Supporting Abortion Rights
The principles on which the Roe v. Wade decision was based -- an individual's freedom of choice, as well as freedom from government intrusion into personal matters -- need to be reaffirmed. The fetus is not yet a person and its rights do not outweigh the mother's right to choose. Decisions about such a personal matter as whether to continue a pregnancy must be left to the individual who is most directly involved, the pregnant woman.
What Should be Done?
Pass laws guaranteeing a woman's unrestricted right to abortion. Such laws must permit abortion not just when the mother's life or health is threatened, but for any reason a woman considers compelling. Provide publicly funded family planning counseling and clinics to permit all women -- regardless of income -- equal access to safe, medically sound abortion services. Pass legislative measures that would require HMOs, insurance companies, and group medical practices to include abortion as a regular part of their services. Encourage American pharmaceutical firms to distribute RU486, to permit women to carry out safe non-surgical abortions. Offer widespread and effective sex education, and easier access to low-cost birth control. Block legislation that would require spousal or parental notification as a precondition for getting an abortion; oppose waiting periods; and oppose mandatory counseling designed to discourage all abortions.
Arguments For This Approach
Women have an inalienable right to determine the circumstances of their lives, and government must not intrude into decisions about personal and private matters. Forcing a pregnant woman to carry her pregnancy to term, regardless of the circumstances that led to pregnancy, the woman's feelings about becoming a mother, or her ability to take on the burdens of child rearing, is terribly intrusive. Efforts to restrict abortion, such as legislative efforts to ban so-called late term partial birth abortions, jeopardize women's health, and keep physicians from making decisions that reflect their best medical judgment. Contraceptives are not entirely reliable, and for medical or religious reasons many women can't use the most reliable methods. Legal abortion must be available when contraception fails. It is inhuman to ban abortion when pregnancy results from rape or incest, or when continuing the pregnancy threatens the woman's health. Pregnant women considering an abortion shouldn't be forced to seek the permission of their spouses or parents, or submit to anti-abortion counseling.For all women to have the right to an abortion, it must be available at public expense to women who cannot afford it and do not have insurance.
Arguments Against This Approach
Allowing abortion on demand undermines one of the most basic values in a civil society: respect for human life. By granting the right to abortion with very few restrictions, the law encourages women to resort to abortion too often, and too casually. This perspective reduces abortion to a matter of personal choice and convenience, which ignores the sanctity of human life and the community's compelling interest. This position is based on the false assertion that if pregnancy is accidental -- resulting, for example, from contraceptive failure or rape -- women should feel no moral compunction about aborting the fetus. Many moral obligations are not voluntarily assumed. Expanding sex education, making contraceptives available to teenagers, and granting the right to abortion have encouraged sexual promiscuity and undermined family life.
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Comments
Rape is a condition that justifies abortion. Someone argues that the child in the womb should not be killed for the sins of another. but this person forgtot 1 thing, what would the baby think when it grows up? o you think that the baby will ever be happy again n his life? The mother probbly won;t treat the baby very well anyways because it's not her baby. if th mother donates the baby, the baby wouldjust feel worse when it greww up and find out that hes an unwanted baby. Woldntthe mother feel morseful too? this is the fact that you have to consider. Affirmitive on abortion
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