If abortion rights are denied, then a constraint is imposed on women's freedom to act in a way that is of great importance to them, both for its own sake and for the sake of their achievement of equality;.
Many people regard the right to control one's own body as a key moral right. If women are not allowed to abort an unwanted foetus they are deprived of this right.
The important US Supreme Court decision in Roe v Wade to some extent supported that view when it ruled that a woman's right to terminate her pregnancy came under the freedom of personal choice in family matters and was protected by the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution. This leads some people to claim is that it is unethical to ban abortion because doing so denies freedom of choice to women and forces 'the unwilling to bear the unwanted'. Opponents of this argument usually attack the idea that a foetus is 'part' of a woman's body.
They argue that a foetus is not the same sort of thing as a leg or a liver: it is not just a part of a woman's body, but is to some extent a separate ' person ' with its own right to life. A second objection to this argument is that people do not have the complete right to control their bodies.
All people are subject to various restrictions on what they do with their bodies - and some of these restrictions laws against suicide or euthanasia are just as invasive.
They say that if a woman is not allowed to have an abortion she is not only forced to continue the pregnancy to birth but also expected by society to support and look after the resulting child for many years to come unless she can get someone else to do so.
They argue that only if women have the right to choose whether or not to have children can they achieve equality with men: men don't get pregnant, and so aren't restricted in the same way. Furthermore, they say, women's freedom and life choices are limited by bearing children, and the stereotypes, social customs, and oppressive duties that went with it.
They also regard the right to control one's own body as a key moral right, and one that women could only achieve if they had were entitled to abort an unwanted foetus.
No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother. The US Supreme Court decision in Roe v Wade , which gave women a right to abortion under certain conditions is seen by many as having transformed the status of women in the USA. This landmark decision Search term:. Many other states have been and are now considering abortion reform or repeal bills but usually without the support of the powerful groups who are backing other forms of population control.
The old laws are also beginning to face challenges in the courts and are being attacked on a variety of constitutional grounds. The ratio of in-hospital abortions to live births in New York City was approximately one to for private patients and something like one to 10, in municipal hospitals.
At the same time the women whose deaths were associated with abortion in New York City in a typical year were 56 percent black, 23 percent Puerto Rican, and 21 percent white. The to 10, in-hospital abortions contrast, of course, with the estimated one million performed outside hospitals annually. Generally speaking, the laws do not distinguish in their prohibitions of abortions between doctors and nondoctors. Moreover, the out-of-hospital abortions performed by doctors are obtained by the same group which accounts for the bulk of the in-hospital abortions: the middle- and upper-income white woman who can afford the hundreds or thousands charged for expert medical service outside the law.
But most of the old laws on abortion remain unchanged on the statute books. In a few states, like Connecticut or Missouri, the law says that the abortion may be performed to save the life of the child as well as that of the mother, although no one is sure what this means. As a matter of fact, no one knows what the laws which permit abortion to save the life of the mother mean.
Is it enough that the pregnancy if it comes to term will seriously damage the mother's health? Or will result in the birth of defective offspring? Clearly, a number of doctors think the answer to these questions is yes, since abortions, especially on white women with good incomes, are routinely and openly performed in some hospitals in most states and the prosecuting authorities do nothing about it.
So why do the abortion laws stay on the books? One reason is the apparent inability or unwillingness of those who advocate population limitation to see the connection. This does not apply to Planned Parenthood-World Population, which in November, , passed resolutions calling for repeal of the abortion laws in support of its declared policy of voluntary parenthood.
By , almost all the major religious groups in the United States except the Roman Catholic Church were on record in favor of abortion-law reform or repeal. And public opinion polls demonstrated that a majority of people, including a majority of the Catholics asked about the issue, favored at least some liberalization of the laws. But the opposition of the Catholic Church is potent and well organized. May all responsible public authorities—as some are already doing so laudably—generously revive their efforts.
They must choose, for example, when it comes to abortion for the therapeutic reason even of saving the life of the woman between their obligations to their church and their obligations to their state.
This leads to the question whether as a matter of law Catholic doctors and Catholic hospitals which follow the teachings of the Pope are practicing sectarian medicine. In comparison, , hysterectomies and , tonsillectomy operations were performed the same year.
The number of abortion-related deaths in the US decreased between and , from 90 to Most of this decrease resulted from the availability and safety of legal abortion.
Legal abortion carries an especially low risk of death, particularly when performed in the 1st trimester. For the period, the risk of death was 1. Legal abortion also has a lower risk of death than does childbearing.
Using even conservative data, the comparison of mortality rates reveals that terminating a pregnancy through legally induced abortion is 7 times safter than carrying the pregnancy to term.
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