abortion right essay

Princeton Legal Journal

The First Amendment and the Abortion Rights Debate

Sofia Cipriano

Following Dobbs v. Jackson ’s (2022) reversal of Roe v. Wade (1973) — and the subsequent revocation of federal abortion protection — activists and scholars have begun to reconsider how to best ground abortion rights in the Constitution. In the past year, numerous Jewish rights groups have attempted to overturn state abortion bans by arguing that abortion rights are protected by various state constitutions’ free exercise clauses — and, by extension, the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. While reframing the abortion rights debate as a question of religious freedom is undoubtedly strategic, the Free Exercise Clause is not the only place to locate abortion rights: the Establishment Clause also warrants further investigation. 

Roe anchored abortion rights in the right to privacy — an unenumerated right with a long history of legal recognition. In various cases spanning the past two centuries, t he Supreme Court located the right to privacy in the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments . Roe classified abortion as a fundamental right protected by strict scrutiny, meaning that states could only regulate abortion in the face of a “compelling government interest” and must narrowly tailor legislation to that end. As such, Roe ’s trimester framework prevented states from placing burdens on abortion access in the first few months of pregnancy. After the fetus crosses the viability line — the point at which the fetus can survive outside the womb  — states could pass laws regulating abortion, as the Court found that   “the potentiality of human life”  constitutes a “compelling” interest. Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (1992) later replaced strict scrutiny with the weaker “undue burden” standard, giving states greater leeway to restrict abortion access. Dobbs v. Jackson overturned both Roe and Casey , leaving abortion regulations up to individual states. 

While Roe constituted an essential step forward in terms of abortion rights, weaknesses in its argumentation made it more susceptible to attacks by skeptics of substantive due process. Roe argues that the unenumerated right to abortion is implied by the unenumerated right to privacy — a chain of logic which twice removes abortion rights from the Constitution’s language. Moreover, Roe’s trimester framework was unclear and flawed from the beginning, lacking substantial scientific rationale. As medicine becomes more and more advanced, the arbitrariness of the viability line has grown increasingly apparent.  

As abortion rights supporters have looked for alternative constitutional justifications for abortion rights, the First Amendment has become increasingly more visible. Certain religious groups — particularly Jewish groups — have argued that they have a right to abortion care. In Generation to Generation Inc v. Florida , a religious rights group argued that Florida’s abortion ban (HB 5) constituted a violation of the Florida State Constitution: “In Jewish law, abortion is required if necessary to protect the health, mental or physical well-being of the woman, or for many other reasons not permitted under the Act. As such, the Act prohibits Jewish women from practicing their faith free of government intrusion and thus violates their privacy rights and religious freedom.” Similar cases have arisen in Indiana and Texas. Absent constitutional protection of abortion rights, the Christian religious majorities in many states may unjustly impose their moral and ethical code on other groups, implying an unconstitutional religious hierarchy. 

Cases like Generation to Generation Inc v. Florida may also trigger heightened scrutiny status in higher courts; The Religious Freedom Restoration Act (1993) places strict scrutiny on cases which “burden any aspect of religious observance or practice.”

But framing the issue as one of Free Exercise does not interact with major objections to abortion rights. Anti-abortion advocates contend that abortion is tantamount to murder. An anti-abortion advocate may argue that just as religious rituals involving human sacrifice are illegal, so abortion ought to be illegal. Anti-abortion advocates may be able to argue that abortion bans hold up against strict scrutiny since “preserving potential life” constitutes a “compelling interest.”

The question of when life begins—which is fundamentally a moral and religious question—is both essential to the abortion debate and often ignored by left-leaning activists. For select Christian advocacy groups (as well as other anti-abortion groups) who believe that life begins at conception, abortion bans are a deeply moral issue. Abortion bans which operate under the logic that abortion is murder essentially legislate a definition of when life begins, which is problematic from a First Amendment perspective; the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment prevents the government from intervening in religious debates. While numerous legal thinkers have associated the abortion debate with the First Amendment, this argument has not been fully litigated. As an amicus brief filed in Dobbs by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Center for Inquiry, and American Atheists  points out, anti-abortion rhetoric is explicitly religious: “There is hardly a secular veil to the religious intent and positions of individuals, churches, and state actors in their attempts to limit access to abortion.” Justice Stevens located a similar issue with anti-abortion rhetoric in his concurring opinion in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989) , stating: “I am persuaded that the absence of any secular purpose for the legislative declarations that life begins at conception and that conception occurs at fertilization makes the relevant portion of the preamble invalid under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Federal Constitution.” Judges who justify their judicial decisions on abortion using similar rhetoric blur the line between church and state. 

Framing the abortion debate around religious freedom would thus address the two main categories of arguments made by anti-abortion activists: arguments centered around issues with substantive due process and moral objections to abortion. 

Conservatives may maintain, however, that legalizing abortion on the federal level is an Establishment Clause violation to begin with, since the government would essentially be imposing a federal position on abortion. Many anti-abortion advocates favor leaving abortion rights up to individual states. However, in the absence of recognized federal, constitutional protection of abortion rights, states will ban abortion. Protecting religious freedom of the individual is of the utmost importance  — the United States government must actively intervene in order to uphold the line between church and state. Protecting abortion rights would allow everyone in the United States to act in accordance with their own moral and religious perspectives on abortion. 

Reframing the abortion rights debate as a question of religious freedom is the most viable path forward. Anchoring abortion rights in the Establishment Clause would ensure Americans have the right to maintain their own personal and religious beliefs regarding the question of when life begins. In the short term, however, litigants could take advantage of Establishment Clauses in state constitutions. Yet, given the swing of the Court towards expanding religious freedom protections at the time of writing, Free Exercise arguments may prove better at securing citizens a right to an abortion. 

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Why abortion in the US is on the rise

There were more abortions in 2023 than in any year since 2011.

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To understand the evolving landscape for abortion in the United States, you have to consider two seemingly contradictory things.

The first: The overturn of Roe v. Wade has led to unprecedented attacks on abortion, with nearly half of states banning or planning to ban the procedure since June 2022.

Yet the second: The overall incidence of abortion has increased. In fact, according to new data published yesterday by the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research group, there were more abortions in the formal US health care system in 2023 than in any year since 2011. To get even more granular, there were approximately 1 million abortions last year, a 10 percent increase over the number from 2020.

So what gives? How is this possible?

We have some sense of what’s driving the increase

The first underlying factor is that travel out of state for abortion has gone up, offsetting some of the newer restrictions in states with bans. More than 160,000 people crossed state lines to end pregnancies in 2023, per Guttmacher, almost double the number who did so in 2020 .

This isn’t to say the burden of state restrictions has been offset.

“Even if people can travel, doing so comes with significant financial and logistical cost,” Isaac Maddow-Zimet, the lead researcher at Guttmacher, told me. “And it’s only been possible because there’s been a lot of support from folks like abortion funds, and we don’t know how sustainable that [funding] will be long-term.”

Another factor explaining the overall increase is that more residents living in states without restrictions are getting abortions.

This seems to have been driven primarily by improved access policies in those states, like expansion of telehealth medicine , more sliding-scale payment options , and wider Medicaid coverage . Some of these efforts began before 2022, though many picked up steam after the Supreme Court’s ruling.

“The broader context is that access anywhere has never been particularly great, and cost has always been a pretty substantial barrier even before Dobbs ,” said Maddow-Zimet.

Another factor likely driving the increase is that more people are choosing to end pregnancies through medication abortion — the two-drug combination of mifepristone and misoprostol.

Use of these pills has been trending up over time, but Guttmacher found a particularly big jump over the last three years, where medication abortion accounted for 63 percent of all US abortions in the formal health care system in 2023, up from 53 percent in 2020.

There are a lot of reasons why people might choose to use this effective option , which researchers have found to be safe and with a very low risk of complications.

Some patients lack access to in-person abortion clinics (both in the states that’ve outright banned abortion since 2022 or just in rural and otherwise underserved regions). Other people may simply prefer to end pregnancies in the comfort of their own home or seek out the pills because they can cost less than surgical abortion.

So ... what happens next?

Given that so many people are turning to abortion pills, it should come as no surprise that the anti-abortion movement has ramped up its efforts to restrict access to the medication since the overturn of Roe . The US Supreme Court will be hearing a case next week that could lead to even more restrictions on mifepristone , a drug that has been FDA-approved since 2000.

Still, despite these legal threats and the looming possibility of a future Trump administration using the executive branch to further crack down on the pills, thus far advocates for abortion rights have made tremendous gains in expanding access to the medication since Roe ’s overturn.

As I’ve previously reported for Vox , it’s never been easier, faster, and cheaper to access abortion medication nationwide, even in red states with total abortion bans.

Some of this is driven by the growth of new shield laws, where blue-state abortion providers can now mail pills to people living in states where abortion is illegal. Some of it is thanks to the growth of e-commerce sites and other international providers, which have collectively and significantly brought down the cost for patients.

Even if the Supreme Court bans mifepristone this summer or places new restrictions on the drug, many of these alternative methods would remain intact, and many abortion providers would switch to providing misoprostol-only regimens.

In other words, the anti-abortion movement is going to have a really hard time stopping people from ending pregnancies they don’t want.

But okay, here’s what we still don’t know when it comes to figuring out why abortion incidence is going up.

The big remaining unknown is whether the increase we’ve seen has been driven in part by people’s shifting childbearing decisions. Do fewer people want to have kids now? Do more people want to delay having kids? Researchers aren’t sure.

Maddow-Zimet tells me this is a particularly difficult thing to measure, and there’s been almost no quality data on changes in people’s intention to have children since Roe ’s overturn. (Though we might get some soon with next year’s National Survey of Family Growth .)

An even bigger unknown: How many people wanted to end a pregnancy since Dobbs but weren’t able to? That sort of data is critical to know but has always been extremely difficult to collect, and we still don’t have reliable methods to do so.

Given all these unknowns, not to mention uncertainty with the upcoming presidential election and future funding streams, it’s hard to say how and whether these abortion trends will continue. We’ll be keeping a close watch.

This story appeared originally in Today, Explained , Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions .

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The Making of the Right to Abortion

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, two aclu board members made it their mission to make reproductive freedom a civil liberties issue..

By Leigh Ann Wheeler October 18, 2019

“I am far from being a feminist,” Dorothy Kenyon announced in 1968 to colleagues on the American Civil Liberties Union’s national board. But I “care passionately for fair play,” she assured them. Harriet Pilpel , another prominent board member, also distanced herself from feminism — so much so that, in 1973, self-identified feminists who had recently joined the board whispered that Pilpel did not “consider Feminist concerns her own or savor the bonds of sisterhood.”

To Kenyon and Pilpel, feminism smacked of man-hating. Worse, it threatened to undermine the camaraderie they had long relied on to persuade male board members to treat women’s rights as civil liberties. Even so, in the 1950s and 1960s, Kenyon and Pilpel introduced their colleagues on the ACLU board — mostly men — to the idea that laws against abortion might involve civil liberties, and they did so in surprising ways and within unlikely contexts.

Dorothy Kenyon, July 31, 1939. (Photo by Barney Stein/New York Post Archives /(c) NYP Holdings, Inc. via Getty Images)

‘Self-Determination in Childbearing’  

The men who led the early ACLU in the 1920s were familiar with abortion. As participants in the sexually experimental social scene that distinguished Greenwich Village, many appreciated that abortion, even though illegal, could provide a back-up when contraception failed. Roger Baldwin , a founder and longtime director of the ACLU, for example, knew that his aversion to fatherhood led his first wife to have at least one abortion. 

Even so, in the beginning of the 1930s, after becoming one of the only female board members, Dorothy Kenyon tried repeatedly and without success to raise the issue of abortion. Harriet Pilpel was younger than Kenyon by more than two decades and did not join the board until the 1960s. But by 1936, she was already working with her law partner Morris Ernst to overturn laws against birth control, and by the 1940s, she advocated repeal of all laws that criminalized common sexual practices, including those against abortion.

Kenyon did not convince the board even to discuss abortion as a possible civil liberties matter  until 1956 , and only after a Virginia-based contributor, Jules E. Bernfeld , urged the ACLU to go after laws that prevented “self-determination in childbearing.” But that discussion resulted in no action; board members concluded that abortion fell outside their purview, because they could not determine when life begins. That, Kenyon argued, was not the point. Women must have the “right to choose what shall happen to their bodies,” she insisted. Nevertheless, the ACLU decided to leave the matter to “social agencies in the field.”

Kenyon gained a new ally a couple of years later when Melvin Wulf arrived as the ACLU’s assistant legal director. Wulf made no secret of his support for abortion rights or of his personal familiarity with the issue. After arguing in Poe v. Ullman (1960) — unsuccessfully, it turned out — that laws against birth control violated rights to privacy, he considered the possibility of attacking laws against abortion on the same grounds. 

Read the entire ACLU 100 History Series

Ironically, although leaders of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America ( PPFA ), represented by Harriet Pilpel in Poe , sided with Wulf, they were reluctant to envision birth control on a continuum with abortion. After all, they had worked for decades to distinguish birth control from abortion as a strategy for destigmatizing and legalizing it.  They had, in fact, argued that birth control was abortion’s antithesis because it would prevent abortions, not make them more available.

Abortion Rights Begin to Go Mainstream  

Even as the ACLU and PPFA coordinated a campaign to overturn laws against birth control, others were developing a full-blown movement focused on legalizing what they called therapeutic abortion. First among them was the American Law Institute (ALI), an organization of leading attorneys and judges who had worked, since 1951, to create a “ Model Penal Code ” that would guide state legislatures in reforming their criminal laws.

By the late 1950s, the ALI recommended legalization of therapeutic abortions, defined as abortions performed by physicians to end a pregnancy that threatened the mental or physical health of the woman or one with severe fetal anomolies. “[R]ape, incest, or other felonious” intercourse might also justify an abortion. 

As if on cue, the 1960s brought a wide range of new demands for abortion — from women who helped to generate the decade’s sexual revolution to women who wanted to control the number and spacing of their children. Discoveries that thalidomide and rubella caused serious fetal anomalies emerged in the middle of a rubella epidemic and also brought new supporters to the movement to legalize therapeutic abortion. 

By the middle of the 1960s, high-profile allies included the Christian Century magazine and the National Council of Churches, as well as a number of mainstream media outlets, law reviews, deans of law schools, and state medical societies and bar conventions.  Meanwhile, abortion law reform groups formed all over the country and demanded “humane abortion laws,” beginning in California when the legislature considered bills that would decriminalize therapeutic abortion.

Despite Kenyon’s persistent advocacy, the ACLU came late to the issue. In 1963, even the director of its most progressive affiliate — the one in Southern California — insisted  that “there is no prospect that the ACLU will regard ‘Therapeutic abortion’ as a civil liberties matter.” 

Even so, just one year later, Harriet Pilpel, recently elected to the national board, brought the issue of abortion to the ACLU’s 1964 Biennial Conference in Boulder, Colorado. Created in the 1950s as a strategy for more fully involving lay members and the affiliates in shaping ACLU policy, the biennial had become the place for activist members to initiate change.  Indeed, resolutions passed at biennial meetings became formal policy if the national board did not reject them within 18 months. If the board did object, the resolutions were submitted to a vote by the ACLU’s affiliate boards.

Pilpel went to Boulder determined to come away with a resolution on abortion.

ACLU General Counsel Harriet Pilpel in her office., 1980 (ACLU Archives)

‘There’s Something Wrong With the Laws’

The 1964 biennial had a packed agenda. The meeting was dominated by the civil rights crisis in Mississippi as participants strategized about how the ACLU could help prevent violence from overtaking the summer voting rights project. President John Kennedy’s “war on crime,” another major issue, also occupied attendees, who worried that a war on crime could trigger new abuses of civil liberties. 

Pilpel actually presented her appeal for abortion law reform on a panel titled, “Civil Liberties and the War on Crime.” Laws against abortion and other “sex laws” constitute a form of “class legislation,” she argued. They are enforced primarily against the poor and underprivileged who suffer “wholesale violations of civil liberties” through surveillance, entrapment, arbitrary police action, speech repression, and intrusions on their privacy. 

Relying heavily on the work of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey , one of her clients , Pilpel claimed that, under these laws, nine out of 10 Americans qualify as sex criminals.  “There’s something wrong with the laws,” Pilpel declared, when elites violate them with impunity, while the poor and people of color suffer prosecution and punishment. 

“The American Law Institute has pointed the way,” she noted, to establishing a right of sexual privacy that would encompass rights to birth control and abortion. But it was up to the ACLU, she insisted, to tease out and defend the civil liberties issues involved.

Pilpel prevailed over the opposition of a vocal minority. The 1964 biennial voted to adopt ALI’s recommendation to decriminalize private sexual conduct by consenting adults and instructed the ACLU to explore the constitutionality of abortion laws. She was delighted.

In addition to moving sexual rights, in general, and abortion, in particular, onto the ACLU’s agenda at the biennial, Pilpel also forged a new and powerful relationship there. “One of the nice things” about the conference, she wrote to Dorothy Kenyon, “was the feeling of having become friends.”

Indeed, the two attended panels together, debated issues, enjoyed sightseeing in the mountains, and later exchanged letters celebrating their newfound friendship. Thereafter, they vacationed together on Martha’s Vineyard and joined forces to persuade the national board to recognize the right to abortion as a matter of civil liberties.

Responding to Pilpel’s triumphant biennial resolution, the national board researched possible constitutional bases for attacking laws against abortion. Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) — a major Supreme Court opinion that relied in part on briefs submitted by Pilpel, for PPFA, and Wulf, for the ACLU — soon eased the task. It overturned laws against birth control by finding in the U.S. Constitution a right to privacy, one that ACLU leaders quickly deployed against abortion laws.

Policy details came together more slowly and with a fair bit of acrimony. Even Pilpel and Kenyon disagreed about whether and how a woman’s right to an abortion should be restricted. Others argued that a married woman must obtain her husband’s consent or that the rights of a fetus trumped those of a pregnant woman. Some argued for the rights of the unborn and the state’s interest in preserving fetal life. 

Kenyon called the discussions  “a shambles of irrelevance and illogic,” and she despaired at seeing civil libertarians steadfastly refusing to apply civil liberties principles to abortion. Like “a Cassandra crying out in the A.C.L.U. wilderness against the crime of our abortion laws and man’s inhumanity to women,” Kenyon denounced the “bodily slavery” that laws against abortion imposed on women. A democracy in which women are “forced by the government to bear children against their will” is a mockery, she insisted. “Only Hitler could create the obscenity of women’s bodies belonging (in this crucial function of theirs) to the state."

Kenyon denounced the “bodily slavery” that laws against abortion imposed on women.

The ACLU, and the Supreme Court, Comes Around  

After years of negotiations, the board in 1969 articulated  the following policy :

The Union asks that state legislatures abolish all laws imposing criminal penalties for abortions. Total repeal of all such laws will meet these civil liberties criteria.

Kenyon expressed her delight in a letter to Jules Bernfeld, the Virginia donor who helped her persuade the ACLU to discuss abortion for the first time in 1956. “I’m happy as can be,” she wrote him, “that the end seems almost in sight. Isn’t it fun to be almost prophets?” 

She also forwarded her original correspondence with Bernfeld to the ACLU’s associate director for preservation as “a footnote to history.” It was to Bernfeld, she added, that “I first made my remark about women’s right to control their own bodies,” an idea that initiated the campaign to repeal abortion laws. “I am free now,” she told another colleague, “to shout abroad that this policy of mine is also that of the A.C.L.U.”

Demonstrators demanding a woman's right to choose march to the U.S. Capitol for a rally seeking repeal of all anti-abortion laws in Washington, D.C., Nov. 20, 1971. (AP Photo)

The ACLU immediately joined a number of promising abortion cases , including Doe v. Bolton and Roe v. Wade . Pilpel stepped up to recruit and coordinate amicus briefs, hoping to present the strongest case for a woman’s right to abortion by mobilizing social science research and arguments from the medical and legal professions as well as agencies representing the poor, women’s rights, and other “public spirited organizations.” She also planned and executed moot court sessions with the local attorneys who would argue the cases to prepare them for the aggressive questioning they would encounter before the Supreme Court. 

Pilpel celebrated on Jan. 23, 1973, when a 7-2 majority on the Supreme Court declared the “right of privacy…broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” The court imposed limits on a pregnant woman’s rights, allowing the state to intrude on her privacy to “safeguard health,” “maintain medical standards,” and “protect potential life.” 

To balance the woman’s rights with the state’s interests, the court created a trimester timetable according to which a woman’s rights would give way over the course of the pregnancy to the state’s interest in preserving her health and the life of the fetus. The court also struck down statutes that restricted abortions to particular types of hospitals, required external approval, or imposed residency requirements.

According to ACLU attorneys at the time, the court's opinion immediately invalidated abortion laws in 43 states, including 13 that had recently adopted ALI-type reform legislation. It also halted 30 other abortion cases with which the ACLU and its affiliates were involved and sent state legislatures back to the drawing board — some to challenge the Supreme Court’s holding, others to bring their laws into compliance. The virulent antiabortion movement that emerged inspired the ACLU to develop a long-term strategy for preserving what it came to call reproductive freedom.

Kenyon and Pilpel’s Legacy

Kenyon did not live to see Doe and Roe . Already, in 1969 — even as she exchanged congratulations with Harriet Pilpel and Jules Bernfeld over the ACLU’s new policy on abortion — Kenyon suffered symptoms related to the stomach cancer that would end her life at age 83 in 1972. 

Pilpel felt the loss of her friend and co-conspirator keenly. Together, she and Kenyon had — with the crucial help of Wulf and others — moved the ACLU, the nation’s most important civil liberties organization, to recognize and fight for women’s right to abortion, something it continues to do today. They did so before the emergence of second-wave feminism, working within institutions — the ACLU, state legislatures, and the judicial system — that included very few women. 

These few women had to persuade men to recognize that laws against abortion violated human rights to control one’s own body — rights that only women and no men sacrificed when sexual intercourse resulted in an unwanted or dangerous pregnancy. Kenyon, Pilpel, and countless others did this in the decades between 1930 and 1970 partly by disavowing feminism, but also by insisting — as First Lady Hillary Clinton would defiantly declare in 1995 in Beijing, China — that women’s rights are human rights. In doing so, they laid groundwork for feminists to take the ACLU and the world by storm.

Leigh Ann Wheeler is professor of history at Binghamton University and the author of "How Sex Became a Civil Liberty" (Oxford University Press, 2014) and "Against Obscenity: Reform and the Politics of Womanhood in America, 1873-1935" (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).  She is currently writing the biography of popular memoirist and civil rights activist Anne Moody.

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How Black Feminists Defined Abortion Rights

By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

It will probably be months before the Supreme Court decides, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization , whether to overturn Roe v. Wade. But, in this latest round of attacks on Roe, a novel line of argument has emerged: that forced pregnancy and parenthood no longer constitute a hardship for women. Lawyers representing Mississippi, the appellant in the lawsuit, describe a world that has fundamentally changed over the past fifty years, in which the burdens of parenting have been lifted and women have been empowered to have it all—to assume a career while still raising families. As for those women who would prefer not to parent, they now have the option to simply terminate their parental rights.

In a legal brief, Mississippi described a fantasy land, where “many (largely post-dating Roe ) laws protect equal opportunity—including prohibitions on sex and pregnancy discrimination in employment,” where the law guarantees parental leave, and where there is “support to offset the costs of childcare for working mothers.” The brief continued, “Sweeping policy advances now promote women’s full pursuit of both career and family.” In an interview with a local television station, the state attorney general, Lynn Fitch, added, as a flourish, “Fifty years ago, for professional women, they wanted you to make a choice. Now you don’t have to. Now you have the opportunity to be whatever you want to be. You have the option in life to really achieve your dreams, your goals, and you can have those beautiful children as well.” These would be wild claims under normal circumstances, but, in the midst of the pandemic, when child-care costs have been rising dramatically and when intermittent and impromptu school closures have forced nearly two million women out of the workforce, they are ludicrous.

According to the legal regime in Mississippi, the ability to give up one’s child for adoption cinches the final loophole in the logic of banning abortion. Justice Amy Coney Barrett added her own gloss on this claim through her questioning of the Jackson Women’s Health Organization’s lawyers, suggesting that safe-haven laws, which allow women to relinquish their infants, mean that “the obligations of motherhood” no longer “flow from pregnancy.” She continued, “It doesn’t seem to follow that pregnancy and then parenthood are all part of the same burden. And so it seems to me that the choice, more focussed, would be between, say, the ability to get an abortion at twenty-three weeks, or the state requiring the woman to go fifteen, sixteen weeks more and then terminate parental rights at the conclusion.”

The powerful men and women championing an end to abortion seek to recast an unwanted pregnancy as an inconvenience for “professional women.” But rich women have always had a bounty of choices when deciding to end a pregnancy and when deciding to have children. Fitch, who likes to use her own story as a single mother of three as evidence that women can have it all, was able to afford day care and a nanny. It should go without saying that these are not options for poor and working-class women, who without access to abortion will lose their right and ability to control their own destiny. In 2014, three-quarters of abortion patients qualified as low-income or poor, according to the Guttmacher Institute. That year, Black and brown patients accounted for more than half of abortions performed.

That Dobbs originates in Mississippi, the poorest state in the country, twists this fairy tale into a cruel joke. In Mississippi, nearly half of women-led households live in poverty, almost twice the national average; twelve per cent of women in the state lack health insurance, compared with eight per cent nationally. Barrett’s blithe suggestion that pregnant women simply “go fifteen, sixteen weeks more” ignores, among many burdens, that pregnant women in Mississippi die at higher rates than their peers in most states, including Louisiana and Georgia. And because this case is no longer just about Mississippi, it also ignores the fact that Black women are three to four times more at risk of dying in childbirth than white women.

For poor and working-class women, a disproportionate number of whom are Black and brown, overturning Roe won’t mean that abortions will end. It will mean that safe and sound abortions in health-care facilities will move further out of reach. This dilemma has been a permanent feature of the modern movement for abortion rights. One study found that eighty per cent of deaths caused by septic abortions in New York City in the nineteen-sixties involved Black and Puerto Rican women. In Georgia, between 1965 and 1967, the Black maternal death rate was fourteen times that of white women. During this period, nurses reported that “sticks, rocks, chopsticks, rubber or plastic tubes, gauze or cotton packing, ballpoint pens, coat hangers, or knitting needles” were administered to terminate pregnancies. For these women, access to abortion was not abstract—it was a matter of life and death.

If the Roe decision had simply affirmed that access to abortion was elemental to the social equality of women, it would have become something closer to an incontrovertible right. Instead, the Justices explicitly disagreed with the appellant’s claim that “the woman’s right is absolute and that she is entitled to terminate her pregnancy at whatever time, in whatever way, and for whatever reason she alone chooses.” The twenty-one-page decision, written by Justice Harry Blackmun, considers when life begins, the potential harm experienced by unwanted children, and the right to privacy between a physician and a patient, but there is nothing about the equality of women and the ways that forced pregnancy impairs its actualization.

Within a few years, new legislation began to restrict poor and working-class women’s right to an abortion. The passage of the Hyde Amendment, in 1976, eliminated Medicaid funding of abortion except in cases in which the mother’s life is at risk. The impact was immediate. The number of abortions financed by Medicaid dropped from three hundred thousand a year to a few thousand.

In Roe, the Supreme Court claimed to want to make a dispassionate decision, one not influenced by the larger debates concerning abortion. “Population growth, pollution, poverty, and racial overtones tend to complicate and not to simplify the problem,” Blackmun wrote. In this way, the Court’s decision reflected the narrowness of the mainstream women’s movement, which viewed abortion as the singular way to measure women’s right to control their reproductive lives. In both cases, the broad range of factors constraining women’s equality was ignored, because doing otherwise would open larger and more complicated issues involving pay, family structure, social provision, and a more capacious consideration of reproductive rights. It would also require accounting for the ways that women’s equality had different meanings for women who were not white or middle class. Black, Puerto Rican, and Chicana women had different constraints and burdens in their daily lives that meant they would have different approaches to achieving liberation.

When the National Organization for Women formed, in 1966, it patterned its mission after the civil-rights strategy of changing the legal framework of discrimination. Yet even as NOW demanded a dramatic expansion of rights for women, it largely overlooked the concerns of poor and working-class women of color. This was made plain in 1969, when NOW ’s president, Betty Friedan , gave an address at a conference that marked the formation of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws. She said, “As the Negro was the invisible man, so women are the invisible people in America today: we must now become visible women who have a share in the decisions of the mainstream of government, of politics, of the church—who don’t just cook the church supper but preach the sermon; who don’t just look up the Zip Code and address the envelopes but make the political decisions; who don’t just do the housework of industry but make some of the executive decisions. Women, above all, who say what their own lives and personalities are going to be, and no longer listen to or even permit male experts to define what ‘feminine’ is or isn’t.” These were certainly examples and sites of sexism, but Friedan ignored the possibility that “woman” was not a universal category as she prioritized the problems of white and middle-class women as the most urgent. And if there was any confusion over whom she was addressing, Friedan went on to explain that NOW ’s purpose was to “break out of the confines of that sterile little suburban family to relate to each other in terms of all of the possible dimensions of our personalities.”

The chasm between middle-class white women’s demands and aspirations and those of poor and working-class women of color began to be addressed by the emergence of Black feminists in the late sixties. These women, who included Toni Cade Bambara, Frances Beal, Alice Walker, and Barbara Smith, argued that real equality could be achieved only by expanding the parameters of what constituted “reproductive justice” to include the entire context within which decisions about having or not having children were made. Organizations like NOW mobilized predominately white women to fight for abortion rights, but they often ignored or minimized the glaring issue of coerced or forced sterilizations, which was critical to women of color. According to a national study conducted by Princeton University in 1970, twenty-one per cent of married Black women had been sterilized. As the legal scholar Dorothy Roberts has observed, “The dominant women’s movement has focussed myopically on abortion rights at the expense of other aspects of reproductive freedom, including the right to bear children, and has misunderstood criticism of coercive birth-control policies.”

For Black feminists, many of whom had become radicalized through their involvement in the civil-rights movement, the persistent racism and sexism that they experienced compelled them to question the totality of American society, not just their place in it. In 1969, Beal penned one of the pioneering documents of Black feminism, a pamphlet titled “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female.” Beal wrote, “it is idle dreaming to think of black women simply caring for their homes and children like the middle-class white model. Most black women have to work to help house, feed, and clothe their families. Black women make up a substantial percentage of the black working force and this is true for the poorest black family as well as the so-called ‘middle-class’ family.” This double burden, Beal continued, was ignored by many Black men, who may have seen the “System for what it really is” when it came to their own subjugation but, when it came to women, seemed to be reading “from the pages of the Ladies Home Journal .” This inattention compelled Black women to organize their own groups, set their own agendas, and develop their own strategies—what the Combahee River Collective would later describe as “identity politics.”

By the time Beal wrote “Double Jeopardy,” she and several other Black women in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ( SNCC ) were leaving the group because of increasingly divergent ideas about the role of women in the Black movement. Among Black men in the movement, there was a pervasive belief that Black women should follow the men’s political lead. As Beal wrote, “To assign women the role of housekeeper and mother while men go forth into battle is a highly questionable doctrine for a revolutionary to maintain. Each individual must develop a high political consciousness in order to understand how this System enslaves us all and what actions we must take to bring about its total destruction. Those who consider themselves to be revolutionary must begin to deal with other revolutionaries as equals. And, so far as I know, revolutionaries are not determined by sex.”

This was more than a debate over the women in radical politics. Beal and her women comrades were chafing against the influence of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report on the state of the Black family, which included a thesis that the emasculation of Black men led them to retreat from their natural role as patriarchs, causing Black women to take leadership of their families. In his view, this gender confusion led to the collapse of Black family life, spawning criminality among men and producing unruly children. Moynihan wrote, “At the center of the tangle of pathology is the weakness of the family structure. Once or twice removed, it will be found to be the principal source of most of the aberrant, inadequate, or antisocial behavior that did not establish, but now serves to perpetuate the cycle of poverty and deprivation.”

Moynihan was criticized for essentially blaming Black women for the poverty and hardship that shaped the lives of their families. In a speech a year after the report was published, the SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael said, “To set the record straight, the reason we are in the bag we are in isn’t because of my mama, it’s because of what they did to my mama. . . . We have to put the blame where it belongs.” But, for many other Black men, Moynihan provided a framework in which they could understand their marginalization and attempt to repair the damage—by reasserting their rightful positions as patriarchs. Assuming this role meant denouncing birth control and abortion as tools of genocide that compromised the future and freedom of Black families. In 1971, the comedian and activist Dick Gregory wrote a cover story for Ebony that began, “My answer to genocide, quite simply, is eight kids—and another baby on the way.” Gregory, who never quotes his wife in the article or even mentions her name, goes on to claim that birth control and abortion both had been designed to “limit the black population,” describing them casually as methods of genocide. Speaking to the U.S. Commission on Population Control, in 1971, the Reverend Jesse Jackson said, “Virtually all the security we have is in the number of children we produce.”

For Beal, a single mother of two children, and other Black feminists, reproductive freedom, including access to birth control and abortion and the right to have children on their terms, was the most basic element of self-determination in a society where their choices were heavily circumscribed by racism, gender, and class position. As a result, Black women activists not only took up the immediate questions concerning reproduction but they also raised issues about child care, employment, welfare, and the other material necessities that could help women take care of their children and choose to bring them into the world. By focussing on the plight of poor women, they made it easier to see that the struggle for abortion and reproductive freedom was about equality, not just privacy or even “choice.” Their insights into the ways that poverty and other forms of oppression limited their life chances compelled them to demand reproductive justice—which also involved the right to raise children in healthy environments where their and their parents’ basic needs could be met. It is a standard that certainly was not achieved with Roe, but is needed now more than ever.

More on Abortion and Roe v. Wade

In the post-Roe era, letting pregnant patients get sicker— by design .

The study that debunks most anti-abortion arguments .

Of course the Constitution has nothing to say about abortion .

How the real Jane Roe shaped the abortion wars.

Recent data suggest that taking abortion pills at home is as safe as going to a clinic. 

When abortion is criminalized, women make desperate choices .

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• v.14(1); 2022 Jan

The Moral Significance of Abortion Inconsistency Arguments

William simkulet.

1 Park University, Parkville, MO USA

2 Dodge City Community College, Dodge City, KS USA

Most opponents of abortion (OA) believe fetuses matter . Critics argue that OA act inconsistently with regards to fetal life, seeking to restrict access to induced abortion, but largely ignoring spontaneous abortion and the creation of surplus embryos by IVF. Nicholas Colgrove, Bruce Blackshaw, and Daniel Rodger call such arguments inconsistency arguments and contend they do not matter. They present three objections to these arguments — the other beliefs, other actions, and hypocrisy objection. Previously, I argued these objections fail and threaten to undermine ethical inquiry. Colgrove et al. have recently replied, but here, I argue their reply fails as well and raises a new criticism of the other actions’ objection. This essay sets out to show, as well as any philosophical argument can, that inconsistency arguments are morally significant.

Introduction

Nicholas Colgrove, Bruce Blackshaw, and Daniel Rodger ( 2020 ) set out to show that inconsistency arguments “do not matter”; by inconsistency argument , they mean to pick out a variety (Fleck 1979 ; Murphy 1985 ; Ord 2008 ; Lovering 2013 , 2014 , 2017 , 2020 ; Berg 2017 ; Simkulet 2016 , 2017 , 2019a , b , c , 2020 ; Bovens 2006 ; Schlumpf 2019 ) of disparate criticisms identifying apparent inconsistencies in how opponents of abortion (OA) treat fetuses. Unfortunately, this term is misleading, as practically all philosophical arguments involve identifying some form of inconsistency, confusion, or misunderstanding.

Critics of the prolife anti-abortion position argue that OA hold inconsistent moral beliefs; they claim to believe that fetuses are persons from conception, but they neglect the welfare of fetuses who are spontaneously aborted by natural causes, and overlook the well-being of the surplus frozen human embryos created for IVF. Perhaps the strangest argument that Colgrove et al. ( 2020 ) label as an inconsistency argument comes from Sister Joan Chittister (Schlumpf 2019 ), who chastises those who call themselves “pro-life” for neglecting the welfare of born persons. Proponents of inconsistency arguments argue that OA hold inconsistent moral beliefs, arguing that upon revision, they will conclude that they either (i) need to do more, or (ii) need not oppose abortion.

Colgrove et al. ( 2020 ) contend that such arguments “do not matter.” This paper interprets this as the claim that inconsistency arguments are morally irrelevant for any (widely held) OA view. This paper will show that such arguments are morally relevant to the most widely held OA position.

Another way to read Colgrove et al. is as claiming they “do not matter” because they cannot show that OA need to adopt (ii) over (i). They say, “Inconsistency arguments simply are not equipped to undermine OAs’ views; at most, they reveal what OAs should do (or believe).” (Colgrove et al. 2020 ) This is uncharitable. First, while some inconsistency theorists (Ord 2008 ; Berg 2017 ) might believe that OA do not really believe fetuses are persons from conception, these arguments identify apparent inconsistency, but need not take a stance on how OA ought to resolve this inconsistency. Second, even if OA choose (i) and conclude they ought to do more to prevent spontaneous abortion (education, research, increased access to healthcare (Simkulet 2017 , 2020 ), and perhaps a major shift in social priorities (Ord 2008 ; Berg 2017 ), and more for surplus IVF embryos (adoption, and gestation (Lovering 2020 ; Blackshaw and Colgrove 2020 ; Blackshaw 2021 ), this matters . Colgrove et al. jest that if OA embrace option (i) it would “make the world a (much) worse place (from the critic’s perspective)”; but fail to note that it would make the world a much better place from the perspective of OA!

Complicating matters, there seems to be disagreement among Colgrove, Blackshaw, and Rodger regarding what opposition to abortion requires. Notably, Bruce Blackshaw ( 2021 , 166) contends that Christians ought to act as neighbors, and offers a robust, clear account of what this requires:

Treating frozen embryos as neighbors requires securing them a life like ours through adoption and gestation, and as well as opposing abortion, Christians must work toward this goal for the vast numbers of frozen embryos that would otherwise be discarded.

Blackshaw and Rodger ( 2019 ) attempt to justify OA disinterest in spontaneous abortion, claiming that most cases of spontaneous abortion are not currently preventable; but Blackshaw ( 2021 ) notes that “if we regard all human life as equally valuable, we have at least some obligation toward helping reduce deaths from spontaneous abortion where possible”.

This paper argues that inconsistency arguments matter. It is divided into three main sections. The first draws a distinction between restrictivist and moralist views on abortion, arguing only restrictivist views are OA. The second sets out to defend my earlier criticism (Simkulet 2021 ) of the other beliefs, other actions, and hypocrisy objections from Blackshaw et al.’s ( 2021 ) recent response. The third offers a new argument against the other actions objection; I argue that if this objection were to succeed, it would undermine restrictivist opposition to abortion.

Opposition to Abortion

On miscarriage.

Before his collaboration (Colgrove et al. 2020 ) with Blackshaw and Rodger, Colgrove ( 2019 ) raised a different criticism of Berg’s ( 2017 ) inconsistency argument. Berg argues that because miscarriage is so common, if we believe fetuses matter , we ought to devote more medical resources to protecting them. Colgrove replies that “miscarriage is not a cause of death,” but rather “it is an outcome.” Blackshaw et al. ( 2021 ) accuse me of the same error.

This is rather uncharitable, but it also misses two key points common in inconsistency arguments. First, if OA believe that fetuses matter, one would expect them to be concerned with both spontaneous and induced abortion, as both are tragic. Second, even if spontaneous abortion has many disparate causes, there may be a common solution. For example, Aspirin can treat a wide variety of conditions, from scraped knee to eye strain to migraine. Many proposals inconsistency theorists discuss (for example, education, gene therapy, and ectogenesis technology) would prevent spontaneous abortion by many different causes.  In short, even if miscarriage is not a single cause of death, there is good reason to think a single solution might address many different cases, saving many fetal lives.

On Opposition to Abortion

To play on Colgrove, note that opposition to abortion is not a moral theory, it is an action or stance one can take toward abortion. There are many reasons why one might oppose abortion; one might merely find the word “abortion” to be distasteful, might oppose abortion on teleological grounds, argue that it is outside the scope of medicine, or that it violates the Hippocratic Oath.

However, most opposition to abortion rests on a single belief. Judith Jarvis Thomson ( 1972 ) says, “Most opposition to abortion relies on the premise that the fetus is a human being, a person, from the moment of conception.” Don Marquis ( 1989 ) says “Many of the most insightful and careful writers on the ethics of abortion… believe that whether or not abortion is morally permissible stands or falls on whether or not a fetus is the sort of being whose life it is seriously wrong to end.”

In short, most opposition to abortion turns on the belief that a fetus matters from conception (or soon afterwards (Marquis 2007 , 2013 ); that the fetus is morally comparable to an adult human person. This view is usually abbreviated as the view that fetuses are persons, broadly construed to mean one of many disparate theories about moral status; that human fetuses are human organisms (Mulder 2013 ), rational substances (Lee and George 2005 ; Beckwith 2007 ; George and Tollefsen 2008 ; Friberg-Fernros 2015 ), have a possible future it would be wrong to deprive them of Marquis 1989 ; Stone 1987 ), etc.

Colgrove et al. ( 2020 ) seek to show that inconsistency arguments are morally irrelevant for any (widely held) anti-abortion view, and there seems to be widespread consensus the most widely held anti-abortion view claims fetuses are persons, broadly construed, from conception (PAC). This paper defends the position that inconsistency arguments are morally relevant to the PAC view.

Restrictivism and Moralism

It will be practical to distinguish between two groups of anti-abortion positions — Restrictivism  (Davis 1984 ; Carroll and Crutchfield Forthcoming ), the view that we should adopt social policies that restrict a woman’s access to induced abortion, and Moralism , the view that abortion is merely immoral, but that we do not need adopt Restrictivist social policies.

It is not hard to see why PAC theorists might embrace restrictivism. On this view, fetuses are comparable to adult human persons, and society has adopted policies aimed at protecting the rights of adult human persons, so it is prima facie plausible that we should adopt similar social policies regarding fetuses. However, Thomson ( 1972 ) demonstrates that it is not enough to show that fetuses merely have a right to life by way of the violinist case:

Violinist: The Society of Music Lovers kidnaps you and attaches your circulatory system to a famous, innocent, unconscious violinist suffering from a kidney ailment that will kill him unless he remains connected to your kidneys for nine months. (Adapted)

The violinist obviously has a right to life, but Thomson argues that the right to life does not give him the right to use your body; it is morally permissible for you to disconnect yourself from the violinist. Thomson says it would be a “great kindness” to stay attached to the violinist but that you do not have to accede to this.

Disconnecting the violinist from your body is comparable to disconnecting a patient from life support to let him die. Restrictivists might argue that induced abortion is not a matter of letting die; but of killing; but this will not do, as one can terminate a pregnancy without killing the fetus by severing the umbilical cord or removing the uterus, “merely” letting the fetus die. If this distinction mattered, restrictivists would not be anti-abortion, they would merely oppose how most abortions are currently performed.

Thomson shows it is not enough for restrictivists to believe fetuses are persons with a right to life, they must also believe something more , that (a) the fetus’s right to life is a positive right to assistance, or (b) the gestational mother somehow comes to have a special obligation to provide assistance to the fetus. She argues that this special obligation cannot be explained by merely risking the chance of pregnancy, as this would imply any woman who leaves the house without a hysterectomy has consented to pregnancy, even by rape. Furthermore, David Boonin ( 2002 ) argues that even if one consents to provide aid, one can withdraw consent.

Bone Marrow: Your neighbor is diagnosed with a condition that will kill him unless he receives monthly bone marrow transplants over the course of nine months from a match. You are a match and you agree to donate. However, it soon becomes clear that these surgeries ask more than you are willing to give, and you refuse to go in for the second surgery. (Adapted)

These thought experiments demonstrate that restrictivists must do more than argue fetuses are persons, they must argue that the fetus has a positive right to assistance.

However, one can believe abortion is immoral without believing we ought to adopt restrictivist social policies. There are many prima facie immoral things that it would be inappropriate to restrict by law. For example, I think most of us would agree that it is prima facie immoral to waste scarce resources, but that individuals might have a right to do so in some cases. One might hold that it is wrong to waste food without holding that throwing away leftovers should be illegal. Similarly, one might hold that adultery outside of an open marriage is immoral, but that adopting social policies that restrict such behavior would be undesirable, in part, because they are difficult to enforce, and in part because it might incentivize other immoral behavior, such as murdering one’s spouse to keep one’s adultery secret.

Moralism is the view that abortion is often, all things considered, immoral, but does not require that we adopt social policies that restrict woman’s access to abortion. There are many reasons why moralists might reject restrictivism independent of Thomson and Boonin-style concerns.

For example, restrictivist views have a hard time making exceptions for rape cases, despite the fact that many restrictivists believe such exceptions should be made. Rape victims are often reluctant to report rape and reluctant to take medical exams. Convictions in rape cases are difficult to obtain, especially within the short window in which inducing abortion would be medically preferable. As such, restrictivists face a dilemma – (a) if they require proof of rape, then few rape victims are allowed to abort; while (b) if they do not require proof of rape, they encourage women to merely say they were raped (whether true or not), failing to prevent most induced abortions and encouraging deception.

Restrictivists face a similar challenge with regards to self-defense, as all pregnancies are medically risky. The prospect of drawing a nonarbitrary line with regards to legally obligatory medical risk is dubious, but even if such a task could be achieved, those physicians sympathetic to abortion might overestimate risk and those opposing abortion might underestimate or ignore risk. Furthermore, medical risk of abortion increases with malnutrition and other medical emergencies, so those seeking abortion on medical grounds are incentivized to harm themselves to pass this threshold.

In light of these, and other, difficulties, many people who believe abortion are immoral reject restrictivism and adopt moralism. Notably, moralists need not hold that fetuses have a positive right to assistance, like restrictivists. I have contended (Simkulet 2021 ) that most OA believe fetuses have a positive right to assistance — that most OA are restrictivists. Blackshaw et al. ( 2021 ) claim that I miss “the target,” as one can be an OA without being committed to the belief that fetuses have a positive right to assistance.

Perhaps Colgrove et al. wish OA to pick out both restrictivist and moralist positions, but this will not do. Although moralists believe induced abortion is immoral, they are prochoice, while Colgrove et al. identify OA as prolife. Perhaps Colgrove et al. mean to say restrictivism does not require the belief that fetuses have a positive right to assistance, but this would merely introduce greater inconsistency regarding medical and legal ethics, as illustrated by Thomson ( 1972 ) and Boonin ( 2002 ).

Do Inconsistency Arguments Matter?

Colgrove et al. ( 2020 ) raise three objections to inconsistency arguments — the other beliefs, other actions, and hypocrisy objections. I contend (Simkulet 2021 ) these objections threaten to undermine moral analysis completely; opposing parties could always claim to have other beliefs, other actions, or interpret criticism as an ad hominem attack impinging their character.

This section is divided into four subsections. The first looks at two inconsistency arguments. The next three subsections briefly summarize Colgrove et al.’s objections, and my criticisms (Simkulet 2021 ) of these arguments.

Inconsistency Arguments

OA often point to high numbers of induced abortion as a call to action. Upwards of 60% (Boklage 1990 ; Léridon 1977 ) of human pregnancies end in spontaneous abortion, prompting critics to ask why OA do not see spontaneous abortion as a call to action. Toby Ord ( 2008 ) compares spontaneous abortion to a scourge that kills over half of humanity. Berg ( 2017 ) compares it to Heart Disease, Cancer, and Stroke. Faced with these overwhelming numbers, inconsistency theorists conclude that if fetuses matter, then the problem of spontaneous abortion calls for a massive shift in our social and political priorities. I have noted (Simkulet 2021 ) that we recently underwent such a shift to address the COVID-19 pandemic.

Henrik Friberg-Fernros ( 2015 , 2019 , 2018 ) challenges this position, contending that while fetal death is always tragic, not all fetal deaths are equally tragic; that killing is worse than letting die, and even that fetal lives are worth less than adult human lives because they lack time relative interests (Friberg-Fernros 2019 )! However, inconsistency arguments do not assume that all fetal deaths are equally tragic, merely that if fetuses matter, their deaths are tragic.

OA face a dilemma — either they (i) need to do more to prevent fetal death, or (ii) should withdraw opposition to induced abortion. Some proponents think OA should choose (ii) — that the argument demonstrates they do not really believe fetuses are persons. However, others propose a wide variety of methods by which OA might reasonably seek to confront the problem of fetal death, from increased education and better access to healthcare, to technologies like ectogenesis and gene therapy that those on both sides of the abortion debate could reasonably support (Simkulet 2020 ).

While many inconsistency arguments focus on unaddressed fetal loss, Colgrove et al. ( 2020 ) also categorize Chittister's tweet (Schlumpf 2019 ) as an inconsistency argument. She asks whether it makes sense to call OA “pro-life” merely because they oppose abortion, noting all OA seem to be concerned with is ensuring the child is born, not fed, educated, or housed; asserting “That’s not pro-life. That’s pro-birth.”

Colgrove et al. ( 2020 ) contend that Chittister is using the term “pro-birth” pejoratively, but this is rather uncharitable. The term “pro-life” carries with it a positive emotive context, and when OA present their view as “pro-life,” they may mislead their audience about their position. In contrast, the term “pro-birth” seems to capture the one unifying feature of OA.

Even if Chittister is angry or disappointed that OA misrepresent their position, neglect their moral obligations, or the like… so what? That is how moral judgements work. If you think Φing is wrong, and you see someone Φing, it makes sense to be angry or disappointed. Colgrove et al. speak as though this, and accusations of pro-life hypocrisy are ad hominem attacks on OA; not so. An ad hominem fallacy occurs when one attacks person rather than their argument or view. Inconsistency arguments do not do this; they identify apparent inconsistency within the OA view, and call for change, as Chittister does when she concludes, “We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is.”

Other Beliefs Objection and Response

Colgrove et al. ( 2020 ) raise three objections to inconsistency arguments. In the first, they contend that inconsistency arguments do not matter because there is a diversity of beliefs among OA, suggesting that no one inconsistency argument undermine them all; “This diversity makes broad accusations of inconsistency problematic.” Following this, one might argue that when an OA is confronted with apparent inconsistency within one view, they can jump ship to another OA view. But moral analysis is not a shell game. If inconsistency arguments identify a problem within even one OA position, they matter; and if they threaten the most widely held OA position, it seems they matter quite a bit.

Colgrove et al. ( 2020 ) suggest that OA may have other beliefs which explain away apparent inconsistency and justify their inaction with regards to spontaneous abortion; for example they ask us to consider someone who both opposes induced abortion and opposes universal healthcare; noting these beliefs would justify rejecting the conclusion that we should adopt universal health care to help address the problem of induced and spontaneous abortion (and suffering and death due to lack of medical care, more broadly). To this, I reply (Simkulet 2021 ):

It is not enough to show that some [OA] have some beliefs that are prima facie at odds with some [inconsistency theorist] proposals; they must show that the current level of apparent indifference that many [OA] show is justified by their other beliefs; and it is not clear what set of other beliefs would be both internally consistent and justify the conclusion that while persons [matter], this right requires very little in the way of sacrifice from anyone but gestational mothers.

Blackshaw et al. ( 2021 ) contend that I argue “this [apparent] indifference must be justified by their other beliefs…” continuing “there is an obvious belief that justifies [OA]’s actions and priorities —… [OA] believe that induced abortion is a more important priority than these other issues.” However, this misses the point. As we have seen above, inconsistency theorists do not claim that OA need to treat the problem of spontaneous abortion as equally important to the problem of induced abortion, but rather they must consistently recognize both are tragic.

Blackshaw et al. ( 2021 ) continue “induced abortion is the leading preventable cause of death of human beings, as spontaneous abortions are largely unpreventable.” However, they seem to understand “preventable” in an opportunistically narrow way — as preventable with our current technology — to disregard the problem of spontaneous abortion. Amy Berg ( 2017 ) challenges this opportunistically narrow caveat:

But imagine throwing up our hands about a horrible disease… Imagine saying that we should let AIDS, or cancer, or heart disease take its course, rather than expending more effort researching how we might prevent that disease or treat people who contract it. That’s not what we do.

Berg ( 2017 ) notes that just because spontaneous abortion is medically intractable now does not mean it will be in the future, comparing to the AIDs epidemic, “In just a couple of decades, AIDS went from a mysterious underground disease, to a devastating and fatal epidemic, to a relatively manageable chronic condition.”

Perhaps more troublingly, Blackshaw et al. ( 2021 ) say, “If OAs sincerely believe these claims, then they are acting consistently with their beliefs, and the Other Beliefs Objection succeeds.” Above I have argued that even if one sees one form of abortion as a greater priority than another, this does not justify apparent indifference OAs show with regards to spontaneous abortion.

The real challenge here is “sincerity,” most people have inconsistent beliefs of one form or another and do not realize it; but it is possible that one can realize that they hold two sincere beliefs while also sincerely believing those beliefs to be inconsistent. Consider the problem of evil; one might sincerely believe that God exists, that evil exists, and that God would not allow evil to exist. This belief set is inconsistent, but does not necessarily yield conflicting implications for how we ought to live our lives.

But what if an OA sincerely believes the following?

• All human death is morally tragic.
• Not all human death is morally tragic.
• Propositions (a) and (b) are apparently a contradiction.

It is easy to imagine a Socratic dialogue in which Socrates helps an OA to express position (a) and proposition (b), prompting them to reconsider their position; what’s less easy to imagine is what would happen if an OA freely admits proposition (c), but refuses to reconsider. Moral agency requires some degree of reason-responsiveness, and at least with regards to the topic at hand, it is not clear such an OA would be able to function as a moral agent without rejecting one of these three propositions.

Blackshaw et al. ( 2021 ) end their reply as follows “If critics of [OA] want to change the subject – to examining whether the things [OA] believe are true or false, rather than fixating on [OA’s] alleged inconstancy — then [our] essay has succeeded.” Here, they again miss the point of inconsistency arguments, as these arguments do set out to examine whether the things [OA] believe are true or false; if the principle of non-contradiction is true, and OA hold contradictory beliefs, then at least one of their beliefs are false !

Why do they miss this point? I cannot be sure, but at times Colgrove et al. ( 2020 ) and Blackshaw et al. ( 2021 ) talk as though inconsistency theorists are uniformly prochoice and hope to convince OA to abandon restrictivism; however, inconsistency arguments might just as easily lead one to believe they ought to do more to prevent spontaneous abortion, address surplus frozen human embryos, and the like. Some inconsistency theorists believe both would lead to less restrictivist opposition to abortion, but this is irrelevant.

What matters is that inconsistency arguments share the same form as the Socratic method, highlighting apparent inconsistency and prompting introspection. Perhaps Colgrove et al. ( 2020 ) would also conclude that the Socratic method does not matter , but I hope not.

Other Actions Objection and Response

Colgrove et al.’s second criticism of inconsistency arguments is that they are too specific with their recommendations, suggesting OA can address problems raised by these arguments with different actions than those proposed by inconsistency theorists. For example, rather than adopt and gestate frozen human Embryos, as Lovering ( 2020 ) (and Blackshaw 2021 !) advocate, Colgrove et al. ( 2020 ) suggest OA might fight “to change public perception of the status of embryos,” or lobby to change IVF laws.

There are three problems here. First, although inconsistency theorists propose a variety of recommendations, these recommendations are not meant to be exhaustive, but rather representative of the kinds of changes an OA would need to adopt to resolve their apparent inconsistency. Remember, inconsistency theorists argue that OA face a dilemma — either (i) do more, or (ii) abandon their opposition to abortion; to say that an OA can perform other actions to address the problem just is to embrace the first horn of the dilemma.

Second, I have pointed out (Simkulet 2021 ) that the other actions Colgrove et al. ( 2020 ) propose are not necessarily mutually exclusive; one might both lobby to change IVF laws and adopt and gestate frozen human embryos. The fact that one lobbies to change IVF laws may reduce the number of surplus embryos created and frozen in the future; but it fails to address the needs of currently existing frozen human embryos, highlighting a third problem, that many of Colgrove et al.’s “other actions” are simply not enough. I illustrate (Simkulet 2021 ) this with a case inspired by James Rachels ( 1979 ):

Jack 2 finds himself in a room with a starving child, surplus sandwich in hand. He receives a call… The caller asks, “Will you donate your sandwich?” and he replies, “I’ll do you one better; I’m going to fight to change the public perception of the status of such starving children and raise awareness!” He proceeds to tweet about the starving child, sets up a donation page to help spread awareness, and posts pictures and videos of the child’s deteriorating state. Jack 2 , an expert in such things, narrates as the child slowly dies.

Jack 2 ’s claim to act to raise awareness pokes fun at Colgrove et al.’s ( 2020 ) proposal to protect frozen embryos by fighting to change public perception. Despite his tweeting, it is clear Jack 2 fails morally — he lets a child starve to death when he could have easily saved that child’s life.

Blackshaw et al. ( 2021 ) argue that this case is disanalogous to OA (in)action, arguing that OA “live in a world where there are many important issues clamoring for their attention,” and suggest the following case is more analogous:

Jack 100 finds himself in a room with 100 needy children and only enough resources to save 1 child, which he does.

There are three substantive problems with this response. First, the case of Jack 2 is not meant to be analogous to OA inaction (despite poking fun at it); it is meant to demonstrate that merely having other actions is not sufficient to show that inconsistency arguments fail.

Second, the case of Jack 100 begs the question by assuming Jack is saving as many people as possible. However, as Lovering ( 2020 ) and Blackshaw ( 2021 ) seem to show, this simply is not how OA act. Inconsistency theorists argue that OA neglect to address the problems of spontaneous abortion, surplus frozen embryos, and even starving born children. Rather than save all they can, inconsistency theorists contend that OA act like Jack 2 , they do something , but fail to do everything they can.

Third, inconsistency theorists contend that most OA legislation and philosophical literature neglect to discuss the problems of spontaneous abortion, surplus frozen embryos, or starving born children. As such, perhaps the following case would be more analogous:

Jack 300 finds himself in a room with 300 needy children, and he says, “I see 100 needy children, but woe is me I can only save 1,” and so he saves 1 child.

It seems Jack 300 is unreliable; he says he sees 100 needy children in the room, but there are 300 needy children in the room. If we cannot trust Jack 300 to get an accurate headcount, it seems unreasonable to take his word that he is doing all he can.

With the Jack 100 case Blackshaw et al. ( 2021 ) seem to abandon the other actions objection, instead arguing that OA, like Jack 100 , do the “most good” they can. In short, Blackshaw et al. seem to treat the other actions’ objection as a surrogate for an argument from effective altruism, the view that we should try to do the most good we can. Colgrove et al. ( 2020 ) claim that there are many different beliefs about what it means to do the “most good”, and suggest that objectively measuring options might be difficult, as though to claim that it does not matter what other actions OA take as long as they are trying to do the “most good.”

But this will not do. Effective altruism asks us to use reason and empirical evidence to maximize the amount of good we do, and inconsistency arguments seem to show that OA fail to do just this. Like Jack 2 , OA seem to ignore the easily preventable deaths of some with an unearned confidence that their current course of action is sufficient. If OA strive for effective altruism, they should be at least open to the prospect of embracing the first horn of the inconsistency theorist’s dilemma — that maybe should do more. Suppose Jill 100 finds herself in the locked room with Jack 100 , and promises to show Jack 100 how he can save 3 needy children, rather than just 1, with the resources at hand; if Jack 100 seeks to be an effective altruist, should he not at least listen, time permitting?

Effective altruism requires that we guide our choices by reason and evidence; it is not enough to have a sincere belief that one is doing all that one can, the evidence has to back this up. If inconsistency theorists can show that OA are not doing all they can, then they have been succeeding in showing that OA fall short of effective altruism.

Of course, this is exactly what proponents of inconsistency theorists purport to show. Take the aforementioned inconsistency theorist Lovering ( 2020 ) who, like OA restrictivist Blackshaw ( 2021 ), argues that OA should do more than merely fight to change public perception or lobby to change IVF laws, in many cases they ought to also adopt and gestate actually existing frozen human embryos. Of course, not every OA can gestate frozen human embryos — without effective ectogenesis technology and universal healthcare this burden seems to fall on wealthy, female OA alone. However, few OA argue that adopting and gestating these embryos are obligatory for those with the means to do so, and this omission at least appears to be inconsistent with their assertion that all fetuses matter from conception, let alone the position that OA are acting as effective altruists.

Furthermore, Blackshaw ( 2021 ) does not merely side with Lovering regarding OA’s obligations regarding frozen human embryos; he says:

[I]f we regard all human life as equally valuable, we have at least some obligation toward helping reduce deaths from spontaneous abortion where possible. The parable of the Good Samaritan reinforces the notion that Christians do have some responsibility toward this neglected group of human beings, who are also our neighbors.

Here Blackshaw ( 2021 ) contends that these groups — frozen human embryos and those fetuses who die from spontaneous abortion — matter , and that at least some OA — those inconsistency arguments seek to criticize — neglect them. In short, Blackshaw’s ( 2021 ) view seems at odd with the view he expresses in Colgrove et al. ( 2020 ) and Blackshaw et al. ( 2021 ). This is not meant as a criticism of Blackshaw; philosophers revise their views over time, articles are often published long after their initial submission, and many articles are written for blind review which could disincentivize the author from discussing their previous works.

Note, however, that Colgrove et al. ( 2020 ) and Blackshaw et al. ( 2021 ) set out to argue that inconsistency arguments do not matter for any OA view and in doing so they bite off far more than they can chew. It is easy to contend that all OA have other possible actions – contra Frankfurt ( 1969 ), many philosophers believe alternate possibilities are required for moral agency and responsibility; but it is quite a different matter to argue that all OA are acting as effective altruists, or even that all OA merely sincerely believe they are acting as effective altruists, especially when confronted with criticism from inconsistency theorists. Blackshaw ( 2021 ) contends inconsistency arguments demonstrate that some OA neglect this group, and this alone seems sufficient to show inconsistency arguments are morally significant.

Hypocrisy Objection and Response

In their third objection, Colgrove et al. ( 2020 ) contend that inconsistency arguments aim to show that OA are hypocrites, rather than demonstrate inconsistency. I note (Simkulet 2021 ) that Colgrove et al. equivocate between hypocrisy and inconsistency, and that they characterize hypocrisy as a moral failing. Colgrove et al. ( 2020 ) say:

[OA] are often described as ’inconsistent’ (hypocrites) in terms of their beliefs, actions and/or priorities…These objections notwithstanding, perhaps some OAs do act in ways that can be shown to be inconsistent with their beliefs. If so, then they are hypocrites. Hypocrisy is a serious charge regarding the character of OAs, but it has nothing to say regarding the validity and consistency of their beliefs—and OAs’ beliefs are surely what critics should primarily be targeting.

In short, it seems that Colgrove et al. mischaracterize inconsistency arguments as ad hominem fallacies; but as we have already seen there is a difference. Inconsistency arguments are simply not aimed at showing OA are hypocrites; only that they have inconsistent beliefs.

In their reply to my previous work (Simkulet 2021 ), Blackshaw et al. ( 2021 ) say something bizarre “Simkulet offers no empirical evidence regarding [OA’s] supposed lack of interest in relevant issues.” But inconsistency theorists do this ; Lovering ( 2020 ) goes to great lengths to discuss OA who do go out of their way to address these concerns and provides evidence such altruism is rare . Still, it is difficult to take this call for empirical evidence seriously, as neither Colgrove et al. ( 2020 ) nor Blackshaw et al. ( 2021 ) provide such evidence on behalf of OA.

Blackshaw et al. ( 2021 ) also challenge my claim (Simkulet 2021 ) that legislation seeking to reduce the creation of surplus IVF embryos would be relatively easy to pass:

Not so. Italy, for example, passed a law in 2004 prohibiting the freezing of embryos, and requiring that all embryos be implanted. (Riezzo et al. 2016 ) The law was swiftly condemned, eventually overturned and, in one case, actions prescribed by the law were declared by the UN to have constituted a ‘human rights violation.’ (Scaffidi 2019 ) Thus, relevant laws would likely face international resistance. So, a central problem Simkulet puts forth as having an ‘easy’ solution does not.

There are two big problems here. First, I propose (Simkulet 2021 ) passing legislation to limit the creation of surplus embryos, not to force all created embryos to be implanted. The difference is obvious, my restrictivist proposal would limit the number of embryos created at a time, so it might take multiple tries before a successful embryo is created.

In contrast, the Italian law seems to place no limits on how many embryos can be created, rather it sets out to force women to undergo invasive, risky medical procedures. IVF has a relatively low chance of success; but imagine more attempts at fertilization succeed than expected; this law would compel physicians to perform, and women to undergo, dangerous medical procedures against their wills. This is hauntingly similar to forcing you to donate bone marrow even at the cost of your life in Boonin’s ( 2002 ) bone marrow case. In short, the Italian law threatens to harm citizens and undermine professional ethics by requiring medically risky and unnecessary interventions without the patient’s consent.

In contrast, my proposal (Simkulet 2021 ) would merely require physicians limit the number of embryos created at one time; not entirely dissimilar from legal limits on how many drugs a physician can prescribe within a period of time. Furthermore, I do not say such legislation would be easy, only “relatively easy” compared to restrictivist legislation – legislation that has far more in common with the Italian law than Blackshaw et al. ( 2021 ) acknowledge. Both restrictivist legislation and the Italian law seek to undermine women’s rights to control their body and force them to risk their lives for the sake of others. Meanwhile limiting the number of embryos created does not limit one’s reproductive freedom, nor compel them to take on additional medical risk.

Both OA restrictivist legislation and the Italian law seek to limit women’s reproductive choices and force women to take on additional medical risk. Legislation of this kind faces strong opposition from those seeking to protect women’s liberty and reproductive freedom. This kind of legislation also faces strong opposition from biomedical ethicists and medical professionals, as it threatens to violate patient autonomy and the Hippocratic Oath by forcing patient and physician to perform risky medical procedures to benefit a third party, not unlike forcing you to remain attached to the violinist in Thomson’s infamous violinist case (Thomson 1972 ).

In contrast, it is not clear that my proposed legislation (Simkulet 2021 ) to limit the number of embryos that can be created at a single time, would face much opposition at all. Perhaps eugenicists would oppose such legislation for limiting a parent’s right to choose the “best” fetus from the widest possible net, but this does not seem like a widely held position. Perhaps bioethicists and medical professionals would oppose such legislation believing it cumbersome and impractical, but this seems like a much weaker ground for opposition than the autonomy and professional ethics violations epitomized by OA restrictivist legislation and the Italian law.

The Prochoice Other Beliefs Objection

I have argued (Simkulet 2021 ) that if the other beliefs, other actions, and hypocrisy objections are not successful in showing inconsistency arguments “do not matter,” they threaten to undermine the discipline of ethics. No person has merely one moral belief, so if a diversity of beliefs invalidates moral analysis, ethics is impossible. In all cases in which a person acts morally responsibly (save maybe some interpretations of Frankfurt-style cases (Frankfurt 1969 ), agents have other possible actions, so if merely having other actions was sufficient to disregard moral analysis, ethics fails. Finally, if interpreting moral analysis as an ad hominem attack of hypocrisy was sufficient to rebuff criticism, one can shut down all moral debate merely by being thin-skinned. Here, I have argued that Blackshaw et al. ( 2021 ) fail to defend these objections, and fail to show that inconsistency arguments do not matter.

However, these are lofty claims about the discipline of ethics; let’s consider something a bit more down to Earth. Consider the following case:

Jacqueline is surprised to find herself pregnant, calling into question her school’s sexual education program. While discussing the matter with her physician, she learns that some people believe embryos are persons from conception! She finds this view intuitive and compelling, and outraged by her school’s poor sexual education program, she endeavors to work tirelessly to change the public perception of the status of embryos. Later, her physician expresses concern about her exertion, recommending that she puts her efforts to educate on hiatus during the pregnancy, fearing the worst. Jacqueline faces a choice — (i) continue with her pregnancy for the next 6 months, losing ground on her fight to change public perception of embryos or (ii) induce abortion (perhaps by hysterectomy) and continue the fight. When speaking with her physician, Jacqueline quotes an influential piece of literature (Colgrove et al. 2020 ), “It may be unclear, however, which option is superior. Many considerations apply to each, and they may be highly individualistic.” She continues “Objectively evaluating options to determine the most appropriate action for a particular belief held by a specific individual seems a very difficult task.” Upon careful and thoughtful reflection, she chooses (ii), judging that it will do the most good. After all, her embryo is but one embryo and while it is tragic to disconnect it from her body and let it die, her tireless efforts might do more good overall.

If the other actions objection shields OA from inconstancy arguments, it seems that it equally shields Jaqueline from restrictivist OA arguments that seek to restrict her freedom. Therefore, it seems that Blackshaw et al. face a dilemma — (i) reject the position that merely having other actions, beliefs, etc. is sufficient to shield a position from criticism, or (ii) abandon their opposition to induced abortion. If (i), then inconsistency arguments matter. Then again, if (ii), then it seems as though no ethical arguments matter.

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Persuasive Essay About Abortion

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Are you about to write a persuasive essay on abortion but wondering how to begin?

Writing an effective persuasive essay on the topic of abortion can be a difficult task for many students. 

It is important to understand both sides of the issue and form an argument based on facts and logical reasoning. This requires research and understanding, which takes time and effort.

In this blog, we will provide you with some easy steps to craft a persuasive essay about abortion that is compelling and convincing. Moreover, we have included some example essays and interesting facts to read and get inspired by. 

So let's start!

• 1. How To Write a Persuasive Essay About Abortion?
• 2. Persuasive Essay About Abortion Examples
• 3. Examples of Argumentative Essay About Abortion
• 4. Abortion Persuasive Essay Topics
• 5. Facts About Abortion You Need to Know

How To Write a Persuasive Essay About Abortion?

Abortion is a controversial topic, with people having differing points of view and opinions on the matter. There are those who oppose abortion, while some people endorse pro-choice arguments. 

It is also an emotionally charged subject, so you need to be extra careful when crafting your persuasive essay .

Before you start writing your persuasive essay, you need to understand the following steps.

Step 1: Choose Your Position

The first step to writing a persuasive essay on abortion is to decide your position. Do you support the practice or are you against it? You need to make sure that you have a clear opinion before you begin writing. 

Once you have decided, research and find evidence that supports your position. This will help strengthen your argument. 

Check out the video below to get more insights into this topic:

Step 2: Choose Your Audience

The next step is to decide who your audience will be. Will you write for pro-life or pro-choice individuals? Or both? 

Knowing who you are writing for will guide your writing and help you include the most relevant facts and information.

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Step 3: Define Your Argument

Now that you have chosen your position and audience, it is time to craft your argument. 

Start by defining what you believe and why, making sure to use evidence to support your claims. You also need to consider the opposing arguments and come up with counter arguments. This helps make your essay more balanced and convincing.

Step 4: Format Your Essay

Once you have the argument ready, it is time to craft your persuasive essay. Follow a standard format for the essay, with an introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion. 

Make sure that each paragraph is organized and flows smoothly. Use clear and concise language, getting straight to the point.

Step 5: Proofread and Edit

The last step in writing your persuasive essay is to make sure that you proofread and edit it carefully. Look for spelling, grammar, punctuation, or factual errors and correct them. This will help make your essay more professional and convincing.

These are the steps you need to follow when writing a persuasive essay on abortion. It is a good idea to read some examples before you start so you can know how they should be written.

Continue reading to find helpful examples.

Persuasive Essay About Abortion Examples

To help you get started, here are some example persuasive essays on abortion that may be useful for your own paper.

Short Persuasive Essay About Abortion

Persuasive Essay About No To Abortion

What Is Abortion? - Essay Example

Persuasive Speech on Abortion

Legal Abortion Persuasive Essay

Persuasive Essay About Abortion in the Philippines

Persuasive Essay about legalizing abortion

You can also read m ore persuasive essay examples to imp rove your persuasive skills.

Examples of Argumentative Essay About Abortion

An argumentative essay is a type of essay that presents both sides of an argument. These essays rely heavily on logic and evidence.

Here are some examples of argumentative essay with introduction, body and conclusion that you can use as a reference in writing your own argumentative essay. 

Abortion Persuasive Essay Introduction

Argumentative Essay About Abortion Conclusion

Argumentative Essay About Abortion Pdf

Argumentative Essay About Abortion in the Philippines

Argumentative Essay About Abortion - Introduction

Abortion Persuasive Essay Topics

If you are looking for some topics to write your persuasive essay on abortion, here are some examples:

• Should abortion be legal in the United States?
• Is it ethical to perform abortions, considering its pros and cons?
• What should be done to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies that lead to abortions?
• Is there a connection between abortion and psychological trauma?
• What are the ethical implications of abortion on demand?
• How has the debate over abortion changed over time?
• Should there be legal restrictions on late-term abortions?
• Does gender play a role in how people view abortion rights?
• Is it possible to reduce poverty and unwanted pregnancies through better sex education?
• How is the anti-abortion point of view affected by religious beliefs and values? 

These are just some of the potential topics that you can use for your persuasive essay on abortion. Think carefully about the topic you want to write about and make sure it is something that interests you. 

Check out m ore persuasive essay topics that will help you explore other things that you can write about!

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Facts About Abortion You Need to Know

Here are some facts about abortion that will help you formulate better arguments.

• According to the Guttmacher Institute , 1 in 4 pregnancies end in abortion.
• The majority of abortions are performed in the first trimester.
• Abortion is one of the safest medical procedures, with less than a 0.5% risk of major complications.
• In the United States, 14 states have laws that restrict or ban most forms of abortion after 20 weeks gestation.
• Seven out of 198 nations allow elective abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy.
• In places where abortion is illegal, more women die during childbirth and due to complications resulting from pregnancy.
• A majority of pregnant women who opt for abortions do so for financial and social reasons.
• According to estimates, 56 million abortions occur annually.

In conclusion, these are some of the examples, steps, and topics that you can use to write a persuasive essay. Make sure to do your research thoroughly and back up your arguments with evidence. This will make your essay more professional and convincing. 

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MyPerfectWords.com is a persuasive essay writing service that provides help to students in the form of professionally written essays. Our persuasive essay writer can craft quality persuasive essays on any topic, including abortion. 

Frequently Asked Questions

What should i talk about in an essay about abortion.

When writing an essay about abortion, it is important to cover all the aspects of the subject. This includes discussing both sides of the argument, providing facts and evidence to support your claims, and exploring potential solutions.

What is a good argument for abortion?

A good argument for abortion could be that it is a woman’s choice to choose whether or not to have an abortion. It is also important to consider the potential risks of carrying a pregnancy to term.

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The fight over US abortion rights in the year without Roe – photo essay

A look back on the year since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade with the Dobbs decision, and the advocates who aren’t giving up

While the supreme court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade sent shockwaves around the country, many activists, physicians and advocacy groups closely engaged in the fight over abortion in the US were not surprised.

Since Roe’s establishment of the federal right to abortion in 1973, anti-abortion advocates and conservative lawmakers have been chipping away at it. Restrictions on abortion increased over the last decade, and by the mid-2010s, seven states had just one abortion clinic left. In Mississippi, where the Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization case that ultimately ended Roe originated, the state’s one clinic did not provide abortions beyond 16 weeks of pregnancy, meaning many people already had to travel to find care.

For residents in a state with the highest poverty rate in the nation, where there is no guaranteed childcare, and where elected officials have refused to expand Medicaid to cover low-income workers, that often meant obtaining an abortion was unlikely. For those who do move forward with pregnancies, the state doesn’t make that easy either. The states like Mississippi that have now passed the strictest abortion laws are also typically the ones with the lowest minimum wages , the least generous policies that support families, least access to education and to health care. In many southern states, the rates of maternal and infant mortality and morbidity are among the highest in the country. The US has the highest maternal death rate of any wealthy country, and Black women suffer most – they’re three to four times as likely to die from pregnancy-related complications as white women.

The ways the US healthcare system has treated Black people continues to affect their health in profound ways, says Dr Nina Ragunanthan, an OB-GYN who serves the largely low-income Black community in Mississippi’s Delta region.

“You take a group of people that have been so abused for generations,” she says, “the essential stress from that passes down.” Ragunanthan and other doctors say these inherited health challenges combined with ongoing racism mean that abortion bans and their subsequent effects, from medical providers moving away from states with restrictive laws to the potential of criminal penalties, have a disproportionate impact on Black Americans.

In the days after the Dobbs decision, protesters flooded the Pink House, as the Jackson Women’s Health Organization clinic was known. The Pink House Defenders, the group of volunteers who escorted patients to and from the clinic, were used to seeing regular, sometimes heated demonstrations outside, and so tried to keep things as normal as possible for patients, said Derenda Hancock, the group’s founder. “We are just trying to be here for the patients until the last moment.”

Destiny Buchauau had her son at 14 and had her daughter a few months before the Dobbs ruling. She dropped out of school and lives in Rolling Fork, Mississippi, with her children and extended family.

Activist Linda Nicole Stringfellow always has condoms, emergency contraception, and pregnancy tests in her office in Cleveland, Mississippi. Whenever someone arrives, she also provides basic sexual education.

Ebony Jones became pregnant by rape at 17 and miscarried. She later got pregnant again, but the fetus was not developing correctly. Jones had to continue to term because it was illegal to terminate at her stage. When her son was born, she held him as he was dying for 10 hours.

Shantana Stamps, has a four-month-old son at 16. She lives with her mother and aunts in Anguilla, Mississippi. While she knew that contraception existed, she did not know where to find it or who to ask.

Cathy Dolley delivered her daughter prematurely by emergency cesarean section. Years earlier, she had a miscarriage and had to keep the fetus in her uterus for 21 days because of trap laws on abortion.

Dolley has three children and has been pregnant six times. Her first daughter, T’lana La’Faith Davis, died the day she was born in 2018.

Dolley is a certified nurse. Throughout the whole miscarriage and hospital experience she understood completely what are the risks and what was happening to her body.

Many abortion clinics stopped providing care the moment the Dobbs decision came down as they scrambled to interpret what the ruling meant for their state. The Pink House closed its doors for good on 6 July, and as the summer stretched on, more abortion bans took effect. Sixty-six clinics across 15 states stopped offering abortions in the first 100 days after Roe fell, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research form that supports abortion rights.

Clinics in states where abortion remains legal saw huge increases in patients seeking care, and they tried to expand hours and staffing to meet those needs.

I went home with his birth certificate and an empty box with a black flower on it. – Ebony Jones

Doctors, patients and activists spoke out, drawing attention to the ripple effects that new abortion laws were having not only on those who sought abortions, but also on people experiencing pregnancy complications, miscarriages and on those who used medications that were caught up in the uncertainty around the new legislation. Anti-abortion doctors and advocates, meanwhile, argued that the laws were clear and doctors were at fault for any confusion about when the laws applied.

In August, the new era of abortion restrictions faced its first test at the ballot box when Kansas voters decisively rejected a measure that would have opened the state to future abortion bans. The surprising win for abortion rights supporters served as a symbol of a brewing backlash to the supreme court’s decision, and added fuel to debates within the Republican party about how far it should go with its new ability to restrict abortion.

Senator Lindsay Graham proposed a national 15-week abortion ban in September, but other conservative states faltered as they tried to agree on limits for abortion without the constraints of Roe.

The intensity of these fights increased as the country headed toward the midterm elections, where abortion was suddenly at the forefront of nearly every campaign. Members of Congress held hearings on the topic. Advocates flooded into states where more ballot measures addressed abortion, and where voters were now acutely aware of the power that state and local elected officials have over their lives.

Meanwhile, reproductive justice advocates, who had been warning for years that Roe was not enough to guarantee abortion access, ramped up their plans to help people find care. Some clinics that stopped offering abortions remained open in states with bans to provide other reproductive health services, gender-affirming care and follow-up appointments for people who terminated their pregnancies out of state.

While performing an ultrasound for a patient who was preparing for an abortion, Dr. Cheryl Hamlin saw signs of an ectopic pregnancy, which would make taking abortion pills dangerous for the patient.

Her patient had traveled multiple hours to reach the clinic and needed to return home that night, so Hamlin worked to verify the diagnosis as soon as possible with other specialists.

While some people prefer to take abortion pills on their own, Hamlin believes everyone should have medical support if they desire. Now that many states have outlawed abortion, many people are going without that support.

Kate works at the Hope Clinic for Women in Illinois, where she received an abortion in 2021. After a complicated pregnancy, she was told a future pregnancy would be dangerous but the Catholic hospital where she gave birth refused to tie her tubes.

Kate became pregnant again despite taking birth control. She experienced complications after taking abortion pills and had to have three blood transfusions. The Hope Clinic asked Kate to return to ensure the abortion was safely completed.

Many abortion clinic workers choose these jobs because they have personal experience with the topic or believe strongly in the clinics’ missions.

Grassroots groups known as abortion funds raised money to help people afford abortions and the travel, lodging, childcare and extra costs that come with seeking medical assistance far from home. People like Michelle Colon, founder of Shero in Mississippi, organized volunteers to drive more than 50 women at least 10 hours north to Illinois to obtain abortions. Colon herself drove at least 20 times between the end of June and the fall, sometimes bringing more than one patient in her car and paying for travel costs herself. She is now among the very few individuals left providing such help in Mississippi.

With the country focused on abortion in a way it hadn’t been for years, advocates tried to cut through the stigma around the topic. They held conferences, speakouts and encouraged politicians to talk about the issue on the campaign trail leading up to the November midterm elections.

Angela Michael, an anti-abortion activist and former nurse performs an ultrasound on Ashley in a recreational vehicle outside the Hope Clinic. Michael convinced Ashley not to have an abortion several years ago.

On 8 November 2022, voters delivered a ringing endorsement of abortion rights in key states, establishing new abortion protections in Michigan, California and Vermont, while rejecting efforts to restrict abortion or criminalize providers in Kentucky and Montana. Elsewhere, voters supported governors and other state level candidates who backed abortion rights in places like Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Kansas and Arizona.

As the post-Roe reality set in, abortion pills, which have been on the World Health Organization’s list of “essential medicines” for years and now account for more than half of US abortions, proved a key flash point.

Abortion rights activists see the pills, a two-drug regimen also known as medication abortion, as a key way to help people get care privately and take some of the load off brick-and-mortar clinics. Telehealth services like Hey Jane, Choix and Abortion on Demand expanded in states where abortion remains legal. The number of abortions provided by virtual-only telehealth providers increased from an average of 4,025 abortions a month (or 5% of all abortions) before Dobbs to 7,461 a month (9% of all abortions) in the first nine months after the decision, according to the Society of Family Planning’s new WeCount report . For people who couldn’t or didn’t want to use official channels, activists expanded underground networks run by groups like Las Libres and Red Necesito Arbortar that are delivering abortion pills to Americans from as far away as Mexico and India.

Michelle Colon, founder of Shero, an abortion fund in Mississippi, works with other activists to find ways to continue helping women in the south access abortion.

Plan A mobile clinic provides free basic reproductive healthcare and pre- and postnatal checkups for patients without health insurance. The clinic also refers patients to health centers that provide post-abortion checkups.

Valencia Robinson leads Mississippi in Action, a group that does advocacy and education about sexual and reproductive health issues. Robinson started this work after her own emergency c-section years ago.

April Jackson already had two kids when she got pregnant again. She went to a pregnancy center and was convinced not to have an abortion. Her youngest daughter was born with a heart defect that now needs to be constantly monitored.

April is raising her seven children on her own without any substantial support from any organizations or the state of Mississippi, where she is from and currently lives.

As a teenager, Amanda Furdge had two abortions. She never received sex education growing up in Mississippi. She later got married and had a son but escaped back home after her husband became violent. She soon learned she was pregnant again and was misled by a crisis pregnancy center after she went to them for an abortion.

Several years later she married another man, and though she did not want to have more children, she had another baby. After her second husband also became violent, Furdge got a tubal ligation and left her spouse to raise her children on her own.

Those who oppose abortion see pills as enabling a way around their favored laws. While the vast majority of Americans did not want to see Roe overturned and public opinion has only solidified in favor of abortion rights since last summer, the anti-abortion movement does not care if its positions are not widely popular. This year, Christian legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom filed a lawsuit aiming to force the FDA to take mifepristone, one of the two drugs used for medication abortions, off the market nationwide.

After a Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas agreed with the group, the supreme court eventually blocked the restrictions and maintained access for now. But the case is likely to end up back at the supreme court, where it could still upend abortion access in every state.

She asked me to show her a photo of my oldest son. And then she asked ‘what if I kill him? – Amanda Furdge

The 2023 legislative session brought a number of new state abortion bans and restrictions, though some of these have now been blocked by courts. Democratic-leaning states pushed back by allocating funding and passing new protections for abortion seekers and providers within their borders. In other places, conservative lawmakers sought to limit ballot measures related to abortion. A group of patients in Texas who say they were denied medically necessary abortions despite risks to their lives and their fetuses, sued the state seeking to clarify exceptions to its abortion bans and as physicians in other states highlighted similar situations also arguing for more health-based exceptions, lawmakers often proved skeptical and anti-abortion advocates encouraged them to hold strong.

Alejandra had an abortion in 2018. She remembers how lonely she felt during her experience. Now Alejandra provides help to other women in Arizona and talks about her story publicly to fight abortion stigma.

Throughout the spring, abortion funds continued to help people access care. But while many groups in places as diverse as Louisiana, Arizona and Colorado doubled and tripled their fundraising from before Dobbs, they are now warning that funding is lagging as the public’s attention wanes. The New York Abortion Access Fund, which has helped patients from 29 states, Washington DC and six countries access abortions in the last year, says it is on pace to run out of money by October if it does not receive more support.

Over 3,000 abortion pills were donated to Red Necesito Abortar, an activist group in Mexico so that they can be transported across the border for American women to use.

Misa (pseudonym) is an activist from a feminist collective in Matamoros, Mexico. Since the abortion laws have changed in the US, she has crossed the border multiple times to bring abortion pills to Texas.

In Mississippi, health problems continue and people like Colon, one of the few people helping residents in her state find the resources to travel and obtain abortions, says the situation feels almost like Jenga, the children’s game that involves precariously removing wooden blocks from a tower until they collapse. “They’re just pulling away everything,” she says. “There’s only a couple more blocks left. You’ve got these other blocks just kind of teetering.”

We never thought that we would be the ones who would be able to provide abortion access to women in the US. – Veronica Cruz

It’s not clear what will happen when the last block is gone. More lawsuits and legal attacks are coming, OB-GYNs are leaving states with abortion bans, and training for the next generation of medical residents in states with restrictions remains uncertain.

But for now, abortion rights advocates are not giving up.

Colon says she feels like she is fighting back against the new laws every time she gets someone to an appointment to terminate their pregnancy if that’s what they want. “You may have put up all of these hurdles, but we’re still getting folks there,” she says. “We’re basically crawling over fucking glass, we’re climbing mountains, yet we’re still getting people there.

Lola, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who has been living in California for over 20 years, prepares abortion pills provided by a Mexican organization for clandestine distribution around the US.

When Lola had an abortion a few years ago, she was alone. She is now part of a network distributing them to people in the states where abortion has been illegal since more laws started changing in June 2022.

• A year without Roe
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My Abortion Story Went Viral. Here’s What Happened Next.

In an exclusive essay for ELLE.com, Arizona state Sen. Eva Burch recounts her speech on the floor of the Arizona Senate.

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Last week, Arizona state Sen. Eva Burch did the unthinkable: She announced her decision to get an abortion on the floor of the Arizona Senate. In her speech, which quickly went viral, Burch talked about the importance of access to abortion care in America and why she, as a politician, felt compelled to share her story in such a public manner. Now, in an exclusive essay for ELLE, Burch writes about that emotional moment on the Senate floor—and why she wants to “ change the narrative about what abortion care looks like.”

Two years ago I scheduled my first abortion. This was a pregnancy my husband and I had been dreaming of and planning for, but it wasn’t progressing. Then, as if that news wasn’t heartbreaking enough, I began to miscarry. The bleeding was heavier than expected, and we called an ambulance.

Shortly after we arrived at the hospital, my miscarriage stalled, and the bleeding stopped. Doctors could still see the embryo on the ultrasound, but there was no longer a heartbeat. I was told that I couldn’t have an abortion in the hospital, because my life wasn’t in danger. Instead, doctors advised me to wait and go to my scheduled abortion appointment the next day. They said their hands were tied, and it was all they could do. Two weeks later, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade .

Fast forward to this year, and I found out that I was pregnant once again. My mother had just passed away in my home where I was caring for her, and it was hard not to believe this was a sign that this pregnancy might be different. But after several ultrasounds, it became clear that my pregnancy was, once again, not progressing as it should. I made the decision to have an abortion.

For far too long, political extremists have worked to rewrite the image of the abortion patient—working overtime to make us believe that the only people who seek out abortion care are promiscuous, selfish, irresponsible, or even lazy. This narrative is pushed to create stigma and justify bad laws.

Sometimes it feels like a bad dream; my first abortion was days before the Supreme Court stripped away the reproductive rights of millions of Americans. Here I am, standing in that position once again, as the Supreme Court hears oral arguments on Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) , which will decide how patients can access mifepristone, one of two drugs (along with misoprostol) used in medication abortions.

My own experience has been marred by disinformation and obstacles created by out-of-touch elected officials. If SCOTUS once again chooses to side with extremists, it will make medication abortion much harder to get. And we know these attacks won’t stop there. While SCOTUS decides just how much bodily autonomy we are entitled to, the Arizona Supreme Court is weighing the decision to either uphold our state’s current 15-week abortion ban or reinstate our no-exceptions total ban on abortion that was enacted in 1864. Either way, Arizonans lose. And similar scenarios are playing out in states all across the country .

I can’t find a way to say this with more clarity: Our rights are on the chopping block, and they won’t be protected unless you show up to vote in November. As a legislator, I am well aware of how hostile Republicans can be to our rights and freedoms. I work with them every day. Some Arizona Republicans are so far out of touch, that they refused to even consider or discuss the Right to Contraception Act that was introduced by my Democratic colleagues. So we know exactly what they are coming for next. It will never be enough.

I share my story in the hopes that we can change the narrative about what abortion care looks like, who the abortion patient is, and how legislation impacts real people seeking abortion care. The overwhelming amount of love that I have received and the willingness of strangers to tell me their own stories gives me hope that November will be a time of celebration, not heartbreak. We have the power to write our own stories. Let’s do it together. Get registered to vote. Learn about the candidates on your ballot. Bring friends to the polls.

Abortion is on the ballot, and we must elect politicians up and down the ticket who will remain committed to restoring our fundamental freedoms—and who protect us from those who seek to take away our rights, our stories, and our futures.

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2. social and moral considerations on abortion.

Relatively few Americans view the morality of abortion in stark terms: Overall, just 7% of all U.S. adults say abortion is morally acceptable in all cases, and 13% say it is morally wrong in all cases. A third say that abortion is morally wrong in  most  cases, while about a quarter (24%) say it is morally acceptable most of the time. About an additional one-in-five do not consider abortion a moral issue.

There are wide differences on this question by political party and religious affiliation. Among Republicans and independents who lean toward the Republican Party, most say that abortion is morally wrong either in most (48%) or all cases (20%). Among Democrats and Democratic leaners, meanwhile, only about three-in-ten (29%) hold a similar view. About four-in-ten Democrats say abortion is morally  acceptable  in most (32%) or all (11%) cases, while an additional 28% say abortion is not a moral issue. 

White evangelical Protestants overwhelmingly say abortion is morally wrong in most (51%) or all cases (30%). A slim majority of Catholics (53%) also view abortion as morally wrong, but many also say it is morally acceptable in most (24%) or all cases (4%), or that it is not a moral issue (17%). And among religiously unaffiliated Americans, about three-quarters see abortion as morally acceptable (45%) or not a moral issue (32%).

There is strong alignment between people’s views of whether abortion is morally wrong and whether it should be illegal. For example, among U.S. adults who take the view that abortion should be illegal in all cases without exception, fully 86% also say abortion is always morally wrong. The prevailing view among adults who say abortion should be legal in all circumstances is that abortion is not a moral issue (44%), though notable shares of this group also say it is morally acceptable in all (27%) or most (22%) cases. 

Most Americans who say abortion should be illegal with some exceptions take the view that abortion is morally wrong in  most  cases (69%). Those who say abortion should be legal with some exceptions are somewhat more conflicted, with 43% deeming abortion morally acceptable in most cases and 26% saying it is morally wrong in most cases; an additional 24% say it is not a moral issue. 

The survey also asked respondents who said abortion is morally wrong in at least some cases whether there are situations where abortion should still be legal  despite  being morally wrong. Roughly half of U.S. adults (48%) say that there are, in fact, situations where abortion is morally wrong but should still be legal, while just 22% say that whenever abortion is morally wrong, it should also be illegal. An additional 28% either said abortion is morally acceptable in all cases or not a moral issue, and thus did not receive the follow-up question.

Across both political parties and all major Christian subgroups – including Republicans and White evangelicals – there are substantially more people who say that there are situations where abortion should still be  legal  despite being morally wrong than there are who say that abortion should always be  illegal  when it is morally wrong.

Public views of what would change the number of abortions in the U.S.

Asked about the impact a number of policy changes would have on the number of abortions in the U.S., nearly two-thirds of Americans (65%) say “more support for women during pregnancy, such as financial assistance or employment protections” would reduce the number of abortions in the U.S. Six-in-ten say the same about expanding sex education and similar shares say more support for parents (58%), making it easier to place children for adoption in good homes (57%) and passing stricter abortion laws (57%) would have this effect. 

While about three-quarters of White evangelical Protestants (74%) say passing stricter abortion laws would reduce the number of abortions in the U.S., about half of religiously unaffiliated Americans (48%) hold this view. Similarly, Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say this (67% vs. 49%, respectively). By contrast, while about seven-in-ten unaffiliated adults (69%) say expanding sex education would reduce the number of abortions in the U.S., only about half of White evangelicals (48%) say this. Democrats also are substantially more likely than Republicans to hold this view (70% vs. 50%). 

Democrats are somewhat more likely than Republicans to say support for parents – such as paid family leave or more child care options – would reduce the number of abortions in the country (64% vs. 53%, respectively), while Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say making adoption into good homes easier would reduce abortions (64% vs. 52%).

Majorities across both parties and other subgroups analyzed in this report say that more support for women during pregnancy would reduce the number of abortions in America.

A majority of Americans say women should have more say in setting abortion policy in the U.S.

More than half of U.S. adults (56%) say women should have more say than men when it comes to setting policies around abortion in this country – including 42% who say women should have “a lot” more say. About four-in-ten (39%) say men and women should have equal say in abortion policies, and 3% say men should have more say than women. 

Six-in-ten women and about half of men (51%) say that women should have more say on this policy issue. 

Democrats are much more likely than Republicans to say women should have more say than men in setting abortion policy (70% vs. 41%). Similar shares of Protestants (48%) and Catholics (51%) say women should have more say than men on this issue, while the share of religiously unaffiliated Americans who say this is much higher (70%).

How do certain arguments about abortion resonate with Americans?

Seeking to gauge Americans’ reactions to several common arguments related to abortion, the survey presented respondents with six statements and asked them to rate how well each statement reflects their views on a five-point scale ranging from “extremely well” to “not at all well.” 

The list included three statements sometimes cited by individuals wishing to protect a right to abortion: “The decision about whether to have an abortion should belong solely to the pregnant woman,” “If legal abortions are too hard to get, then women will seek out unsafe abortions from unlicensed providers,” and “If legal abortions are too hard to get, then it will be more difficult for women to get ahead in society.” The first two of these resonate with the greatest number of Americans, with about half (53%) saying each describes their views “extremely” or “very” well. In other words, among the statements presented in the survey, U.S. adults are most likely to say that women alone should decide whether to have an abortion, and that making abortion illegal will lead women into unsafe situations.

The three other statements are similar to arguments sometimes made by those who wish to restrict access to abortions: “Human life begins at conception, so a fetus is a person with rights,” “If legal abortions are too easy to get, then people won’t be as careful with sex and contraception,” and “If legal abortions are too easy to get, then some pregnant women will be pressured into having an abortion even when they don’t want to.” 

Fewer than half of Americans say each of these statements describes their views extremely or very well. Nearly four-in-ten endorse the notion that “human life begins at conception, so a fetus is a person with rights” (26% say this describes their views extremely well, 12% very well), while about a third say that “if legal abortions are too easy to get, then people won’t be as careful with sex and contraception” (20% extremely well, 15% very well).

When it comes to statements cited by proponents of abortion rights, Democrats are much more likely than Republicans to identify with all three of these statements, as are religiously unaffiliated Americans compared with Catholics and Protestants. Women also are more likely than men to express these views – and especially more likely to say that decisions about abortion should fall solely to pregnant women and that restrictions on abortion will put women in unsafe situations. Younger adults under 30 are particularly likely to express the view that if legal abortions are too hard to get, then it will be difficult for women to get ahead in society.

In the case of the three statements sometimes cited by opponents of abortion, the patterns generally go in the opposite direction. Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say each statement reflects their views “extremely” or “very” well, as are Protestants (especially White evangelical Protestants) and Catholics compared with the religiously unaffiliated. In addition, older Americans are more likely than young adults to say that human life begins at conception and that easy access to abortion encourages unsafe sex.

Gender differences on these questions, however, are muted. In fact, women are just as likely as men to say that human life begins at conception, so a fetus is a person with rights (39% and 38%, respectively).

Analyzing certain statements together allows for an examination of the extent to which individuals can simultaneously hold two views that may seem to some as in conflict. For instance, overall, one-in-three U.S. adults say that  both  the statement “the decision about whether to have an abortion should belong solely to the pregnant woman” and the statement “human life begins at conception, so the fetus is a person with rights” reflect their own views at least somewhat well. This includes 12% of adults who say both statements reflect their views “extremely” or “very” well. 

Republicans are slightly more likely than Democrats to say both statements reflect their own views at least somewhat well (36% vs. 30%), although Republicans are much more likely to say  only  the statement about the fetus being a person with rights reflects their views at least somewhat well (39% vs. 9%) and Democrats are much more likely to say  only  the statement about the decision to have an abortion belonging solely to the pregnant woman reflects their views at least somewhat well (55% vs. 19%).

Additionally, those who take the stance that abortion should be legal in all cases with no exceptions are overwhelmingly likely (76%) to say only the statement about the decision belonging solely to the pregnant woman reflects their views extremely, very or somewhat well, while a nearly identical share (73%) of those who say abortion should be  illegal  in all cases with no exceptions say only the statement about human life beginning at conception reflects their views at least somewhat well.

In their own words: How Americans feel about abortion 

When asked to describe whether they had any other additional views or feelings about abortion, adults shared a range of strong or complex views about the topic. In many cases, Americans reiterated their strong support – or opposition to – abortion in the U.S. Others reflected on how difficult or nuanced the issue was, offering emotional responses or personal experiences to one of two open-ended questions asked on the survey. 

One open-ended question asked respondents if they wanted to share any other views or feelings about abortion overall. The other open-ended question asked respondents about their feelings or views regarding abortion restrictions. The responses to both questions were similar. 

Overall, about three-in-ten adults offered a response to either of the open-ended questions. There was little difference in the likelihood to respond by party, religion or gender, though people who say they have given a “lot” of thought to the issue were more likely to respond than people who have not. 

Of those who did offer additional comments, about a third of respondents said something in support of legal abortion. By far the most common sentiment expressed was that the decision to have an abortion should be solely a personal decision, or a decision made jointly with a woman and her health care provider, with some saying simply that it “should be between a woman and her doctor.” Others made a more general point, such as one woman who said, “A woman’s body and health should not be subject to legislation.” 

About one-in-five of the people who responded to the question expressed disapproval of abortion – the most common reason being a belief that a fetus is a person or that abortion is murder. As one woman said, “It is my belief that life begins at conception and as much as is humanly possible, we as a society need to support, protect and defend each one of those little lives.” Others in this group pointed to the fact that they felt abortion was too often used as a form of birth control. For example, one man said, “Abortions are too easy to obtain these days. It seems more women are using it as a way of birth control.” 

About a quarter of respondents who opted to answer one of the open-ended questions said that their views about abortion were complex; many described having mixed feelings about the issue or otherwise expressed sympathy for both sides of the issue. One woman said, “I am personally opposed to abortion in most cases, but I think it would be detrimental to society to make it illegal. I was alive before the pill and before legal abortions. Many women died.” And one man said, “While I might feel abortion may be wrong in some cases, it is never my place as a man to tell a woman what to do with her body.” 

The remaining responses were either not related to the topic or were difficult to interpret.

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Table of contents, majority of public disapproves of supreme court’s decision to overturn roe v. wade, wide partisan gaps in abortion attitudes, but opinions in both parties are complicated, key facts about the abortion debate in america, about six-in-ten americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, fact sheet: public opinion on abortion, most popular.

About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts .

Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Abortion — Thesis Statement for Abortion

Thesis Statement for Abortion

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Words: 515 |

Published: Mar 20, 2024

Words: 515 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Table of contents

The pro-choice perspective, the pro-life perspective, ethical considerations, legal implications.

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Abortion has been a major conflict in society. It puts a tremendous amount of pressure on women who are debating whether to change their lives dramatically by having a baby. Abortion terminates fetuses in the womb and that is [...]

In recent years, abortion has been the most controversial and politically charged subject in the United States. Abortion can be defined as the deliberate termination of a human pregnancy. The two main sides of the debate are [...]

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Repro-Rights Advocates Focused on Abortion and Not Pregnancy. That Was a Mistake.

Fetal personhood, prosecuting women—attorney lynn paltrow has seen this coming for decades., nina martin.

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As the Supreme Court prepares for arguments in a wide-ranging case over the FDA’s regulation of mifepristone, it’s hard to fathom what might happen if the abortion pill, which now accounts for 63 percent of abortions in the US, becomes largely unavailable. But then again, for a very long time, it was hard for the vast majority of Americans to believe that Roe v. Wade might be overturned. Or for all but the most apocalyptic-minded to imagine that ultra-right justices in Alabama , inspired by Christian Nationalism, might someday declare frozen embryos created in a fertility clinic to be children, literal persons, under the law.

Civil rights lawyer and reproductive justice pioneer Lynn Paltrow is one of the rare exceptions. “Maybe there’s something about being Jewish, and brought up on the knowledge of the Holocaust, that’s sensitized me to the possibility of the worst-case scenario being real,” she says from her home office in New York, taking a break from the book she’s been writing. With the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling on IVF, Paltrow jokes that she finally has its title: I Told You So.

Paltrow began working on abortion cases as an intern with the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project in the early 1980s; later she helped found what is now the Center for Reproductive Rights . But even as she was filing lawsuits and amicus briefs to defend Roe , she came to believe that her side’s single-minded focus on abortion was myopic and, she feared, potentially disastrous. In 2001, she founded National Advocates for Pregnant Women, taking up the types of issues that mainstream pro-choice groups were mostly ignoring—the policing of pregnancy, for instance, and the emerging threat posed by claims of fetal personhood . Though Paltrow stepped down from NAPW, now Pregnancy Justice , in 2023, she’s paying as close attention as ever to the many ongoing efforts to “deny women, and anyone with the capacity to be pregnant, of their personhood.” Whether the issue is mifepristone or fetal rights, the ultimate goal, she warns, is far more ambitious than banning abortion. It’s to “ensure male supremacy and a society in which men have certain roles and women have others.”

What was the first case you came across that made you start to understand the implications of the idea that a fetus is a separate legal person from its mother—and that pro-choicers should be focusing on pregnancy, not just abortion?

There were two cases. The first was the criminal prosecution of Pamela Rae Stewart in 1986. She was a poor white woman near San Diego whose baby was severely compromised and died five weeks after birth. One factor in the charges was that she had allegedly used criminalized drugs during pregnancy—marijuana and amphetamines. But the prosecutors ultimately admitted that was not the real reason for the case. Her real crime was not obeying her doctor’s orders. They said she hadn’t gotten early enough prenatal care; she didn’t take her prescribed medication; she didn’t get to the hospital quickly enough on the day of delivery—she started hemorrhaging and lost five cups of blood. My favorite—this is a quote from the prosecutors’ brief—was that she had “subjected herself to the rigors of sexual intercourse” on the day she gave birth.

It was the first time that most people had ever heard of a woman’s actions during pregnancy being policed and criminalized this way. It also showed how prosecutors could take existing laws that had nothing to do with drug use or pregnancy and twist them for their purposes. The California legislature had amended its murder laws in 1970 to allow homicide charges against someone who killed a fetus in the commission of a crime, but the statute was very clear that it could not be used in the context of abortion or against the mother. So instead of charging Pamela Rae with murder or manslaughter, prosecutors used a misdemeanor criminal child support law that required parents to support their children, including “children conceived but not yet born.” 

We got the trial court judge to dismiss it. It was an absolute victory for Pamela Rae Stewart. But very quickly there were scores of similar cases around the country that disproportionately targeted Black mothers, using laws written for another purpose, like charging women with child abuse or distributing drugs to a minor.

What was the second case?

It was just a year later, in 1987. Angela Carder was a young woman, confined to a Washington, DC, hospital with cancer—a tumor in her lungs the size of a football. She was also 26 weeks pregnant. The fetus was not viable, it was never going to live; the tumor had deprived it of oxygen for too long to survive. Her family wanted the hospital to keep Angela comfortable and alive for as long as possible. But the hospital called an emergency hearing to determine the rights of the fetus and obtained a court order for cesarean surgery. The baby lived for two hours; Angela for another two days.

Eventually, at the appellate level, we were able to get a decision that held, in effect, that women who become pregnant don’t lose their civil rights. But in a dissent , one appellate judge claimed that “the expectant mother,” because she has “undertaken to bear another human being” to the point of viability, places herself  “in a special class of persons.” And over the years there have been numerous cases—including forced c-section s, forced bedrest —in which other courts essentially say something very similar: We know we’re violating a woman’s rights, but this is different, she’s pregnant.

So, thinking about the slippery slope, my first two cases started at the bottom of it. No exaggeration, no hyperbole. The Pamela Rae Stewart case made me understand that claims of separate, legal personhood for an embryo or fetus could become a mechanism for policing half the people in the United States, the half that can get pregnant. And then the Angela Carder case made clear that it wasn’t simply that you could lose your physical liberty and go to jail. You could lose your right to life.

I associate these kinds of rulings with, say, Texas or Alabama. But this isn’t just happening in conservative states.

No! In a report last fall, Pregnancy Justice found nearly 1,400 cases of pregnancy-related criminalization across the US just in the past 16 years, including in New York . Even in California, after Pamela Rae Stewart’s case was thrown out, there were at least four other cases in which individual prosecutors brought charges to try to make a name for themselves. As recently as 2019, a woman was charged with murder after having a stillbirth that prosecutors claimed was caused by methamphetamine use. It wasn’t until 2022 that the California legislature finally passed a law that said you can’t do this.

Let’s be clear: Methamphetamine not only doesn’t cause stillbirths, it doesn’t even have a theoretical [physiological] pathway for causing stillbirths. Think about all people on Ritalin and other medications with the same chemical makeup as meth that do not cause stillbirths. If methamphetamine—or any of the criminalized drugs—were good at ending pregnancy, don’t you think we’d be shipping them to Texas and Alabama? It’s probably a hell of a lot easier to get methamphetamine in those places than it is to get mifepristone.

Beyond banning abortion, what do you think is the goal of people who argue for fetal personhood?

They claim it’s to “protect unborn life from its earliest stages of development.” But what I’m seeing—and this is the only thing that I think allows one to make sense out of all of the laws and policies that purport to regulate abortion and birth control and IVF—is that they are all mechanisms for ensuring a subordinate status for women and anybody who can become pregnant. That’s why I’ve started calling it the anti-abortion, pro-misogynist movement.

I hear people say all the time that the personhood movement wants to give the fetus more rights than the mother . No, it’s more rights than any living person . No living person has the right to require anybody else to undergo any health intervention on their behalf. No living person has a right to require another living person to give them blood or an organ. Even if it’s their twin sister, their mother, their father. But according to the personhood people, fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses have more rights than any living person because their existence could require women to literally die for them. Fetuses have rights even when they’re completely nonviable, as happened in the Angela Carder case.

How did the anti-abortion movement grab hold of the personhood idea? And how did criminalizing pregnancy become a key part of it? 

One of the foundations of Roe v. Wade was the conclusion that fetuses are not constitutional persons at any stage of development. Right after Roe came down, people on the [anti-abortion side] began strategizing: What can we do to challenge that holding?  

There were proposals to amend the US Constitution to have the unborn declared full persons under the law, which ultimately failed. There were a few state ballot measures that also mostly failed. Instead, the strategy that proved to be most effective was injecting into every possible law the idea that constitutional personhood begins at conception and that fetuses should be viewed as separate and independent from their mothers. For example, laws that made the killing of a fetus a crime. Or wrongful death laws that let a family sue if a pregnant person and her unborn child are killed in an accident.

I have never been able to find a deliberate strategy by [the anti-abortion] movement to connect personhood with the criminalization of pregnancy—at least, not at the beginning. Instead, it seemed like individual prosecutors picked up on the legal personhood arguments and found them irresistible. There was a huge drug war going on and they could not show any accomplishments in stemming the tide of drugs. But if they targeted pregnant women, lo and behold, they got national press. And they created the illusion that they were doing something about drugs.

Then anti-abortion groups saw what they were doing and understood that prosecuting women for allegedly harming their fetuses was consistent with their personhood playbook. And they could use these arrests and prosecutions to their advantage.

Even though these prosecutions were popping up all over the country, the higher courts were skeptical. When did that change?

For many years, at the appellate level, we were able to get courts to recognize that interpreting various state laws—like laws against the delivery of drugs to a minor—to prosecute women was a violation of legislative intent. And they would throw the cases out. Then came the Cornelia Whitner case in South Carolina in 1997.

She was a Black mother who gave birth to a healthy baby who tested positive for cocaine. She was arrested under the state’s child endangerment and neglect laws. Her court-appointed lawyer had just left the prosecutor’s office—as far as she was concerned, this was a legitimate prosecution. She advised Cornelia to plead guilty in the hope of getting some kind of treatment, which is an extremely naive position because there’s basically no drug treatment available for pregnant women or mothers. Instead, Cornelia got eight years in jail. There was absolutely no legislative history to support the interpretation of the child abuse law in the context of pregnancy. But, to me shockingly, the state supreme court ruled in favor of the prosecution. I should never have been shocked. We then had a lot of cases arguing that other states should treat Whitner as an outlier. And we were successful—for the next 15 years, courts in other places continued to throw out these cases.

Until prosecutors in Alabama started charging women with chemically endangering their fetuses, under a felony law that was passed to protect actual children from meth labs.

When the Alabama cases started happening , we knew we were going up against an incredibly conservative state supreme court. We had no illusions about the outcome, and we were right. In 2013, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that the state’s meth lab law could be used to prosecute people for substance use in pregnancy. To get there, they dismissed the many other rulings around the country that they disagreed with and singled out the Whitner case as supporting the idea that women could, and should, be prosecuted.

What was different was the broader goal. The South Carolina court was focused on the case in front of them—the crack baby hysteria. They didn’t say “Roe v. Wade was decided wrongly.” The Alabama ruling was very much part of a broader agenda to explicitly attack and eventually overturn Roe. A whole string of Alabama cases built on each other, trying to make arguments for personhood by mischaracterizing many areas of the law, from inheritance laws to torts like wrongful death. The IVF decision is part of that series of cases.

Do you think people on the abortion rights side have been slow to understand the threat posed by personhood?  

I was disappointed by the lack of any kind of national feminist outcry at the Whitner decision. It had the effect of seeming to endorse an idea of legal personhood for viable fetuses. I’ve seen this happen in many other cases—there’s a legal argument or even a ruling that seems so narrow or outlandish that the pro-choice side doesn’t bother to push back. When we fail to respond—to offer an ideology that values the personhood of women and people who get pregnant—we go one more step backward.

What do you think accounts for this pro-choice blind spot?

A few things. There are a lot of silos. For much of the past 50 years, the mainstream pro-choice groups were focused almost exclusively on the right to abortion. Although as individuals, they understood that right as representing much more than a single medical procedure, there was no campaign to explain abortion as necessary to the full equality and citizenship—the personhood—of women in this country. They were defending abortion as opposed to the people who sometimes need abortions but always need to be treated as full constitutional persons under the law, whatever the outcome of their pregnancies.

Even on the pro-choice side, a lot of people thought of pregnancy and abortion as two different things. Years ago, when I was at National Advocates for Pregnant Women, I was invited to talk at a prestigious public health school. One of the people who invited me was a bioethicist I’d worked with years before.  In anticipation of my talk, she called and asked, “What made you change from working on abortion to working on pregnant women?” I was like, “You know you don’t need an abortion unless you become pregnant…?”

And then many people working on abortion issues felt that connecting the protection of the right to abortion to drug policy issues was incredibly dangerous for their cause. I understand that. But, the fact is, they were being linked by the right. Refusing to respond to that connection ended up keeping our side extremely vulnerable.

Did people on the pro-choice side also tend to believe that some of the decisions happening in, say, Alabama were so far out on the fringe that they wouldn’t have any real influence?

People have a hard time believing that the worst and the craziest can happen. The ongoing willingness to say, “Oh, that’s just Alabama” is extremely dangerous. There are judges in New York who have reached very similar kinds of decisions.

If you could single out one effort the repro-justice movement could make to protect the personhood of women, what would it be?

We have to have a 50-year plan that includes the development of arguments about women’s rights to conscience that articulates the moral injury they suffer when they are denied the right to abortion, and when they face penalties for any outcome of their pregnancies. It cannot just be the defense of a procedure. We will never ensure a national system of health care that includes all the health care that women need if we don’t make this a fight about the status of women as free and equal citizens.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Guest Essay

The Supreme Court Got It Wrong: Abortion Is Not Settled Law

By Melissa Murray and Kate Shaw

Ms. Murray is a law professor at New York University. Ms. Shaw is a contributing Opinion writer.

In his majority opinion in the case overturning Roe v. Wade, Justice Samuel Alito insisted that the high court was finally settling the vexed abortion debate by returning the “authority to regulate abortion” to the “people and their elected representatives.”

Despite these assurances, less than two years after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, abortion is back at the Supreme Court. In the next month, the justices will hear arguments in two high-stakes cases that may shape the future of access to medication abortion and to lifesaving care for pregnancy emergencies. These cases make clear that Dobbs did not settle the question of abortion in America — instead, it generated a new slate of questions. One of those questions involves the interaction of existing legal rules with the concept of fetal personhood — the view, held by many in the anti-abortion movement, that a fetus is a person entitled to the same rights and protections as any other person.

The first case , scheduled for argument on Tuesday, F.D.A. v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, is a challenge to the Food and Drug Administration’s protocols for approving and regulating mifepristone, one of the two drugs used for medication abortions. An anti-abortion physicians’ group argues that the F.D.A. acted unlawfully when it relaxed existing restrictions on the use and distribution of mifepristone in 2016 and 2021. In 2016, the agency implemented changes that allowed the use of mifepristone up to 10 weeks of pregnancy, rather than seven; reduced the number of required in-person visits for dispensing the drug from three to one; and allowed the drug to be prescribed by individuals like nurse practitioners. In 2021, it eliminated the in-person visit requirement, clearing the way for the drug to be dispensed by mail. The physicians’ group has urged the court to throw out those regulations and reinstate the previous, more restrictive regulations surrounding the drug — a ruling that could affect access to the drug in every state, regardless of the state’s abortion politics.

The second case, scheduled for argument on April 24, involves the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (known by doctors and health policymakers as EMTALA ), which requires federally funded hospitals to provide patients, including pregnant patients, with stabilizing care or transfer to a hospital that can provide such care. At issue is the law’s interaction with state laws that severely restrict abortion, like an Idaho law that bans abortion except in cases of rape or incest and circumstances where abortion is “necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman.”

Although the Idaho law limits the provision of abortion care to circumstances where death is imminent, the federal government argues that under EMTALA and basic principles of federal supremacy, pregnant patients experiencing emergencies at federally funded hospitals in Idaho are entitled to abortion care, even if they are not in danger of imminent death.

These cases may be framed in the technical jargon of administrative law and federal pre-emption doctrine, but both cases involve incredibly high-stakes issues for the lives and health of pregnant persons — and offer the court an opportunity to shape the landscape of abortion access in the post-Roe era.

These two cases may also give the court a chance to seed new ground for fetal personhood. Woven throughout both cases are arguments that gesture toward the view that a fetus is a person.

If that is the case, the legal rules that would typically hold sway in these cases might not apply. If these questions must account for the rights and entitlements of the fetus, the entire calculus is upended.

In this new scenario, the issue is not simply whether EMTALA’s protections for pregnant patients pre-empt Idaho’s abortion ban, but rather which set of interests — the patient’s or the fetus’s — should be prioritized in the contest between state and federal law. Likewise, the analysis of F.D.A. regulatory protocols is entirely different if one of the arguments is that the drug to be regulated may be used to end a life.

Neither case presents the justices with a clear opportunity to endorse the notion of fetal personhood — but such claims are lurking beneath the surface. The Idaho abortion ban is called the Defense of Life Act, and in its first bill introduced in 2024, the Idaho Legislature proposed replacing the term “fetus” with “preborn child” in existing Idaho law. In its briefs before the court, Idaho continues to beat the drum of fetal personhood, insisting that EMTALA protects the unborn — rather than pregnant women who need abortions during health emergencies.

According to the state, nothing in EMTALA imposes an obligation to provide stabilizing abortion care for pregnant women. Rather, the law “actually requires stabilizing treatment for the unborn children of pregnant women.” In the mifepristone case, advocates referred to fetuses as “unborn children,” while the district judge in Texas who invalidated F.D.A. approval of the drug described it as one that “starves the unborn human until death.”

Fetal personhood language is in ascent throughout the country. In a recent decision , the Alabama Supreme Court allowed a wrongful-death suit for the destruction of frozen embryos intended for in vitro fertilization, or I.V.F. — embryos that the court characterized as “extrauterine children.”

Less discussed but as worrisome is a recent oral argument at the Florida Supreme Court concerning a proposed ballot initiative intended to enshrine a right to reproductive freedom in the state’s Constitution. In considering the proposed initiative, the chief justice of the state Supreme Court repeatedly peppered Nathan Forrester, the senior deputy solicitor general who was representing the state, with questions about whether the state recognized the fetus as a person under the Florida Constitution. The point was plain: If the fetus was a person, then the proposed ballot initiative, and its protections for reproductive rights, would change the fetus’s rights under the law, raising constitutional questions.

As these cases make clear, the drive toward fetal personhood goes beyond simply recasting abortion as homicide. If the fetus is a person, any act that involves reproduction may implicate fetal rights. Fetal personhood thus has strong potential to raise questions about access to abortion, contraception and various forms of assisted reproductive technology, including I.V.F.

In response to the shifting landscape of reproductive rights, President Biden has pledged to “restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land.” Roe and its successor, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, were far from perfect; they afforded states significant leeway to impose onerous restrictions on abortion, making meaningful access an empty promise for many women and families of limited means. But the two decisions reflected a constitutional vision that, at least in theory, protected the liberty to make certain intimate choices — including choices surrounding if, when and how to become a parent.

Under the logic of Roe and Casey, the enforceability of EMTALA, the F.D.A.’s power to regulate mifepristone and access to I.V.F. weren’t in question. But in the post-Dobbs landscape, all bets are off. We no longer live in a world in which a shared conception of constitutional liberty makes a ban on I.V.F. or certain forms of contraception beyond the pale.

Melissa Murray, a law professor at New York University and a host of the Supreme Court podcast “ Strict Scrutiny ,” is a co-author of “ The Trump Indictments : The Historic Charging Documents With Commentary.”

Kate Shaw is a contributing Opinion writer, a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School and a host of the Supreme Court podcast “Strict Scrutiny.” She served as a law clerk to Justice John Paul Stevens and Judge Richard Posner.

Argumentative Essay on Abortion – Sample Essay

Published by gudwriter on October 24, 2017 October 24, 2017

A Break Down of my Abortion Argumentative Essay

Styling format: APA 6th Edition

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Title: Abortion Should Be Legal

Introduction.

The introduction paragraph of an argumentative essay constitutes of 4 parts. Topic introduction, a reason why the topic is important, accepting there is a difference of opinion on this topic and lastly a statement that gives the writer’s main premises, popularly known as a thesis statement.

The body of my abortion argumentative essay contains reasons + evidence to support my thesis. I have also included opposing arguments to show the reader that I have considered both sides of the argument and that am able to anticipate and criticize any opposing arguments before they are even stated. I have made sure to show the reader that though I have written opposing arguments and that I do not agree with them.

The conclusion paragraph of this abortion essay constitutes of three main parts. The first part restates the main premises: The decision to terminate a pregnancy should generally lie with pregnant women. The second part presents 1 – 2 sentences which summarizes the arguments that support my thesis. And lastly my personal position.

I tried to use credible resources for this essay. Books from respectable publishers on this subject.  Peer reviewed articles and journals are also acceptable.

Argumentative Essay on Abortion

The abortion debate is an ongoing controversy, continually dividing Americans along moral, legal, and religious lines. Most people tend to assume one of two positions: “pro-life” (an embryo or fetus should be given the right to gestate to term and be born. Simply put, women should not be given the right to abort as that constitutes murder) or “pro-choice” (women should be given the right to decide whether or not to terminate a pregnancy).

When you are writing an abortion  argumentative essay , you are free to support any side that you want. Whichever position you take, make sure you have good points and supporting facts.

In this abortion essay, I have decided to take the pro-choice position: a woman carrying a fetus should be given the right to abort it or carry the baby to term. In fact, my thesis statement for this argumentative essay is abortion should be legal and women should have the right to decide whether or not to terminate a pregnancy.

My essay is divided into three basic parts, the introduction, the body, and the conclusion. Read till the end to find the brief analysis of the parts /sections.

Here is my abortion argumentative essay. Enjoy!

Abortion Should Be Legal

A heated debate continues to surround the question of whether or not abortion should be legal. Those who feel it should be legal have branded themselves “pro-choice” while those opposed to its legality fall under the banner of “pro-life.” In the United States of America, not even the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court case (Parker, 2017) that declared abortion as a fundamental human right has served to bring this debate to an end. The pro-choice brigade front an argument that abortion is a right that should be enjoyed by all women and one that should not be taken away by religious authority or even governments. They claim that this right cannot be superseded by the perceived right that should be enjoyed by a fetus or embryo. If not legalized, the pro-choice claim, women would resort to unsafe means. However, to pro-life, the life of a human being begins at fertilization and therefore abortion condemns an innocent human being to immoral murder. They further argue that the practice exposes the unborn human to pain and suffering. This paper argues that abortion should be legal and women should have the right to decide whether or not to terminate a pregnancy.

Perhaps you may find comparing and contrasting the higher education between England and Kenya interesting .

Just as was observed by the US Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade, an individual should be allowed certain privacy zones or areas. The decision of a pregnant woman to terminate her pregnancy or not should fall within this fundamental right (Parker, 2017). Interfering with this right is a kin to deciding for a person the kind of people they may associate with or the kind of a person they may fall in love with. These kinds of private matters are very sensitive and any decision touching on them should be left at the discretion of an individual. After all, it is the woman who knows why they would want to terminate a pregnancy. It could be that seeing the pregnancy to its maturity and eventual delivery would endanger the life of the bearer. It could also be that a woman is not comfortable with having a baby due to some reason(s). Whatever reason a woman might have, it is their private affair; they should be left to handle it in private.

On the same note, women get empowered by reproductive choice as they get the opportunity to freely exercise control over their bodies. Just like male members of the society, women should be allowed to be independent and be able to determine their future. This includes the freewill of determining whether or not to have children. The ability to control their productive lives would ensure that women are well placed to take part equally in the social and economic matters of the society (Mooney, 2013). It should not be that upon conceiving, a woman has no otherwise but to deliver the baby. What if the conception was accidental? Even if it was not accidental, a woman can realize or determine before delivery that she is just not ready to have the baby as she might have initially planned. At that point, they should have the freedom to terminate the pregnancy.

The pro-life’s argument that abortion is murder is a bit far fetched. The fetus or embryo may be innocent as they claim. However, it is noteworthy that it is only after the fetus becomes able to survive outside the womb that personhood begins (Ziegler, 2015). This is definitely after birth and not during the pregnancy or at conception. In this respect, the claim that abortion kills innocent human beings is actually not valid. On the contrary, this stance or statement culminates in the victimization of innocent women who have committed no wrong but exercised their right of controlling their reproductive life. Ideally, an embryo or fetus should not be considered a human being just yet. There   should thus be nothing like “unborn babies” but fetuses or embryos.

Legal abortion also ensures that women may avoid maternal injury or death by securing professional and safe means of performing abortion. The point here is that illegalizing abortion would compel some women to resort to unsafe abortion means. In the process, they might sustain life threatening injuries or even lose their lives (Schwarz & Latimer, 2012). Whether legal or not, a woman would make up their mind and terminate her pregnancy! The only difference is that in a “legal” environment, she would be safe. Why then endanger the lives of pregnant women who may like to have an abortion by illegalizing the practice? In addition, the pro-life argument that a fetus feels pain during the procedure of abortion is less convincing. It may be that the reason a mother is terminating a pregnancy is to prevent the yet to be born child from facing the pains of the world. If a mother feels she may not accord her child all the necessities of life, she would be right to subject the child to the “short-term pain” during abortion.

Those opposed to abortion further argue that the practice brews a traumatic experience for women as it involves the death of a human being. Specifically, they contend that the experience emanates from a woman witnessing how she intentionally and violently condemns her unborn child to death by physically destroying it. They hold that it also subjects the woman to unacknowledged grief and thoughts of severed maternal attachments and as well violates her parental responsibility and instinct (Major et al., 2009). According to this argument, this experience can be as traumatic as to plunge a woman into serious mental health problems, in what may be called post-abortion syndrome (PAS). This syndrome may attract symptoms similar to those of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), they say. Anti-abortion crusaders further contend that the aftermath of undergoing the procedure may see a woman experience such PTSD related symptoms as substance abuse, guilt, shame, anger, grief, depression, denial, and flashbacks (Major et al., 2009). While all these may seem to be sensible to some extent, they fail to recognize that a woman who willfully secures an abortion would not have to worry about having “killed” her unborn baby. Instead, she would appreciate that she was able to successfully terminate the pregnancy before it could grow to maturity.

The decision to terminate a pregnancy should generally lie with pregnant women. It is a private decision that should not be interfered with. Women should be able to determine when to have a child. If she deems it not yet time, she should be allowed to abort. A woman actually kills nobody by aborting but rather prevents the fetus from being able to survive outside the womb. The reason for aborting should not be questioned, whether medical, involving incest or rape, or just personal. Whatever reason it might be, it falls within the right of a woman to determine and control their productive life.

Major, B. et al. (2009). Abortion and mental health.  American Psychologist , 64 (9), 863-890.

Mooney, C. (2013). Should abortion be legal? San Diego, CA: ReferencePoint Press, Incorporated.

Parker, W. (2017). Life’s work: a moral argument for choice . New York City, NY: Simon and Schuster.

Schwarz, S. D., & Latimer, K. (2012). Understanding abortion: from mixed feelings to rational thought . Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Ziegler, M. (2015). After Roe . Cambridge , MA: Harvard University Press.

Argumentative Essay against Abortion 2, with Outline

Abortion argumentative essay outline.

Thesis:  Abortion is wrong and should not be legalized since its disadvantages far outweigh its advantages, if any.

Paragraph 1:

It is wrong to condemn an innocent human being to murder.

• Human life begins at conception and this implies that at whatever stage a pregnancy may be terminated, an innocent being would have been killed.
• The fetus is a human being and should be allowed to grow and be born and live their life to the fullest.
• A fetus has a unique genetic code and thus it is a unique individual person.

Paragraph 2:

It is wrong to deliberately cause pain.

• Whatever process is used to secure an abortion subjects the developing human to untold suffering before they eventually die.
• By 18 weeks, a fetus has undergone sufficient development to feel pain.
• Aborting a fetus is the same as physically attacking an innocent person and causing them fatal physical bodily harm.

Paragraph 3:

Abortion increases tolerance of killing which is a wrong precedence for the human race.

• To legalize abortion and to view it as being right is like to legalize killing and see nothing wrong with it.
• The respect people have for human life would be reduced if killing would be legalized.
• Loss of society’s respect for human life may result into increased murder rates, genocide, and euthanasia.

Paragraph 4:

Abortion is can seriously harm a woman’s body and in some cases lead to the death of that woman.

• It yields both anticipated physical side effects as well as potentially more serious complications.
• In other instances, a woman may experience serious complications that may even threaten her life as a result of having an abortion.

Paragraph 5:

People who believe abortion is not morally wrong argue that the fetus should not necessarily be considered a person with the right to life.

• This is wrong because the collection of human cells that is the fetus, if given the opportunity to grow, eventually becomes a complete human being.
• The beginning of human life should be considered to be at conception.
• A conceived human should be allowed to see out their life.

Paragraph 6:

The pro-choice group argues that pregnant women have moral rights too and that these rights may override the right of the fetus to live.

• This argument fails to acknowledge that the moral rights of one human being should not deny another human being their moral rights.
• Both the woman and fetus’ rights should be respected.

Abortion is absolutely wrong and no arguments can justify its morality or legality. It kills innocent human beings before they can develop and experience life. It also causes untold pain and suffering to an innocent fetus. It further increases tolerance to killing.

Argumentative Essay against Abortion Example 2

People across the world have strong opinions for and against abortion. Those who argue for its legalization fall under the “pro-choice” group while those who oppose its legalization are under the “pro-life” group. Even after the practice was declared a fundamental human right in the United States by the  Roe v. Wade  Supreme Court case, the debate about it is still going on in the country. According to pro-choice arguments, all women should enjoy abortion as a human right and no religious and/or government authorities should take that away from them. On the other hand, pro-life brigade argue that abortion immorally murders innocent human beings since the life of a human being begins at fertilization. This paper argues that abortion is wrong and should not be legalized since its disadvantages far outweigh its advantages, if any.

The major reason why abortion is wrong is because it is wrong to condemn an innocent human being to murder.  Human life begins once they are conceived  and this implies that at whatever stage a pregnancy may be terminated, an innocent being would have been killed. The fetus is in itself a human being and should be allowed to grow and be born and live their life to the fullest. As pointed out by Kaczor (2014), a fetus has a unique genetic code and thus it is a unique individual person. It is a potential human being with a future just like people who are already born. It would be wrong to destroy their future on the account of being killed through abortion.

Abortion is also wrong because it is wrong to deliberately cause pain. Whatever process is used to secure an abortion subjects the developing human to untold suffering before they eventually die. By 18 weeks, a fetus has undergone sufficient development to feel pain (Meyers, 2010). Thus, aborting it would be the same as physically attacking an innocent person and causing them fatal physical bodily harm. Under normal circumstances, such an attack would attract condemnation and the person or people involved would be punished accordingly as per the law. This is the exact same way abortion should be viewed and treated. It should be legally prohibited and those who do it should be punished for causing pain on an innocent person.

Further, abortion increases tolerance of killing and this is a wrong precedence being created for the human race. Just as Kershnar (2017) warns, to legalize abortion and to view it as being right is like to legalize killing and see nothing wrong with it. The respect people have for human life would be reduced if killing was legalized. It would be wrong and detrimental to reduce society’s respect for human life as it may result in increased murder rates, genocide, and euthanasia. Just like such measures as vaccination and illegalization of murder are taken to preserve human life, prohibiting abortion should be considered an important way of increasing human respect for life. Society should not tolerate killing in whatever form and should discourage it through every available opportunity.

Another detrimental effect of abortion is that it can seriously harm a woman’s body and in some cases lead to the death of that woman. It yields both anticipated physical side effects as well as potentially more serious complications. Some of the side effects a woman is likely to experience after securing an abortion include bleeding and spotting, diarrhea, vomiting, nausea, and cramping and abdominal pain. Worse is that these side effects can continue occurring two to four weeks after the procedure is completed (“Possible Physical Side Effects,” 2019). In other instances, a woman may experience serious complications that may even threaten her life as a result of having an abortion. These complications may include damage to other body organs, perforation of the uterus, the uterine wall sustaining scars, the cervix being damaged, sepsis or infection, and persistent or heavy bleeding. In the worst case scenario, a woman undergoing the abortion process might lose her life instantly (“Possible Physical Side Effects,” 2019). While such cases are rare, it is still not sensible to expose a woman to these experiences. A practice that has the potential to endanger human life in this manner should be considered wrong both legally and morally. It is the responsibility of individuals to care for and not expose their lives to harm.

People who believe abortion is not morally wrong argue that the fetus should not necessarily be considered a person who has the right to life. They hold that the fetus is just a collection of human cells and thus does not deserve the express right to live (Bailey, 2011). This argument is misinformed because the fact is that this collection of human cells that is the fetus, if given the opportunity to grow, eventually becomes a complete human being. This is why the beginning of human life should be considered to be at conception and not at birth or after some time after conception. A conceived human should be allowed to see out their life and only die naturally.

Another argument by the pro-choice group is that pregnant women have moral rights too and that these rights may override the right of the fetus to live under certain circumstances. These rights, according to this argument, include the right to take decision without legal or moral interference, the right to decide one’s own future, the right to ownership of one’s own body, and the right to life (Bailey, 2011). This argument fails to acknowledge that the moral rights of one human being should not deny another human being their moral rights. Even in cases where carrying a pregnancy to delivery would endanger the life of a pregnant woman, the fetus should be separated from the mother and be allowed to grow through such other mechanisms as being placed in an incubator.

Abortion is absolutely wrong and no arguments can justify its morality or legality. It kills innocent human beings before they can develop and experience life. It also causes untold pain and suffering to an innocent fetus. It further increases tolerance to killing, a precedence that would make people throw away their respect to human life and kill without a second thought. Even worse is that the practice exposes aborting women to serious bodily harm and could even claim their lives. Those who do not consider the fetus as a moral person who deserves to live are wrong because upon complete development, the fetus indeed becomes a human being. Similarly, those who feel the moral rights of a pregnant woman should override those of the fetus ignore the fact that both the woman and the fetus are human beings with equal rights.

Bailey, J. (2011).  Abortion . New York, NY: The Rosen Publishing Group.

Kaczor, C. (2014).  The ethics of abortion: women’s rights, human life, and the question of justice . New York, NY: Routledge.

Kershnar, S. (2017).  Does the pro-life worldview make sense?: Abortion, hell, and violence against abortion doctors . New York, NY: Taylor & Francis.

Meyers, C. (2010).  The fetal position: a rational approach to the abortion issue . Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

“Possible Physical Side Effects after Abortion”. (2019). In  American Pregnancy Association , Retrieved July 5, 2020.

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The Current Attack on Abortion Pills Will Fail. The Next One Will Be So Much Worse.

There are always a couple of tells when the most conservative Supreme Court in more than a century finds itself adjudicating a truly mortifying and meritless case. One is that it’s coming up by way of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5 th Circuit, a court that so consistently shovels its worst constitutional garbage upward that the high court conservatives are often forced to reluctantly lob it back. Another tell is when the facts of the case are so laugh-out-loud insane that even conservative justices can’t bring themselves to adopt them or the underpinning legal reasoning with a straight face. There’s yet a third tell: when the conservative justices start injecting a bunch of nonsense and randomized pet peeves into oral argument to distract from how embarrassing it would be to discuss the merits of the actual case.

All three tells were present Tuesday morning, when the court heard FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine , a challenge to the current medication abortion regime nationwide. This case is about a handful of physicians seeking to wield their “conscience objections” to abortion as a cudgel against everyone’s access to safe reproductive care throughout the country. So, it was heartening to see that the majority of the Supreme Court doesn’t have the conscience to take it seriously. It was harrowing, however, to hear at least two justices embrace the plaintiffs’ foundational theory: that a long-defunct federal law already bans medication abortion, and maybe procedural abortion as well—and that the courts can revive this ban once they get their hands on the right case.

Before we reach the doomsday scenario, let’s start with the case at hand, which is laughable to the point of frivolity. In 2000 the Food and Drug Administration approved mifepristone, the first drug in a medication abortion. Initially, and under huge pressure , the agency imposed tight restrictions on the drug, including mandatory doctor’s visits, in-person dispensing requirements, and strict limits on pharmaceutical availability. Over the next 23 years, the FDA loosened these rules, concluding—based on extensive studies—that they did not improve health outcomes for patients. Today, in blue states, mifepristone can be prescribed via telemedicine and mailed to a patient’s home. It remains almost entirely illegal in the 14 states that have outlawed abortion.

The plaintiffs in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine are a group of anti-abortion physicians who do not prescribe mifepristone. Rather, they worry that someday, some patient who has taken mifepristone prescribed by a different doctor might have serious adverse complications and end up in their care—forcing them to be “complicit” in abortion simply by treating the patient. These physicians claim that the only solution to their speculative fear is a nationwide ban on mifepristone, achieved through a judicial order that revokes the FDA’s approval of the drug for everyone. As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson put it Tuesday, the case reflects a “mismatch” between the harms alleged and the remedy demanded: “They’re saying, ‘Because we object to having to be forced to participate in this procedure, we’re seeking an order preventing anyone from having access to these drugs at all.’ ”

In a saner judiciary, the case would have been booted out of the courthouse with prejudice, because the plaintiffs have neither sustained nor suffered an injury: They are merely speculating about the possibility of a future harm, which does not establish standing under Article 3 of the Constitution. And that possibility really is quite remote, since mifepristone has been proved safe in more than 100 scientific studies.

Alliance Defending Freedom, the far-right, Christian nationalist organization that represents the plaintiffs, knows that this theory of standing violates every rule in the book. So it brought the lawsuit in Amarillo, Texas, where it was guaranteed to draw Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Donald Trump appointee who has devoted his life to criminalizing abortion, along with other theological battles. Kacsmaryk attempted to issue a nationwide ban on mifepristone, which the 5 th Circuit whittled down, allowing the drug to remain legal while reimposing the immense burdens that would put it out of reach for countless patients. But the Supreme Court froze the 5 th Circuit’s order last year, sending a signal that a majority would not play ball with this humiliating mess of a case. Arguments on Tuesday confirmed that most justices remain skeptical toward ADF’s “We’re scared we might have to treat abortion providers’ patients” theory of cognizable harm and standing.

Lurking under the embarrassment of these standing arguments about wholly speculative harms lies the embarrassment of the scientific claims proffered to support them. To show that mifepristone is actually super dangerous, Kacsmaryk and the 5 th Circuit relied on junk science peddled by shameless hucksters. As Jessica Ellsworth, representing the maker of mifepristone, told the justices: “You have a district court that, among other things, relied on one study that was an analysis of anonymous blog posts. You have another set of studies that he relied on that … have since been retracted for lack of scientific rigor and for misleading presentations of data.”

Lurking beneath that embarrassment lies the fact that if the plaintiffs were allowed to prevail in this case, pharmaceutical companies and the FDA would be subject to fanciful challenges by anyone who has ever objected to a drug. Mifepristone, recall, has been safely used by millions of Americans and is less dangerous than Tylenol and Viagra. Thousands of other drugs pose greater safety risks yet remain on the market, indeed sold over the counter, because experts have concluded that the benefits outweigh the dangers.

If Kacsmaryk and the 5 th Circuit are correct, then any doctor can waltz into court and secure a nationwide injunction against a drug they dislike on the grounds that they might one day treat a patient who takes it. Further, the FDA’s review process, the global gold standard for drug approval, would fall apart—which is why the biopharma industry has lined up on the government’s side. The consequences for development and testing of new drugs would be catastrophic. Jackson acknowledged as much when she asked Ellsworth to describe “concerns about judges parsing medical and scientific studies” without any “specialized scientific knowledge with respect to pharmaceuticals.”

In the face of this skepticism, Erin Hawley—an ADF lawyer and wife of Jan. 6 rally boy Sen. Josh Hawley—struggled to explain the reason why a handful of activist physicians should be able to ensure that every woman in America is denied access to mifepristone. Her answer? They don’t want to be “complicit” in abortion. The problem here is that these doctors are already amply protected from coercion in abortion care by federal and state conscience laws, as Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar assured Justice Brett Kavanaugh. They are welcome to walk away from an abortion patient in need of their follow-up care. Even Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett and Chief Justice John Roberts appeared to be embarrassed with the slurry of bad plaintiffs and worse evidence that Hawley paraded before them as a serious legal challenge. As usual, when it was clear that the case was too asinine to contemplate, what surfaced instead was a protracted gripe about nationwide injunctions from Gorsuch and aggrieved grousing from Justice Samuel Alito, who sounded annoyed that ADF hadn’t cooked up a more plausible case.

Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas are never ones to let an embarrassment of a lawsuit go to waste. And they were openly eager to embrace the chilling argument at the heart of ADF’s case: the notion that the Comstock Act of 1873 prohibits the distribution of abortion pills and perhaps even equipment used for procedural abortions. Under this theory, abortion is already a criminal offense under federal law, and every abortion provider in the country may be prosecuted and imprisoned immediately. Conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation are already urging Trump to issue an executive order on Day 1 banning medication abortion. Republican lawyers are preparing to use the Comstock Act to prohibit all abortions , not just pills. This reading of the zombie relic is so broad that a Justice Department and judiciary hostile enough to reproductive freedom could contort it to make all abortion care a felony.

Predictably on Tuesday, and with a case built of vapors to work with, Alito and Thomas went full Comstock. Alito scolded the FDA for letting providers mail abortion pills despite the existence of the law. “This is a prominent provision,” the justice told Prelogar. “It’s not some obscure subsection of a complicated, obscure law. They knew about it. Everybody in this field knew about it.” Thomas warned Ellsworth that her client, the maker of mifepristone, lacked a “safe harbor” from prosecution over Comstock. “It’s fairly broad, and it specifically covers drugs such as yours,” he told her. (That claim is very much in dispute .) Alito and Thomas know they will likely lose this case, so they’re preparing for the next one. Maybe Trump will win and commence Comstock prosecutions. Maybe Kacsmaryk will issue a new ban on mifepristone at the behest of red states, as he is currently threatening to do . Either way, Comstock is racing toward the Supreme Court. And two justices have already aligned themselves with a sweeping interpretation of its puritanical prohibitions.

The FDA looks poised to win this silly case at the Supreme Court in June, but we cannot let the case’s silliness obscure all the future damage it tees up—to the practice of medicine, to women’s health, and to the credibility of a Supreme Court that once cared about credibility. Whenever a door closes on the worst MAGA toxins at this court, an Overton window opens to something so much worse. Health care professionals, biopharma companies, and reproductive rights advocates can cheer the probable outcome of Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine . But they can spare only a moment’s rest because Thomas and Alito, with the help of bad actors like ADF and Kacsmaryk, are already bringing the next battle to their doorstep.