Is abortion legal and should it remain legal?

Question

I'm writing a paper on abortion and I'm kind of in the middle. I want to know some more facts so I can make my oppinion with some good info. Any help would be appreciated!

Answer 1

Yes/yes. Basicly a womens body is her own, and she has control of what is or isnt done to her body. Not government.

Answer 2

yes and yes. very strong opinions on both sides of this debate too. my best friend is pro life, and we dont even discuss it, for it ends up heated. but i respect her opinion and her choice for having one.

what ever side of the fence you end up on, just try to respect different opinions of those whom dont believe what you do.

anyway, this is how i feel about the issue:

as a mother of 4, it may not be my choice, but at least i have one.

there are many reasons why women get pregnant unexpectedly; in the event a man or woman gets fixed and the tubes grow back (which are known to happen although rare), women get pregnant. If a woman is on the pill, and takes an antibiotic, it makes the pill ineffective, and she can get pregnant. When using condoms, they never tell you not to use petroleum jelly, but rather a water-soluble lubricant, for the PJ can teat holes in condoms and you don’t even know it. In the event that a woman has 7 kids, and can not handle another, she knows it…. and so on.

HOW it happens is irrelevant, yet that is what society focus’s on.

When we had no legal abortions, women were going to seedy back alley clinics with barbaric people performing the abortions anyway. woman also douched with bleach and dug at themselves with coat hangers (among other things) in an effort to give themselves abortions. as a result, many many women died. Therefor, outlawing it will not stop anything.

Some people (usually the rich) say that poor women should not have babies if they can not afford them, and i say, the poor all over the world are entitled to have a family if they choose to, even here in the USA. They think that people are poor by choice and from being lazy. Instead of rubbing some brain cells together and realizing that some people have good jobs, and some do not…. the people who work for minimum wage, cant live on that, thus are poor. Our society depends upon these minimum wage jobs in order to function.

Despite what we are all taught, or led to believe, a woman does not enter lightly into such a decision, she thinks long and hard before she does. of course there are a few who do not, which makes them ALL look like its used for a birth control method, which simply is not the case.

The day they allow men to decide for her, is the day she will not even bother to tell her bf, husband, partner or lover she is even pregnant. That’s exactly what will happen.

This is just my opinion.

Answer 3

Yes, it is legal. But that is largely due to the fact that the Supreme Court lied about the Constitution and forced the legality on all of the states.

Before the Supreme Court lied, some states had already legalized abortion in most circumstances. But there are also some states in which it would never have been legalized.

Personally, I don't care whether it is legal or not. I just want for the Supreme Court to stop lying about the Constitution.

Answer 4

I cant think of a single good argument against abortion that is not based in religion. As I do not believe there should be laws with only a religious basis I think it should remain legal.

Contrary to what some have said here abortion is not murder as murder is the unlawful killing of another. Since abortion is lawful it is not murder.
Also the usage "of another" creates problems. Another what? Obviously something that has a right to life. While some animal rights people may argue that this extends to animals it is pretty clear that the law only refers to people so "another" must mean a human or a person ( or both). Does a zygote qualify as a human? I don't believe so, a potential human perhaps, but I don't see why that would qualify it for full rights. And is it a person? Personhood in the debate is usually used to refer to a degree of self awareness hence someone who is brain dead would continue to be a human but would no longer be a person. We don't consider it murder to take someone off life support when they are not a "person" anymore. Clearly being human is not sufficient for a right to life. Nor is it necessary, to speak hypothetically, no one would deny Mr.Spock's right to life even if he was not human because of his obvious personhood.
Having established that it does not matter if the zygote is human and that it certainly lacks ( presently) personhood, does its potential personhood create a duty in the mother to bring it to term?
Under the common law, most rights are "negative rights" - that is others have a duty not to stop you from exercising them. Positive rights on the other hand impose positive duties on others. For example the right to live means that others have a duty not to kill you, not ( as it would if it were a positive right) that they have a duty to feed you, see that you get medical care etc. As this country moves to the left more positive rights are being recognized ( for example the right to an attorney was considered a negative right, you couldn't be kept from having an attorney, until the Gideon after which it became a positive duty of the government to provide one. In homicide, however, it is still pretty clear cut.
The distinction between what type of right it is is important. Even if the zygote should enjoy full human rights do to its potential humanity or personhood, does this create a positive duty for someone to provide a womb? One of the rights that the constitution provides is the right against involuntary servitude. Working for 9 months as someone else incubator against ones will is slavery. I'm not saying the zygote is enslaving the woman, if there are laws against abortion the government is the one doing it.
One could argue it is not involuntary as act of having sex may be a tacit acceptance of pregnancy ( though this clearly fails in the case of rape ( though some would argue only in the rape of virgins as those who have ever had sex have indicated that acceptance at some point)). But most people if they do not want to become pregnant take some precautions against it clearly indicating their denial of that acceptance. Should their status as involuntary servants be acceptable when it is imposed by the bad luck of failed birth control?
What if we make abortion illegal and unwilling woman are forced to carry the children to term. Even if they can wash their hands of responsibility after that by giving the child up for adoption, what are their duties during the course of the pregnancy? Must they abstain from drinking, smoking, ski-diving? Where do you draw the line. I believe that the woman has an absolute right to get the little guy out of her body. If that could be done without killing it great, but if it dies as a consequence of that, oh well.
So, a zygotes status as a creature with rights is questionable, As the moral status of the zygote is in doubt while the moral status of the woman is not, its theoretical rights should not trump her established and recognized rights. But even if the zygote had the same rights as any other, it still would not impose upon the woman the duty to carry it to term. ( However if the zygote has rights, then there may come a future time when medical science is advanced enough to remove the zygote to a willing host or some type of an incubator, that would be acceptable and does call into question abortions carried out after viability.)
I'm tired of all there big government nuts ( they call themselves conservatives) who always want to increase government power and its intrusion into people lives. I remain a Republican ( despite the current administration), but we have gotten far away from the foundation of limited government and negative rights. But, as a Republican I am also against against making abortion illegal because it would be the end of the party. We'd be swept out of every office in the next elections by all those people who were happy to look the other way while the law was still on their side.

Answer 5

to me all the pro choice arguments are week. ill explain all the one i can think of this late at night...

"its just a zygote, no more then cancer cells, not a human" - well actually its a human zygote. there are 46 chromesomes that make us human and the second the sperm and egg are combined the 'zygote' has those exact 46 chroms that make us human.

"why should a person thats raped or subjected to incest have to have a child" - several reasons against this one...
1) only about 1% of real rape victims get pregnant(i say real rape bc in states where you can only get an abortion bc of rape all you have to do is say it was rape and no one investigates the rape, they just sign a paper and off to the butcher you go)
2) only about another 6% get pregnant thru incest
3)adoption
4)(for those that say adoption is a fluke) If from the very begining of pregnancy you contact an agency your child will be adopted. there are people on waiting lists for as long as five years that wait for a woman thats pregnant and will have the baby so it can be adopted. The adoptive parents will often pay for your housing, food, and doctors visits aswell.

Age.. "would you put a 12 or 14 year old girl thru this?" - yes. women have menstration as an effect of puberty for a reason, its their body telling them that they can bare children. if the body couldn't handle it she wouldn't have gotten her period yet.

no money to have the child - single women can get welfare if they have a child, not to metion that almost all pro life organizations have money from charities that will help single mothers. and lets not for get the adoption arguement from above



thats all i can think of before bed, goodnight.

Answer 6

Yes its legal,i am a mother of 2 and would never do it,but to each their own,if you start to tell people what they can and cannot do people will find their own ways of doing it(coathanger)etc...which is alot more dangerous than the actual act,i thin that it should be illegal after 4 months gestation,anything before that you cant really call a baby,but to me its sick,but for some people whove made mistakes its the only way for them,and i will not be judgemental of them,i am not the one who judges.

Answer 7

When does life begin? That is the actual question.

If we believe the unborn child is a living human being, we must consider abortion the deliberate tasking of a human life. That is murder.

If we believe that the unborn child is not a living human being, abortion is a form of cosmetic surgery.

In my mind that is the entire debate.

Answer 8

It is currently legal as a result of the Roe Vs. Wade court case in 1973. Should it be legal is both a legal and moral question. Personally, I think abortion should be made ILLEGAL, with of course the rare (and by rare I mean extremely RARE due our advancements in medical science) exception where a woman’s life might be forfeited as a result of continuing with a pregnancy and/or delivery.

Abortion to me is synonymous with infanticide, and anyone who isn’t deluded by the absurd and selfish notion of how having a personal choice in the matter supersedes the worth of life, will see it exactly as I do. It is murder plain and simple. There should be no equivocation for what it is. There should be no sugarcoating the heinous crime that it is.

Granted much of my opinion on this issue is informed by my Christian upbringing, but I think a cogent case against abortion can be posited without reference to a supernatural framework, or a moral system founded on theological formulations.

If we believe that murder of another person, outside the womb is immoral, and an infringement of another person’s right to live, and as a result a crime of the highest sort, why is abortion, which is also an infringement of the right of another person to live, not considered on par with homicide? The fact that a 3 or 6-month-old fetus is not fully developed life is immaterial. The fact that it can POTENTIALLY be a fully DEVELOPED life makes it morally reprehensible to terminate it on the grounds of freedom of choice.

Look at other areas in which one party destroys the assets of another party in a court of law. The party who incurred damages not only has a right to seek redress for those assets but also for what those assets might develop into, and for the emotional damage caused by the destruction of those assets. For example, if a rival automotive company goes into a Ford Motor company factory and obliterates all the raw material used to produce a car, Ford Motor company has the right to not only sue for the value of the raw material, but also the future value that those raw materials could have yielded for the company when they DEVELOPED INTO cars that could be sold at a future time. The key word here is DEVELOP.

You see the legal system constantly rules in such a manner that it is patently obvious that it, and our collective morality that informs it, values what things can DEVELOP into. When an employee gets injured on the job as a result of employer negligence, the employee has the right, under the law, to seek compensatory damages not only for funding his rehabilitation, but for money that he POTENTIALLY could have earned had he been fit for work.

Hence, if in every facet of our existence we acknowledge that destruction of something that could POTENTIALLY DEVELOP into something greater, is synonymous with the destruction of that greater thing, why is the murder of a creature who POTENTIALLY will DEVELOP into human life not in and of itself be considered murder of human life! It seems to me to be common sense. Of course as a wise man once said, common sense isn’t always so common. I guess this holds true even more so when people’s self interest is involved. When it comes to justifying people’s selfish pursuits the only thing that is common about common sense is that it is commonly ignored.

The truth is the law, and the morality of many people who support the legality of abortion, is highly inconsistent. A glaring example of this is how we try the murder of pregnant women. In many instances, the prosecutor is well within his right to pursue a double homicide case. Why is this the case if a baby inside the womb is deemed by society not to be a child? Doesn’t that smack of hypocrisy and contradictory thinking.

The fact that a double homicide case can legitimately be heard when a pregnant woman is murdered reveals that society does hold that the fetus, as undeveloped as it is, is worthy of being called human, and that it should be accorded protection afforded to us all. The only time this protection is nullified is when a woman’s choice is involved.

People call abortion a controversy that will never be resolved because we cannot get the two opposing sides to agree on anything. I think that this is true, but not because both sides have equally valid points. I think we are at an impasse because those who are for the preservation of abortion are too mired in their own self-centered goals, to call the murder of children the morally repugnant act that they know, deep in the recesses of their hearts and minds, it is.

Answer 9

abortion is legal but in my opinion it should be illegal unless the mothers life is at stake. Murder is murder. But as long as its a big money maker for certain people and a way for libs to get elected it will always remain legal...politics before human life