Variety Of Safe Abortion Procedures example essay topic

The abortion debate in America has been framed by something known as "A Women's Right To Choose!" But of just what does the Women's Right To Choose consist of? It is premised, we are told, on a "right to privacy". But exactly what is included in that right to privacy, and what excluded? I hold my own opinion to this subject as being Pro-Choice (Pro-Choice is defined as having the ability to choose). Opponents of choice have been using inflammatory rhetoric about "infanticide" and "partial-birth" abortion in a nationwide strategy to further their goal of eroding women's reproductive options. However, bans on abortion procedures are unconstitutional in at least three ways.

First, the definition of what methods of abortion would be banned is vague and overboard - it would ban a variety of safe and common abortion procedures, not just the unsafe procedures. Second, by banning a variety of safe abortion procedures, the bans impose an undue burden on women seeking access to abortions by forcing them to rely upon less safe medical options, or even non-medical options. Finally, these bans are unconstitutional because they do not allow a women to obtain a banned procedure when it would preserve her health. The Supreme Court's decision in Roe vs. 's. Wade is often misrepresented by those who oppose safe, legal abortion. It is often portrayed as giving women the right to terminate their pregnancy for any reason through all nine months of pregnancy.

But contrary to the arguments of many abortion opponents, Roe does not provide for "abortion on demand". The court held that a woman has the right to choose abortion until fetal viability - the time at which it first becomes realistically possible for a fetus to live outside the woman's body - but that the states interest outweighs the woman's right after that point. So what happened to our "right to privacy"? Except in the story of the Emperor's New Cloths, I cannot think of a more startling example of mass refusal to see the obvious than is presented by the current attitudes toward the population problem on the one hand and abortion on the other.

The government continues to maintain strict antiabortion laws on the books of at least four fifths of our states, denying freedom of choice to women and physicians and compelling the "unwilling to bear the unwanted". Yet as Dr. Christopher Tie tze and Sarah Lew it point out in the Scientific American (January 1969), "Abortion is still the most widespread method of fertility control in the modern world. Since, however abortions are still so difficult to obtain, we force the birth of millions more unwanted children every year. If we really want to cut our population growth rate on a voluntary basis, we should make abortion available on a voluntary basis, at least in the early stages of pregnancy. When Japan liberalized its abortion laws some years back, it halved its rate of population growth in a decade. I do not recommend abortion as a birth-control method of choice.

I merely state that it is a fact the most important single method of birth-control in the world today, and to cut down on population growth we should make abortion easy and safe while we continue to develop other and more "satisfactory" methods of family limitation. In addition to the 5 million women in the U.S. without access to birth-control for whom abortion would seem a mater of right when they want it, there are the uncounted thousands who after conception suffer some diseases of discover some defect which makes the birth of a live healthy baby unlikely, and the many, too, whose contraceptive methods occasionally do not work. Today abortion under modern hospital conditions is safer than childbirth. Instead of making abortion more difficult and dangerous for women, lawmakers should promote policies that reduce the need for abortion. Almost 50 percent of all pregnancies in this country are unintended, including over 30 percent within marriage. And over half of all unintended pregnancies end in abortion.

Improved access to contraception - including increases in Title X funding, insurance coverage of contraception and improved contraceptive research - would address the root causes of unintended pregnancy and would reduce the need for abortion, but not eliminate the choice..