Essay Sample Outline: Complications of Legalizing Abortion Today

Publication Date: 16 Jan 2020

Introduction

Although the number of women choosing to undergo an abortion is declining, a significant number of women in the US still choose, and will continue to desire the availability of this procedure. According to a study, 1 in 4 Americans will have an abortion by the age of 45 (Jones and Jerman 1904). Therefore, abortion laws, or the availability of legal abortion will affect almost a quarter of a million women in the US every year. As such, considering the barriers, and increasing the legal availability of abortions is an important issue.  Given the medical safety and ongoing or consistent demand for abortions, and the number of decades that have passed since Roe vs. Wade, why has this remained a hot-button issue? In this speech, we will explore some of the factors that continue to make abortion an important topic, and form a barrier to legalization. These factors include the pro-choice/pro-life divide, religious and moral stigma associated with abortion and the relationship of abortion to politics. These factors, among others, continue to complicate the process of wide-spread legalization today.

(Transition): So, given the seriousness of the topic, it is important to begin by defining the two primary sides of the debate, which keep abortion a hot-button issue: pro-life and Pro-choice movements.

Body

1. The pro-choice/pro-life divide remains the primary crux of the contention among participants in the abortion debate (Planned Parenthood, 2019).
2. The pro-choice camp, as defined by Planned Parenthood, is the belief that “women have the basic human right to decide when and whether to have children, based on their own moral and religious beliefs, even though they themselves may not choose abortion as an option for an unplanned pregnancy.” (Planned  Parenthood, 2019).
   1. This means that those who are pro choice think that abortions should be made legal, and available, and that the primary deciding factor should be left up to the mother, because she has the right to make choices regarding her own body.
3. In contrast to this, the pro-life camp argues that killing unborn babies is the murder of a human being, so women should not be given the right to abort their pregnancies.
   1. This group does not believe that abortion should be made legally available in most or all circumstances.
   2. According to Planned Parenthood (2019) this can be divided into two subgroups, based on whether or not they believe that some exception should be made for medically-indicated abortions, in cases where the fetus will not live, or the mother’s health is threatened by the continuation of the pregnancy.
4. A crucial point in the debate between these two sides is the foundational argument regarding whether an unborn child can be considered a human being that has its own rights
   1. The pro-choice camp argues that an unborn child is not a human being yet, so abortion should not be considered murder and is not a transgression of an individual human being’s right to live (American Civil Liberties Union, 2019).
   2. The American Civil Liberties Union attests to this fact stating that “No state interest described by fetal rights advocates has enough force to override a woman’s fundamental rights of privacy, bodily integrity, and self-determination. . . . Until the child is brought forth from the woman’s body, our relationship with it must be mediated by her.” (Gallagher, 1987 as cited in American Civil Liberties Union, 2019).
   3. On the other hand, the pro-life camp argues that an unborn child is already a human being with its own set of rights and the mother has no right to deprive him/her of the right to live.
      1. The Pontifical Academy for life (Stevens, 1997) states that each individual even the unborn has a fundamental “right to life” which is violated, if they are aborted.
      2. Similarly, the Eternal Perspective Ministries state that the baby is a unique entity, pointing to scientific fact, like the fact that the baby has its own blood type to demonstrate that it is an individual with a separate right to life.

(Summary) The pro-choice/pro-life debate rests upon whether or not the child is a part of the mothers’ body, and whether or not the mother has an unalienable right to do what they want with their bodies, during the term of their pregnancy.

(Transition/Preview) However, the issue is clouded with religious arguments regarding consciousness, the sanctity of life, etc. and these cannot possibly be settled because of these philosophical questions, so much be considered from a religious or moralistic perspective.

1. The Religious and moral stigma placed on people who choose to have abortions, frames the issues as a moral issue, rather than a legal issue.
2. This can be seen in how an appeal to emotion is often used as an argument against full legalization (Ntontis and Hopkins 87).
   1. A series of  religious, or moral,  questions such as: ‘when does life really begin?’ and ‘is an unborn child, a person?’,  target the morality of the mother, implying that mothers who choose to abort their pregnancies are ‘immoral’ and are murderers.
3. However, these are not proper arguments, because it merely gives moral judgment from a subjective perspective, or uses religious standards to determine a legal issue.
4. Religion and the law should be separated, because not all people believe in the same religions and moral codes.
5. Further, the constitution guarantees religious freedom and separation of the church and state, which should prevent strictly Christian standards from becoming the biased basis of legal policy.

(Summary): Thus, religious and moral stigmas dominate the issue, and create a significant barrier, making it more challenging to pursue a rational resolution to the legal debate.

(Preview): Finally, one must consider the way that abortion has become a major element of the democratic and republican political platforms.

• The legality of abortion is also connected to politics.

1. The pro-choice camp is often associated with liberals, so the pro-life camp also sees the legalization of abortion as an affront to conservative values.
2. This is closely related to partisan positions, because the pro-life stance, is part of the republican platform, and the pro-choice platform has become the standard part of the democratic platform.
3. Gender is also a factor, as gender roles and women’s rights are also partisan issues

(Summary:) The abortion issue has become much more complicated because we have gone beyond the issue of choice into issues of mortality and other factors such as politics.

Conclusion

It is clear, from this discussion that the factors that perpetuate the debate related to abortion are multilayered, and heavily tied to the perception of morality. To fully understand the scope of the debate, we need to consider abortion as a social issue and to always to remember to consider it as such because it is currently being distracted, or placed off track, as a direct result of personal issues and unrelated debates. In terms of legality, it should not be decided by the basic human rights, and women’s right to control their own body, and not a sense of morality, or the political power that it gives to any party.

Reference

Alcorn, Randy. “Is the Unborn Part of the Mother’s Body?” Eternal Perspective Ministries. Retrieved from: https://www.epm.org/resources/2010/Mar/29/unborn-part-mothers-body/

American Civil Liberties Union. “What’s Wrong with Fetal Rights” 2019. Retrieved from https://www.aclu.org/other/whats-wrong-fetal-rights

Jones, Rachel, Jernna. “Population Group Abortion Rates and Lifetime Incidences of Abortion: United States, 2008-2014”, American Journal of Public Health 107, no. 12 (December 1, 2017): pp. 1904-1909.

Ntontis, E. & Hopkins, N.Framing a ‘social problem’: Emotion in anti-abortion activists’ depiction of the abortion debate. British Journal of Social Psychology, 57(3), 2019, pp. 666-683.

Patev, Alison, Hood, Kristina, Hall, Calvin. The interacting roles of abortion stigma and gender on attitudes toward abortion legality. Personality and Individual Differences 146, 2019, pp. 87-92.

Planned Parenthood. “What do the terms “pro-choice’ and “pro-life” mean?” Planned Parenthood. 2019. Retrieved from https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/teens/ask-experts/can-you-explain-what-pro-choice-means-and-pro-life-means-im-supposed-to-do-it-for-a-class-thanks

Stevens, Clifford. “The Rights of the Unborn” Priests for life. N.d. Retrieved from https://www.priestsforlife.org/government/stevens3.htm