes bearing a white coat, to any person’s reproductive autonomy.

Emma Peterson is a recent graduate of Yale University with a degree in the History of Science, Medicine, and Public Health. Daniel Martinez HoSang is a Professor of American Studies at Yale University with a secondary appointment in the Section of the History of Medicine at Yale School of Medicine.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here . Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors .

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Write to Emma Peterson and Daniel Martinez HoSang / Made by History at [email protected]

Abortion Politics After Dobbs

Arizona Law Review, Forthcoming

U of Penn Law School, Public Law Research Paper No. 24-35

39 Pages Posted: 21 Jun 2024

David A. Skeel

University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School; European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI)

University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School

Date Written: June 18, 2024

In the two years since the Supreme Court decided Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization , overturning the right to abortion established by Roe v. Wade , the scholarly response has coalesced into two major streams, corresponding to the two dominant themes in Justice Alito’s majority opinion. The first criticizes Alito’s narrowly originalist reading of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The second, sounding in democracy and political theory, questions Alito’s claim that Dobbs is democracy-restoring; several recent articles have charged that Court-sanctioned gerrymandering and voting restrictions may stymy efforts to protect abortion rights.

This Article assesses this second set of claims. We emerge skeptical. Our own state-by-state analysis of gerrymandering patterns, as well as recent developments in the Court’s own jurisprudence, suggest that the democracy concerns are greatly overstated. Further undermining these concerns is the backlash that has followed the Dobbs decision, as manifested in a string of pro-choice victories in abortion-restrictive states. We situate these victories in the broader context of backlash to judicial decisions on controversial social issues, a comparison which highlights an important phenomenon: the side that gains the upper hand legally often loses ground in the social and cultural debate. Unlike other social issues such as same-sex marriage, however, permanent resolution of the abortion debate is impeded by significant obstacles including the incommensurable interests at stake and the inconvenient truths of pregnancy faced by each side.

Based on the historical pattern of these and other controversial social issues, ranging from slavery to gambling and the manufacture and sale of alcohol, the Article predicts that pressure will mount for a federal response. American voters have never been content simply to live in a state whose stance on a contested social issue reflects their own view. They will be unhappy that other states diverge from their view, a tendency already reflected in abortion opponents’ efforts to chill travel to states that allow abortion and in abortion rights advocates’ efforts to facilitate abortions for pregnant people in states that ban abortion. The Article assesses the three federal approaches that have been proposed, considering both their political plausibility and the likelihood that the Supreme Court would deem them to be constitutional under the reasoning the Court employed in Dobbs .

Keywords: abortion rights, Fourteenth Amendment, Dobbs, Roe v. Wade, social issues, Supreme Court, democracy, backlash, federal approaches, judicial decisions, politics, gerrymandering

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Home — Blog — Topic Ideas — 50 Abortion Essay Topics: Researching Abortion-Related Subjects

50 Abortion Essay Topics: Researching Abortion-Related Subjects

Abortion remains a contentious social and political issue, with deeply held beliefs and strong emotions shaping the debate. It is a topic that has been at the forefront of public discourse for decades, sparking heated arguments and evoking a range of perspectives from individuals, organizations, and governments worldwide.

The complexity of abortion stems from its intersection with fundamental human rights, ethical principles, and societal norms. It raises questions about the sanctity of life, individual autonomy, gender equality, and public health, making it a challenging yet critically important subject to explore and analyze.

This guide provides a comprehensive overview of the significance of choosing the right abortion essay topics and abortion title ideas , offering valuable insights and practical advice for students navigating this challenging yet rewarding endeavor. By understanding the multifaceted nature of abortion and its far-reaching implications, students can make informed decisions about their topic selection, setting themselves up for success in producing well-researched, insightful, and impactful essays.

Choosing the Right Abortion Essay Topic

For students who are tasked with writing an essay on abortion, choosing the right topic is essential. A well-chosen topic can be the difference between a well-researched, insightful, and impactful piece of writing and a superficial, uninspired, and forgettable one.

This guide delves into the significance of selecting the right abortion essay topic, providing valuable insights for students embarking on this challenging yet rewarding endeavor. By understanding the multifaceted nature of abortion and its far-reaching implications, students can identify topics that align with their interests, research capabilities, and the overall objectives of their essays.

Abortion remains a contentious social and political issue, with deeply held beliefs and strong emotions shaping the debate on abortion topics . It is a topic that has been at the forefront of public discourse for decades, sparking heated arguments and evoking a range of perspectives from individuals, organizations, and governments worldwide.

List of Abortion Argumentative Essay Topics

Abortion argumentative essay topics typically revolve around the ethical, legal, and societal aspects of this controversial issue. These topics often involve debates and discussions, requiring students to present well-reasoned arguments supported by evidence and persuasive language.

The Bodily Autonomy vs. Fetal Rights Debate: A Balancing Act
Exploring Abortion Rights: An Argumentative Analysis
Gender Equality and Reproductive Freedom in the Abortion Debate
Considering Abortion as a Human Right
The Impact of Abortion Stigma on Women's Mental Health
Abortion: A Controversial Issue
Persuasive Speech Outline on Abortion
Laughing Matters: Satire and the Abortion Debate
Abortion Is Bad
Discussion on Whether Abortion is a Crime
Abortion Restrictions and Women's Economic Opportunity
Government Intervention in Abortion Regulation
Religion, Morality, and Abortion Attitudes
Parental Notification and Consent Laws
A Persuasive Paper on the Issue of Abortion

Ethical Considerations: Abortion raises profound ethical questions about the sanctity of life, personhood, and individual choice. Students can explore these ethical dilemmas by examining the moral implications of abortion, the rights of the unborn, and the role of personal conscience in decision-making.

Legal Aspects: The legal landscape surrounding abortion is constantly evolving, with varying regulations and restrictions across different jurisdictions. Students can delve into the legal aspects of abortion by analyzing the impact of laws and policies on access, safety, and the well-being of women.

Societal Impact: Abortion has a significant impact on society, influencing public health, gender equality, and social justice. Students can explore the societal implications of abortion by examining its impact on maternal health, reproductive rights, and the lives of marginalized communities.

Effective Abortion Topics for Research Paper

Research papers on abortion demand a more in-depth and comprehensive approach, requiring students to delve into historical, medical, and international perspectives on this multifaceted issue.

Medical Perspectives: The medical aspects of abortion encompass a wide range of topics, from advancements in abortion procedures to the health and safety of women undergoing the procedure. Students can explore medical perspectives by examining the evolution of abortion techniques, the impact of medical interventions on maternal health, and the role of healthcare providers in the abortion debate.

Historical Analysis: Abortion has a long and complex history, with changing attitudes, practices, and laws across different eras. Students can engage in historical analysis by examining the evolution of abortion practices in ancient civilizations, tracing the legal developments surrounding abortion, and exploring the shifting social attitudes towards abortion throughout history.

International Comparisons: Abortion laws and regulations vary widely across different countries, leading to diverse experiences and outcomes. Students can make international comparisons by examining abortion access and restrictions in different regions, analyzing the impact of varying legal frameworks on women's health and rights, and identifying best practices in abortion policies.

List of Abortion Research Paper Topics

The Socioeconomic Factors and Racial Disparities Shaping Abortion Access
Ethical and Social Implications of Emerging Abortion Technologies
Abortion Stigma and Women's Mental Health
Telemedicine and Abortion Access in Rural Areas
International Human Rights and Abortion Access
Reproductive Justice and Other Social Justice Issues
Men's Role in Abortion Decision-Making
Abortion Restrictions and Social Disparities
Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Abortion Access
Alternative Approaches to Abortion Regulation
Political Ideology and Abortion Policy Debates
Public Health Campaigns for Informed Abortion Decisions
Abortion Services in Conflict-Affected Areas
Healthcare Providers and Medical Ethics of Abortion
International Cooperation on Abortion Policies

By exploring these topics and subtopics for abortion essays , students can gain a more comprehensive understanding of the multifaceted nature of the abortion debate and choose a specific focus that aligns with their interests and research objectives.

Choosing Abortion Research Paper Topics

When selecting research paper topics on abortion, it is essential to consider factors such as research feasibility, availability of credible sources, and the potential for original contributions.

Abortion is a complex and multifaceted issue that intersects with various aspects of society and individual lives. By broadening the scope of abortion-related topics, students can explore a wider range of perspectives and insights.

Abortion Social Issue
Exploring the Complexity of Abortion: Historical, Medical and Personal Perspectives
Abortion: A Comprehensive Research
An Examination of Abortion and its Health Implications on Women
Abortion Introduction
Comparative Analysis of Abortion Laws Worldwide
Historical Evolution of Abortion Rights and Practices
Impact of Abortion on Public Health and Maternal Mortality
Abortion Funding and Access to Reproductive Healthcare
Role of Misinformation and Myths in Abortion Debates
International Perspectives on Abortion and Reproductive Freedom
Abortion and the UN Sustainable Development Goals
Abortion and Gender Equality in the Global Context
Abortion and Human Rights: A Legal and Ethical Analysis
Religious and Cultural Influences on Abortion Perceptions
Abortion and Social Justice: Addressing Disparities and Marginalization
Anti-abortion and Pro-choice Movements: Comparative Analysis and Impact
Impact of Technological Advancements on Abortion Procedures and Access
Ethical Considerations of New Abortion Technologies and Surrogacy
Role of Advocacy and Activism in Shaping Abortion Policy and Practice
Measuring the Effectiveness of Abortion Policy Interventions

Navigating the complex landscape of abortion-related topics can be a daunting task, but it also offers an opportunity for students to delve into a range of compelling issues and perspectives. By choosing the right topic, students can produce well-researched, insightful, and impactful essays that contribute to the ongoing dialogue on this important subject.

The 50 abortion essay ideas presented in this guide provide a starting point for exploring the intricacies of abortion and its far-reaching implications. Whether students are interested in argumentative essays that engage in ethical, legal, or societal debates or research papers that delve into medical, historical, or international perspectives, this collection offers a wealth of potential topics to ignite their curiosity and challenge their thinking.

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Pros and Cons of Abortion to the Society Argumentative Essay

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Introduction

Pros of abortion, cons of abortion, relationship between abortion and the course on religion, works cited.

If you’re studying the pros and cons of abortion, the essay below will be a great place to start your research.

For a very long time now, the right to abortion has been one of the most controversial topics on the planet, pitying two major sides. On one side, pro-lifers insist that it is immoral and amounts to murdering an innocent child, while pro-abortionists argue that it is just a form of birth control. The latter claim that there is absolutely nothing wrong with it as all children should be born when they are wanted.

The numerous legislations, policies by governments and even hard-line stands by some organizations like the church have made this subject more controversial instead of offering solutions. At one point, one may argue that there would never be a consensus on abortion’s pros and cons in any essay or discussion.

This debate is likely to go on for several years unless the sturdy stands taken by both pro-lifers and pro-abortionists are softened. People have to find ways of accommodating the views of each other regarding the subject. The author will evaluate the issues surrounding the abortion debate. Analyzing the pros and examining the cons of abortion, the essay will seek to find solutions to the conflicting ideas.

There are several arguments that one forward in support of abortion. First of all, any birth of a child should occur when the parents want and not by chance (Potts et al. 229). This way it would go a long way in assisting the world to have an environment where all children that are born in this world have an environment conducive for proper development.

There is no need for inflating the world with many children who cannot have access to basic needs like adequate clothing, food, shelter, and education. It should also be noted that when a person decides to carry out an abortion it is not out of her dislike for children but because she feels that it would not be a wise decision to proceed with the pregnancy as it is still not yet the right time to have a baby (Potts et al. 229).

In the case of rape or incest, keeping a pregnancy is very traumatizing to the person raped as no one would wish to keep a child that is a result of this, and the best solution to this problem would be to abort the unborn child.

For the case of rape, the emotional effects of the occurrence are too traumatizing and take time to heal, and some rape victims do not recover at all. Adding a child to the rape victim is like adding more salt to a wound and would be a constant reminder that is likely to add more emotional trauma to the victim (Khoster 35).

Many studies on the morality or immoralities of abortion have found that some of those against the morality of abortion tend to agree that it is acceptable to abort a pregnancy that is a result of rape.

For instance, the gulp poll carried out in Canada found only 13% of the respondents were against the practice completely while interestingly a whopping 65% were of the view that it is acceptable to abort an unwanted pregnancy in certain conditions like if it is a result of rape (Flanagan 130).

There has also been an unending debate on the exact time that a fetus acquires life and becomes a person with rights and ability to have feelings (Sather 159). Sather further argues that before the 24 th – 28 th week, the fetus has not yet acquired human features and it does not amount to murder if you perform an abortion before this time.

Pro-lifers led by the Catholic Church insist that life begins at conception and anyone who is found guilty of having performed an abortion could be excommunicated from the church because of committing murder (Kohmescher 137). That is not all several studies when life stars in the case of an unborn child have resulted in conflicting dates.

The impending standoff as to, when a person can and cannot have an abortion, have left it possible for anyone to conduct an abortion. It is not clear as to when life begins, and as so long as a woman feels that she cannot have a baby, she has the freedom to do it since it is not yet clear when the life of a person begins.

Sometimes complications can occur to a pregnancy that may put the life of the mother or unborn child in danger and even at times all of them. In this case, abortion ought to be permitted to save the physical health of the mother although some of those advocating for abortion have often argued that the mental health of the mother ought to be included when talking about health (white & Baldwin 113).

At this point, the life of the mother is given first consideration as the fetus cannot survive without the mother, and in any case, the chances are that the mother can always get other children if she wants, but there is no way a fetus can survive on its leave alone getting other parents which is impossible.

Several disadvantages of abortion are argued out by pro-lifers. Most of the books on the subject are mostly in support of the drawbacks of abortion as compared to the advantages. According to Koster abortion is only a temporary and irrational decision that make women feel that they have gotten some relief to an unwanted child against chances of permanent loss of infertility (Koster 304).

She further argues that although removing an unwanted pregnancy may somehow offer relief to the woman the possibility of becoming infertile especially if an unqualified person performed the operation is very significant and once you lose your fertility there is zero chance that you will regain it.

Even when performed by a qualified medical doctor there is a chance that complications may arise like in some medical procedures and if this happens, you could definitely lose your fertility. In fact, interviews conducted on women who had complications when performing an abortion revealed that a majority of them had lost the ability to conceive or hard a miscarriage (Koster 304)

The relief that one feels after procuring an abortion is usually short-lived, and it dies after some time leading to a permanent feeling of guilt and sadness. In fact, in most of the times, this feeling of relief is just a deliberate attempt by the psychology of a person to delete the sense of guilt and shame that creeps in immediately one procures an abortion (Holman 321).

Holman further adds that although most of the legislation and policies concerning abortion allow the practice in the case of schoolgirls the idea that you once killed part of you is not likely to go away and will haunt you forever.

A lot of pro-lifers would equate abortion to murder, and it is therefore morally wrong and should be outlawed. Genovesi defines murder as an intentional act of taking away the life of a human being (Genovesi 340). Fro this he further adds that since the fetus of a person has life, then taking it away will amount to killing it, which is the same as murder.

Of course from this reason arguments are bound to arise as to when the life of a person actually begins. To all Christians led by the Catholic Church, it is completely unacceptable to allow a person to take away another person’s life for whichever reason and at whatever stage in life as it is still murder.

The late Pope John Paul is on record as having condemned the practice and even stating that it would threaten the freedom and dignity of humankind as it promotes a culture of accepting death as a normal thing (Zastrow & Kirst 82)

Procuring an abortion is not the only solution in the event of unwanted pregnancy as the child could also be put to adoption. It is estimated that in all married couples in the United States alone, between 10% -15% of them do not have the ability to have children (Grunlan 217).

This figure is so high that more and more Americans are turning to other countries overseas in order to get children of their own and as Grunlan further adds; this figure has been increasing in the recent years as more mothers turn to abortion as a way of controlling birth.

Furthermore, as Zastrow & Kirst add, in this age where there are so many available contraceptive methods; there should be very minimal unwanted pregnancies that warrant the need to abort a baby who has already been conceived (Zastrow & Kirst 82).

The main concern in the abortion controversy is whether it is morally and ethically right or wrong. Ethics and morality are significantly discussed in unit one of the course.

In unit one, the main issue discussed is how to know what is right and what is wrong. As argued by Aristotle in part of the course, to become ethical he should first reason well and have good character, and total happiness can only be achieved if people are noble.

The abortion debate centers on ethics in that while those who are for abortion argue that it offers a solution to lots of problems that could be brought about by having unwanted children, those against it argue that this relief is only temporary.

Unit three of the course is mainly on how to live a good life as Christians. In this essential part, the unit deals on acceptable Christian virtues and values. One such virtue is having unconditional love towards others. On abortion, it is argued that when one performs an abortion automatically, she does not have love for that child regardless of the conditions.

Moreover, all Christians should preserve human life and have respect for Gods creations, and failure to do so is a sin. People are also supposed to think critically of their actions and be held accountable to these actions, and, as discussed in the unit, they should avoid searching for quick-fix solutions to problems facing them.

The Catholic Church has been the most vocal in speaking against abortion for a long time, and as it stands, there is no chance that this sturdy stand will be reverted. In the book Catholic morality and human sexuality, the author argues that immediately after fertilization, the resulting zygote has human features and should be respected as a human being. Removing it from the uterus amounts to murder (Genovesi 344).

Furthermore, if you reject human life at any point, it is like rejecting God as humans are created in the image of God (Ferrara & Ireland 20). Accepting abortion has been argued by the church as accepting a culture of death and living without Jesus Christ as it amounts t killing an innocent creature of God who has not yet performed any sin.

Even in cases of rape or incest, the church does not permit abortion (Kohmescher 138). In this case, a woman may seek treatment immediately after the incident but not abortion weeks after the incident, and even if the pregnancy is a threat to human life, there should be an attempt to save both lives human lives are sacred and equal before God an none is unique to the other.

As it stands today, it seems the debate on abortion will not come to an end soon. The stands taken by both the pro-abortionists and anti-abortionists are so rigid, and there have not been any attempts to build a consensus.

For instance, the church will certainly not relent on its claim that abortion is murder and therefore a capital sin while pro-abortionists argue that having a child should be a choice. The conflicting policies by different governments regarding the issue have added more controversy to this subject instead of offering guidelines.

There should be efforts to provide a clear policy on this issue that would be acceptable in the whole world through an international body like the United Nations. Apart from that the church and other organizations that are anti-abortion ought to soften their stand in some incidences like rape which are too traumatizing.

Ferrara, Jennifer & Ireland, Patricia. The catholic mystique: fourteen women find fulfillment in the Catholic Church. Huntington: Sunday visitor publishing, 2004. Print.

Flanagan, Thomas . Game theory and Canadian politics . Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. Print.

Genovesi, Vincent. In pursuit of love: Catholic morality and human sexuality . Minnesota: Hutts Publishing, 2002. Print.

Grunlan, Stephen . Marriage and the family . Michigan: Zondervan. 1983. Print.

Holman, Thomas . The family in the new millennium . Westport: Praeger Publishers. 2007. Print liturgical press, 1996. Print.

Khoster, Winnie. Women and abortion in the Yoruba society, Nigeria . Amsterdam: Aksant academic publishers, 2003. Print.

Kohmescher, Matthew. Catholicism today: a survey of Catholic belief and practice the third edition. New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1999. Print.

Potts, Malcolm, Diggory Peter & Peel John . Abortion . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Print.

Sather, Trevor . Pros and cons: a debaters handbook 18 th edition . London: Routledge, 1999. Print.

White, Stuart & Baldwin, Timothy . Legal and ethical aspects of anesthesia, critical care, and preoperative medicine. Cambridge: Cambridge university press, 2004. Print.

Zastrow, Charles & Kirst, Karen. Understanding human behavior and the social environment: 8 th edition. Belmont: Brookscole, 2007. Print.

Abortion: Strengths and Limitations
Abortion Law in Canada
The Needs of Prison Inmates Serving a Life Sentence
Ethics in Public Administration: Case 2 – Paul’s Scenario
Happiness and Morality
Thanksgiving vs. Christmas
Convergence vs. Divergence of Culture and Literature - Examples
Human Obedience' Positive and Negative Effects
Chicago (A-D)
Chicago (N-B)

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IvyPanda . 2018. "Pros and Cons of Abortion to the Society Argumentative Essay." May 17, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/pros-and-cons-of-abortion-to-the-society/.

1. IvyPanda . "Pros and Cons of Abortion to the Society Argumentative Essay." May 17, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/pros-and-cons-of-abortion-to-the-society/.

Bibliography

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Legalized Abortion and the Public Health: Report of a Study (1975)

Chapter: summary and conclusions.

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SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS The legal status of abortion in the United States became a heightened national issue with the January 1973 rulings by the Supreme Court that severely limited states' rights to control the procedure. The Court's decisions on the historic cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton precluded any state interference with the doctor-patient decision on abortion during the first trimester (three months) of pregnancy. During the second trimester, a state could intervene only to the extent of insisting on safe medical practices "reasonably related to maternal health." And for approximately the final trimester of a pregnancyâwhat the Court called "the state subsequent to viability" of a fetusâa state could forbid abortion unless medical judgment found it necessary "for the preservation of the life or health of the mother." The rulings crystallized opposition to abortion, led to the intro- duction of national and state legislation to curtail or prohibit it, and generated political pressures for a national debate on the issue. Against this background of concerns about abortion, the Institute of Medicine in 1974 called together a committee to review the existing evidence on the relationship between legalized abortion and the health of the public. The study group was asked to examine the medical risks to women who obtained legal abortions, and to document changes in the risks as legal abortion became more available. Although there have been other publications on particular relationships between abortion and health, the Institute's study is an attempt to enlist scholars, researchers, health practitioners, and concerned lay persons in a more comprehensive analysis of the available medical information on the subject. Ethical issues of abortion are not discussed in this analysis, nor are questions concerning the fetus in abortion. The study group recog- nizes that this approach implies an ethical position with which some may disagree. The emphasis of the study is on the health effects of abortion, not on the alternatives to abortion.

Abortion legislation and practices are important factors in the relationship between abortion and health status. In order to examine legislation and court decisions that have affected the availability of legal abortion in the U.S., the study group classified the laws and practices into three categories: restrictive conditions, under which abortion is prohibited or permitted only to save the pregnant woman's life; moderately restrictive conditions, under which abortion is per- mitted with approval by several physicians, in a wider range of circumstances to preserve the woman's physical or mental health, prevent the birth of a child with severe genetic or congenital defects, or terminate a pregnancy caused by rape or incest; and non-restrictive conditions, under which abortion essentially is available according to the terms of the Supreme Court ruling. Before 1967, all abortion laws in the United States could be classified as restrictive. Easing of restrictions began in 1967 with Colorado, and soon thereafter 12 other states also adopted moderately restrictive legislation to expand the conditions under which therapeutic abortion could be obtained. In 1970, four states (Alaska, Hawaii, New York, and Washington) removed nearly all legal controls on abortion. Non-restrictive conditions have theoretically existed throughout all fifty states since January 22, 1973, the date of the Supreme Court decision. There is evidence that substantial numbers of illegal abortions were obtained in the U.S. when restrictive laws were in force. Although some of the illegal abortions were performed covertly by physicians in medical settings, many were conducted in unsanitary surroundings by unskilled operators or were self-induced. In this report, "illegal abortion" generally refers to those performed by a non-physician or the woman herself. The medical risks associated with the last two types of illegal abortions are patently greater than with the first. A recent analysis of data from the first year of New York's non- restrictive abortion legislation indicates that approximately 70 percent of the abortions obtained legally in New York City would otherwise have been obtained illegally. Replacement of legal for illegal abortions also is reflected in the substantial decline in the number of reported complications and deaths due to other-than-legal abortions since non- restrictive practices began to be implemented in the United States. The number of all known abortion-related deaths declined from 128 in 1970 to 47 in 1973; those deaths specifically attributed to other-than-legal abortions (i.e., both illegal and spontaneous) dropped from 111 to 25 during the same period, with much of that decline attributed to a reduced incidence of illegal abortions. Increased use of effective con- traception may also have played a role in the decline of abortion-related deaths. Methods most frequently used in the United States to induce abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy are suction (vacuum aspiration) or dilatation and curettage (D&C). Abortions in the second trimester are usually performed by replacing part of the amniotic fluid that surrounds

the fetus with a concentrated salt solution (saline abortion), which usually induces labor 24 to 48 hours later. Other second trimester methods are hysterotomy, a surgical entry into the uterus; hysterectomy, which is the removal of the uterus; and, recently, the injection into the uterine cavity of a prostaglandin, a substance that causes muscular contractions that expel the fetus. Statistics on legal abortion are collected for the U.S. government by the Center for Disease Control. CDC's most recent nationwide data are for 1973, the year of the Supreme Court decision. Some of those figures are: â The 615,800 legal abortions reported in 1973 were an increase of approximately 29,000 over the number reported in 1972. These probably are underestimates of the actual number of abortions performed because some states have not yet developed adequate abortion reporting systems. â The abortion ratio (number of abortions per 1,000 live births) increased from 180 in 1972 to 195 in 1973. â More than four out of five abortions were performed in the first trimester, most often by suction or D&C. â Approximately 25 percent of the reported 1973 abortions were obtained outside the woman's home state. In 1972, before the Supreme Court decision, 44 percent of the reported abortions had been obtained outside the home state of the patient, primarily in New York and the District of Columbia. â Approximately one-third of the women obtaining abortions were less than 20 years old, another third were between 20 and 25, and the remaining third over 25 years of age. â In all states where data were available, about 25 percent of the women obtaining abortions were married. â White women obtained 68 percent of all reported abortions, but non-white women had abortion ratios about one-third greater than white women. In 1972, non-white women had abortion rates (abortions per 1,000 women of reproductive age) about twice those of whites in three states from which data were available to analyze. A national survey of hospitals, clinics, and physicians conducted in 1974 by The Alan Guttmacher Institute furnished data on the number of abortions performed in the U.S. during 1973, itemized by state and type of provider. A total of 745,400 abortions were reported in the survey, a figure higher than the 615,800 abortions reported in 1973 to CDC. The Guttmacher Institute obtains its data from providers of health services, while CDC gets most of its data from state health departments.

Risks of medical complications associated with legal abortions are difficult to evaluate because of problems of definition and subjective physician judgment. Available information from 66 centers is provided by the Joint Program for the Study of Abortion, undertaken by The Population Council in 1970-1971. The JPSA study surveyed almost 73,000 legal abortions. It used a restricted definition of major complications, which included unintended major surgery, one or more blood transfusions, three or more days of fever, and several other categories involving prolonged illness or permanent impairment. Although this study also collected data on minor complica- tions, such as one day of fever post-operatively, the data on major com- plications are probably more significant. The major complication rates published by the JPSA study and summarized below relate to women who had abortions in local facilities and from whom follow-up information was obtained. â Complications in women not obtaining concurrent sterilization and with no pre-existing medical problems (e.g., diabetes, heart disease, or gynecological problems) occurred 0.6 times per 100 abortions in the first trimester and 2.1 per 100 in the second trimester. â Complications in women not obtaining concurrent sterilization, but having pre-existing problems, occurred 2.0 times per 100 in the first trimester and 6.7 in the second. â Complications in women obtaining concurrent sterilization and not having pre-existing problems occurred 7.2 times per 100 in the first trimester and 8.0 in the second. â Women with both concurrent sterilization and pre-existing problems experienced complications approximately 17 times per 100 abortions regardless of trimester. The relatively high complication rates associated with sterilization in the JPSA study would probably be lower today because new sterilization techniques require minimal surgery and carry lower rates of complications. The frequency of medical complications due to illegal abortions cannot be calculated precisely, but the trend in these complications can be estimated from the number of hospital admissions due to septic and incomplete abortionâtwo adverse consequences of the illegal procedure.

The number of such admissions in New York City's municipal hospitals declined from 6,524 in 1969 to 3,253 in 1973; most restrictions on legal abortion in New York City were lifted in July of 1970. In Los Angeles, the number of reported hospital admissions for septic abortions declined from 559 in 1969 to 119 in 1971. Other factors, such as an increased use of effective contraception and a decreasing rate of unwanted pregnancies may have contributed to these declines, but it is probable that the introduction of less restrictive abortion legislation was a major factor. There has not been enough experience with legal abortion in the U.S. for conclusions to be drawn about long-term complications, particularly for women obtaining repeated legal abortions. Some studies from abroad suggest that long-term complications may include prematurity, miscarriage, or ectopic pregnancies in future pregnancies, or infertility. But research findings from countries having long experience with legal abortion are inconsistent among studies and the relevance of these data to the U.S. is not known; methods of abortion, medical services, and socio-economic characteristics vary from one country to another. Risks of maternal death associated with legal abortion are lowâ1.7 deaths per 100,000 first trimester procedures in 1972 and 1973âand less than the risks associated with illegal abortion, full-term pregnancy, and most surgical procedures. The 1973 mortality rate for a full-term pregnancy was 14 deaths per 100,000 live vaginal deliveries; the 1969 rate for cesarean sections was 111 deaths per 100,000 deliveries. For second trimester abortions, the combined 1972-73 mortality ratio was 12.2 deaths per 100,000 abortions. (For comparison, the surgical removal of the tonsils and adenoids had a mortality risk of five deaths per 100,000 operations in 1969). When the mortality risk of legal abortion is examined by length of gestation it becomes apparent that the mortality risks increase not only from the first to the second trimester, but also by each week of ges- tation. For example, during 1972-73, the mortality ratio for legal abortions performed at eight weeks or less was 0.5, and for those performed between nine and 10 weeks was 1.7 deaths per 100,000 legal abortions. At 11 to 12 weeks the mortality ratio increased to 4.2 deaths, and by 16 to 20 weeks, the ratio was more than 17 deaths per 100,000 abortions. Hysterotomy and hysterectomy, methods performed infrequently in both trimesters, had a combined mortality ratio of 61.3 deaths per 100,000 procedures. Some data on the mortality associated with illegal abortion are avail- lable from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) and from CDC. In 1961 there were 320 abortion-related deaths reported in the U.S., most of them presumed by the medical profession to be from illegal abortion. By 1973, total reported deaths had declined to 47, of which 16 were specifi- cally attributed to illegal abortions. There has been a steady decline in the mortality rates (number of deaths per 100,000 women aged 15-44) associated with other-than-legal abortion for both white and non-white women, but in 1973 the mortality rate for non-white women (0.29) was almost ten times greater than that reported for white women (0.03).

Psychological effects of legal abortion are difficult to evaluate for reasons that include lack of information on pre-abortion psychological status, ambiguous terminology, and the absence of standardized measurements. The cumulative evidence in recent years indicates that although it may be a stressful experience, abortion is not associated with any detectable increase in the incidence of mental illness. The depression or guilt feelings reported by some women following abortion are generally described as mild and temporary. This experience, however, does not necessarily apply to women with a previous history of psychiatric illness; for them, abortion may be followed by continued or aggravated mental illness. The JPSA survey led to an estimate of the incidence of post-abortion psychosis ranging from 0.2 to 0.4 per 1,000 legal abortions. This is lower than the post-partum psychosis rate of one to two per 1,000 deliveries in the United States. Psychological factors also bear on whether a woman obtains a first or second-trimester abortion. Two studies in particular suggest that women who delay abortion into the later period may have more feelings of ambiva- lence, denial of the pregnancy, or objection on religious grounds, than those obtaining abortions in the first trimester. It is also apparent, however, that some second-trimester abortions result from procedural delays, difficulties in obtaining a pregnancy test, locating appropriate counseling, or arranging and financing the procedure. Diagnosis of severe defects of a fetus well before birth has greatly advanced in the past decade. Developments in the techniques of amniocen- tesis and cell culture have enabled a number of genetic defects and other congenital disorders to be detected in the second trimester of pregnancy. Prenatal diagnosis and the opportunity to terminate an affected pregnancy by a legal abortion may help many women who would have refrained from becoming pregnant or might have given birth to an abnormal child, to bear children unaffected by the disease they fear. Abortion, with or with- out prenatal diagnosis, also can be used in instances where there is reasonable risk that the fetus may be affected by birth defects from non-genetic causes, such as those caused by exposure of the woman to rubella virus infection or x-rays, or by her ingestion of drugs known to damage the fetus. Almost 60 inherited metabolic disorders, such as Tay-Sachs disease, potentially can be diagnosed before birth. More than 20 of these diseases already have been diagnosed with reasonaable accuracy by means of amniocentesis and other procedures. The techniques also can be used to identify a fetus with abnormal chromosomes, as in Down's syndrome (mongolism), and to discriminate between male and female fetuses, which in such diseases as hemophilia would allow determination of whether the fetus was at risk of being affected or simply at risk of being a hereditary carrier of the disorder.

In North America, amniocentesis was performed in more than 6,000 second-trimester pregnancies between 1967 and 1974. The diagnostic accuracy was close to 100 percent and complication rates were about two percent. Less than 10 percent of the diagnoses disclosed an affected fetus, meaning that the great majority of parents at risk averted an unnecessary abortion and were able to carry an unaffected child to term. There are many limitations to the use of prenatal diagnosis, especially for mass screening purposes. Amniocentesis is a fairly expensive procedure, and relatively few medical personnel are qualified to administer it and carry out the necessary diagnostic tests. Only a small number of genetic disorders can now be identified by means of amniocentesis and many couples still have no way to determine whether or not they are to be the parents of a child with genetic defects. Nevertheless, the avail- ability of a legal abortion expands the options available to a woman who faces a known risk of having an affected child. Abortion as a substitute for contraception is one possibility raised by the adoption of non-restrictive abortion laws. Limited data do not allow definitive conclusions, but they suggest that the introduction of non-restrictive abortion laws in the U.S. has not lead to any documented decline in demand for contraceptive services. Among women who sought abortion and who had previously not used contraception or had used it poorly, there is some evidence that they may have begun to practice contraception because contraceptives were made available to them at the time of their abortion. The health aspects of this issue bear on the higher mortality and mor- bidity associated with abortion as compared with contraceptive use, and on the possibility that if women rely on abortion rather than contraception they may have repeated abortions, for which the risk of long-term compli- cations is not known. The incidence of repeated legal abortions is little known because legal abortion has only been widely available in the U.S. for a few years. Data from New York City indicate that during the first two years of non-restrictive laws 2.45 percent of the abortions obtained by residents were repeat procedures. If those two years are divided into six-month periods, repeated legal abortions as a percent of the total rose from 0.01 percent in the first period to 6.02 percent in the last. Part of this increase is attributable to a statistical fact: the longer non-restrictive laws are in effect, the greater the number of women eligible to have repeated legal abortions. Perhaps, too, the reporting system has improved. In any case, some low incidence of repeated abortions is to be expected because none of the current contraceptive methods is completely failureproof, nor are they likely to be used with maximum care on all occasions.

8 A recent study has suggested that one additional factor contributing to the incidence of repeated abortions is that abortion facilities may not routinely provide contraceptive services at the time of the procedure. This is of concern because of recent evidence that ovulation usually oc- curs within five weeks and perhaps as early as 10 days after an abortion. The conclusions of the study group: â Many women will seek to terminate an unwanted pregnancy by abortion whether it is legal or not. Although the mortality and morbidity . associated with illegal abortion cannot be fully measured, they are clearly greater than the risks associated with legal abortion. Evidence suggests that legislation and practices that permit women to obtain abortions in proper medical surroundings will lead to fewer deaths and a lower rate of medical complications than restrictive legislation and practices. ââ¢ The substantial differences between the mortality and morbidity associated with legal abortion in the first and second trimesters suggest that laws, medical practices, and educational programs should enable and encourage women who have chosen abortion to obtain it in the first three months of pregnancy. â More research is needed on the consequences of abortion on health status. Of highest priority are investigations of long-term medical complications, particularly after multiple abortions the effects of abortion and denied abortion on the mental health and social welfare of individuals and families the factors of motivation, behavior, and access associated with contraceptive use and the choice of abortion.

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The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. Here’s the state of abortion rights now in the US

Judges, state lawmakers and voters are deciding the future of abortion in the U.S. two years after the Supreme Court jolted the legal status quo with a ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade

FILE - People march through downtown Amarillo to protest a lawsuit to ban the abortion drug mifepristone, Feb. 11, 2023, in Amarillo, Texas. Two years after the U.S. Supreme Court ended a nationwide right to abortion, travel and pills have become big parts of the issue.(AP Photo/Justin Rex, File)

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FILE - Paul Meacham holds high a sign that reads “Ohio is pro-life” as the crowd prays during the Ohio March for Life rally at the Ohio State House in Columbus, Ohio, Friday, Oct. 6, 2023. Two years after the U.S. Supreme Court ended a nationwide right to abortion, travel and pills have become big parts of the issue. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)

Judges, state lawmakers and voters are deciding the future of abortion in the U.S. two years after the Supreme Court jolted the legal status quo with a ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade .

The June 24, 2022, ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization sparked legislative action, protest and numerous lawsuits — placing the issue at the center of politics across the country.

Abortion is now banned at all stages of pregnancy, with limited exceptions, in 14 Republican-controlled states. In three other states, it’s barred after about the first six weeks, which is before many know they are pregnant. Most Democratic-led states have taken actions to protect abortion rights, and become sanctuaries for out-of-state patients seeking care.

That’s changed the landscape of abortion access, making it more of a logistical and financial ordeal for many in conservative states. But it has not reduced the overall number of procedures done each month across the U.S.

Here’s what to know about the state of abortion rights in the U.S. now.

Limited abortion access prompts more out-of-state travel

Bans in Republican-led states have prompted many people seeking abortions to travel to get care.

FILE - Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at Planned Parenthood, March. 14, 2024, in St. Paul, Minn. Harris says "everything is at stake" with reproductive health rights in November's presidential election. Harris' statements from segments of an MSNBC interview that aired Sunday, June 23, comes as the Biden campaign steps up its focus on contrasting Joe Biden and Donald Trump's positions on the issue ahead of this Thursday's presidential debate. (AP Photo/Adam Bettcher, File)

That translates into higher costs for gas or plane tickets, hotels and meals; more logistics to figure out, including child care; and more days off work.

A new study by the Guttmacher Institute, which advocates for abortion access, found that out of just over a million abortions provided in clinics, hospitals and doctors’ offices, more than 161,000 — or 16% — were for people who crossed state lines to get them.

More than two-thirds of abortions done in Kansas and New Mexico were for out-of-staters, particularly Texans.

Since Florida’s six-week abortion ban kicked in in May, many people had to travel farther than before, since throughout the Southeast, most states have bans.

Low-income patients and those lacking legal permission to be in the country are more likely to be unable to travel. There can be lasting costs for those who do.

In Alabama, the Yellowhammer Fund, which previously helped residents pay for the procedure has paused doing so since facing threats of litigation from the state .

Jenice Fountain, Yellowhammer’s executive director, said she met a woman recently who traveled from Alabama to neighboring Georgia for an abortion but found she couldn’t get one there because she was slightly too far into her pregnancy. So she then went to Virginia. The journey wiped out her rent money and she needed help to remain housed.

“We’re having people use every dime that they have to get out of state, or use every dime they have to have another child,” Fountain said.

It’s usually provided with pills rather than procedures

FILE - People march through downtown Amarillo to protest a lawsuit to ban the abortion drug mifepristone, Feb. 11, 2023, in Amarillo, Texas. (AP Photo/Justin Rex, File)

Nearly two-thirds of known abortions last year were provided with pills rather than procedures .

One report found that pills are prescribed via telehealth and mailed to about 6,000 people a month who live in states with abortion bans. They’re sent by medical providers in states with laws intended to protect them from prosecution for those prescriptions. The laws in Colorado, Massachusetts, New York, Vermont and Washington specifically protect medical providers who prescribe the pills to patients in states with bans.

The growing prominence of pills, which were used in about half of all abortions just before the Dobbs ruling, is a frontier in the latest chapter of the legal fight.

The U.S. Supreme Court this month unanimously rejected an effort by abortion opponents who were seeking to overturn or roll back the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone, one of two drugs usually used together for medication abortions. The issue is likely to return .

Abortion is on the 2024 ballot

In this presidential election year, abortion is a key issue.

Protecting access has emerged as a key theme in the campaigns of Democrats, including President Joe Biden in his reelection bid . Former President Donald Trump , the presumptive Republican nominee, has said states should decide whether to restrict abortions. He also suggested states could limit contraception use but changed his tune on that.

“We recognize this could be the last Dobbs anniversary we celebrate,” Kelsey Pritchard, a spokesperson for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America said in an interview, noting that if Democrats win the presidency and regain control of both chambers of Congress, a right to abortion could be enshrined in the law.

The issue will also be put directly before voters in at least four states. Colorado, Florida, Maryland and South Dakota have ballot measures this year asking voters to approve state constitutional amendments that would protect or expand access to abortion. A New York measure would bar discrimination against someone who has an abortion. There are attempts to put questions about abortion access on the ballots this year in Arkansas, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska and Nevada.

There’s also a push for a ballot measure in Arizona, where the state Supreme Court this year ruled that an 1864 abortion ban could be enforced. With the help of some Republicans — Democrats in the Legislature were able to repeal that law .

Generally, abortion rights expand when voters are deciding. In the seven statewide abortion policy-related votes since 2022, voters have sided with abortion rights advocates in every case.

It’s still up to the courts — including the Supreme Court

FILE - Paul Meacham holds high a sign that reads "Ohio is pro-life" as the crowd prays during the Ohio March for Life rally at the Ohio State House in Columbus, Ohio, Friday, Oct. 6, 2023. Two years after the U.S. Supreme Court ended a nationwide right to abortion, travel and pills have become big parts of the issue. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)

The Dobbs ruling and its aftermath gave rise to a bevy of legal questions and lawsuits challenging nearly every ban and restriction.

Many of those questions deal with how exceptions — which come into play far more often when abortion is barred earlier in pregnancy — should apply. The issue is often raised by those who wanted to be pregnant but who experienced life-threatening complications.

A group of women who had serious pregnancy complications but were denied abortions in Texas sued, claiming the state’s ban is vague about which exceptions are allowed. The all-Republican Texas Supreme Court disagreed in a May ruling.

The Supreme Court also heard arguments in April on the federal government’s lawsuit against Idaho, which says its ban on abortions at all stages of pregnancy can extend to women in medical emergencies. The Biden administration says that violates federal law. A ruling on that case could be issued at any time.

Meanwhile, bans have been put on hold by judges in Iowa, Montana, Utah and Wyoming.

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Michelle Goldberg

Trump’s Allies Say They’ll Enforce the Comstock Act. Believe Them.

An old photograph shows Margaret Sanger standing next to a table of medical supplies. A woman sits in a wooden chair in the foreground.

By Michelle Goldberg

Opinion Columnist

Until the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, it was hard for feminists to get Americans to take the threat of losing the constitutional right to abortion seriously. Describing Hillary Clinton’s inability, in 2016, to shake pro-choice voters out of their complacency, The New York Times’s Lisa Lerer and Elizabeth Dias wrote , “Internal campaign polling and focus groups showed that the issue did not resonate strongly with key groups of voters, because they did not believe Roe was truly at risk.”

It is similarly difficult to get Americans to appreciate the threat that the 19th-century Comstock Act could be resurrected . Named colloquially for the fanatical postal inspector Anthony Comstock, the 1873 act — which is actually a set of anti-vice laws — bans the mailing of “obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile” material, including devices and substances used “for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral purpose.” Though never repealed, it was, until recently, considered a dead letter, made moot by Supreme Court decisions on free speech, birth control and abortion.

But with Roe overturned, some in Donald Trump’s orbit see a chance to reanimate Comstock, using it to ban medication abortion — and maybe surgical abortion as well — without passing new federal legislation.

The 920-page blueprint for a second Trump administration created by Project 2025, a coalition of conservative organizations, calls for enforcing Comstock’s criminal prohibitions against using the mail — widely understood to include common carriers like UPS and FedEx — to provide or distribute abortion pills. Some MAGA legal minds believe that Comstock could also be wielded to prevent the mail from transporting tools used in surgical abortions. “We don’t need a federal ban when we have Comstock on the books,” Jonathan F. Mitchell, a crusading anti-abortion lawyer who represented Trump before the Supreme Court this year, told Lerer and Dias in February.

Conservatives know this would be enormously unpopular, which is probably why, when they talk about Comstock at all, they often refer to it by its criminal code numbers rather than its common name. (“I think the pro-life groups should keep their mouths shut as much as possible until the election,” said Mitchell.) Democrats, by contrast, need to be doing everything possible to make “Comstock” a household word. That’s why they should champion a bill introduced by Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota on Thursday to overhaul the Comstock Act. And it’s why President Biden would be wise to act on a petition from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression to posthumously pardon one of Comstock’s high-profile victims.

Many were shocked when the Supreme Court overturned Roe two years ago, but as Smith, the former vice president of Planned Parenthood of Minnesota, told me, they shouldn’t have been, because the right made no secret of its objectives. There is something similar going on with Comstock. “Believe them when they tell us what they want to do, because they will do it if they’re given half a chance,” she said.

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FILE PHOTO: A patient prepares to take Mifepristone, the first medication in a medical abortion, at Alamo Women's Clinic i...

Mark Sherman, Associated Press Mark Sherman, Associated Press

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Supreme Court unanimously preserves access to abortion medication mifepristone

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Thursday unanimously preserved access to a medication that was used in nearly two-thirds of all abortions in the U.S. last year, in the court’s first abortion decision since conservative justices overturned Roe v. Wade two years ago.

The justices ruled that abortion opponents lacked the legal right to sue over the federal Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the medication, mifepristone, and the FDA’s subsequent actions to ease access to it.

The case had threatened to restrict access to mifepristone across the country, including in states where abortion remains legal.

READ MORE: 5 takeaways from the abortion pill case before the U.S. Supreme Court

The high court is separately considering another abortion case, about whether a federal law on emergency treatment at hospitals overrides state abortion bans in rare emergency cases in which a pregnant patient’s health is at serious risk.

More than 6 million people have used mifepristone since 2000. Mifepristone blocks the hormone progesterone and primes the uterus to respond to the contraction-causing effect of a second drug, misoprostol. The two-drug regimen has been used to end a pregnancy through 10 weeks gestation.

Health care providers have said that if mifepristone is no longer available or is too hard to obtain, they would switch to using only misoprostol, which is somewhat less effective in ending pregnancies.

READ MORE: Threats to medication abortion access drive U.S. women to stockpile pills

President Joe Biden’s administration and drug manufacturers had warned that siding with abortion opponents in this case could undermine the FDA’s drug approval process beyond the abortion context by inviting judges to second-guess the agency’s scientific judgments. The Democratic administration and New York-based Danco Laboratories, which makes mifepristone, argued that the drug is among the safest the FDA has ever approved.

The abortion opponents argued in court papers that the FDA’s decisions in 2016 and 2021 to relax restrictions on getting the drug were unreasonable and “jeopardize women’s health across the nation.”

The mifepristone case began five months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe. Abortion opponents initially won a sweeping ruling nearly a year ago from U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump nominee in Texas, which would have revoked the drug’s approval entirely. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals left intact the FDA’s initial approval of mifepristone. But it would reverse changes regulators made in 2016 and 2021 that eased some conditions for administering the drug.

The Supreme Court put the appeals court’s modified ruling on hold, then agreed to hear the case, though Justices Samuel Alito, the author of the decision overturning Roe, and Clarence Thomas would have allowed some restrictions to take effect while the case proceeded.

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IMAGES

Abortion Essay Writing Guide with Examples
1. Introduction
Abortion Essay Writing Guide with Examples
I had an abortion. Why is none of your business.
Summary and Conclusions
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COMMENTS

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Opinion
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