Keep Abortion Legal

A detailed Summary of Keep Abortion Legal

Prior to the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, abortion was illegal in most states. The 5-4 decision favoring the plaintiff in this case defined a constitutional right to privacy on the basis of which the Court said abortion should be allowed in certain cases. Rather than offering a sweeping decision rooted in the importance of the right to privacy or the value of unborn life, the Court employed a continuum of fetal development along which the conflicting interests of the mother and the unborn child must be balanced at various stages of pregnancy. The result: three decades of political debate and polling about the legality of abortion under various specific circumstances and in each of the three trimesters. Each individual has his or her own opinion about whether or not abortion should be completely legal or not. But I believe that abortion should be legal and that there should be no more debate about it.

In order to get to the heart of the debate, I will have to address some of the main arguments of those who believe that abortion should be illegal. The best way to this is to separate these questions into certain groupings. This will help to answer questions from all different spectrums of the issue including the

There are those who say that abortion should not be legal in the United States and it must be stopped because the right to life must be protected. To that I would say laws have never stopped abortion, but only relegated it to "back-alley butchers". The hypocrisy is clear: when illegal abortion was the leading killer of pregnant women in the United States, there were no Right to Life organizations as there are today according to the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report of the Centers for Disease Control. Another argument against abortion states abortion is wrong because it is taking a human life. However, we manage to justify exceptions for warfare, self-defense, capital punishment and euthanasia. So why are some people so afraid to justify legal abortion also? Innocent people are killed in each one of the aforementioned exceptions, including capital punishment on occasion, and yet they are all considered legal. A third argument would be simply, most Americans believe that abortion should be illegal. But polls show overwhelming - and growing - support for legal abortion. Typically, a 1982 Associated Press-NBC poll showed that 77% agreed that abortion "should be left to the woman and her doctor," and that support for abortion rights cuts across political, age, religious, income, education, race and sex differences. Only 19% favored a constitutional amendment outlawing abortion. The last argument in this category is "If abortion were made illegal again, women would not return to self-induced, coat-hanger abortions or back-alley butchers. Modern suction machines, or even a catheter and bulb syringe, will be available to non-physicians. P

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Approximate Word count = 1117
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Politics