Abortion

Name

Date
Introduction

Abortion has been a long going debate in the world as to whether it should be a

fundamental right as a human being has a right to their own body, or whether ending another life

couldn’t be in the hands of another human being, even if it is the mother herself. The idea of

abortion has been legal in the United States for quite some time since 1973; however, there are

certain restrictions placed on the act in certain states where it is made illegal. People have been

working on anti-abortion laws since the 1900’s because of which the debate has carried on for so

long (Sharma et al., 2017). The overall debate is divided into two main categories; pro-choice

and pro-life, where various aspects like religion, medicine and moral beliefs are taken into

account.

Pro- Choice

The pro-choice side of the argument believes that since new life exists in the body of

another human being, they have the right over their body in all aspects, which includes the act of

abortion. This side of the argument believes that since it is an individual’s body under question,

the woman herself should be able and trusted to make an informed decision, and the state cannot

stop her from abortion. Pro-choice supporters are working to make sure abortion facilities are

available, and they oppose the government laws which are making abortion illegal, even if the

pregnancy is out of assault, rape or even unplanned (Ntontis et al., 2018). They also argue that

since abortion is made illegal in so many states, they have to opt for life-threatening illegal

clinics for abortion, which puts their lives at risk and the facilities aren’t even kept up to the

basic health standards since they may be shut down at any moment.
 Pro-choice supporters believe that since a woman is being given the right to become

pregnant, and is being trusted enough to start life within her body, then she is also capable and

rightfully set to end that pregnancy if she deems necessary. There are a thousand reasons why

pregnancies aren’t ideal for the woman, either it’s a result of rape, or it is unplanned, under

which circumstances the parents or sometimes just the mother alone, isn’t prepared or equipped

with everything that she might need to raise that child. Often times there are even medical risks

in carrying out pregnancies, even to the extent of death of the mother, and even then, mothers are

forced to carry the child.

It isn’t that pro-choice supporters don’t realize the extent of their actions and that

abortion actually ends a life growing inside of someone. However, they believe that abortion is

the least bad situation out of all the bad options available long term, which makes it the right

choice for the mother (Bilewicz et al., 2017). And the irony is that the state laws are usually

made by men since the ratio of women passing out such laws and standing to support them is

quite low. And men are least affected by going forward with a pregnancy that has nothing but

multiple avenues of bad futures. All in all, pro-choice supporters believe that having the right to

one’s body is a basic moral and human right that everyone is born with, and the state cannot take

that right away, just like they cannot take away someone’s right to see, or hear.

Pro-Life

The pro-life side of the argument believes that even as a fetus, a life deserves an equal

chance of making it through the natural course without being ended midway. Especially since

due to the impeccable medical advancements nowadays, parents are able to see the actual

development of the baby every step of the way, so it isn’t even that they aren’t familiar with
what the baby is like. Everything, up to the baby’s hair even, can be seen in scans done

nowadays, which means that parents get to experience that baby living life inside the womb, very

much like living outside of it. And ending a life inside the womb then also equates to ending the

life of a baby living amongst people, or life pro-life supporters argue; murder. Where pro-choice

argues about a moral right of a human beings body, the same principle can now be applied to a

fetus since its growth is so closely being measured that it isn’t anything less than a life, and

abortion would again be suppressing that fetus’s right to life; the moral right it was conceived

with (Beckman, 2017). The pro-life side also argues that ending a life, even as a fetus, can have

lifelong emotional and psychological effects on the human being since they will have ended a

life and the series of ‘what ifs’ will just keep piling up.

The pro-life side argues that with time and more technologies in the medical field coming

into play, the fetus is more and more like a sub-human form because it too deserves the same

right to life as any other human being would be given. And pro-life often back this up with data

and actual real-life examples of how a fetus can too experience pain like human beings, so the

actual act of ending its existence wouldn’t be any less than ending the life of a living and

breathing child outside the womb (Hill, 2017). And the pro-life side also believes that science is

on their side in this argument since they back up their arguments to where the fetus is compared

to a living human being by showing studies conducted on fetuses and the individual works of

doctors to show that the fetus does indeed need the same moral rights as a human being.

Conclusion

Abortion has been a topic of debate for so many years in America, and it has been giving

new developments every year like all other socio-political issues of the world. The reason why
the debate still exists is that human beings are put in a position to decide the nature of what

human life actually is, even if it is a different form of it, which makes it a rather complex debate

with which reaching a conclusion becomes a rather subjective thing to do.

Feminism & Psychology., 27(1), pp. 101-113.

Bilewicz, M., Mikołajczak, G. & Babińska, M., 2017. Speaking about the preborn. How

specific terms used in the abortion debate reflect attitudes and (de)mentalization. Personality and

Individual Differences, Volume 111, pp. 256-262.

Hill, R. L., 2017. The political potential of numbers: data visualisation in the abortion

debate. Women, Gender & Research, 26(1), pp. 83-96.

Ntontis, E. & Hopkins, N., 2018. Framing a ‘social problem': Emotion in anti‐abortion

activists' depiction of the abortion debate. British Journal of Social Psychology , 57(3), pp. 666-

683.

Sharma, E. et al., 2017. Analyzing Ideological Discourse on Social Media: A Case Study

of the Abortion Debate. CSS 2017: Proceedings of the 2017 International Conference of The

Computational Social Science Society of the Americas, Issue 3, pp. 1-8.