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Why Abortion Should Be Legalized

• Categories: Abortion Pro Choice (Abortion) Women's Health

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Words: 1331 |

Published: Jan 28, 2021

Words: 1331 | Pages: 3 | 7 min read

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Introduction, why abortion should be legal.

• Gipson, J. D., Hirz, A. E., & Avila, J. L. (2011). Perceptions and practices of illegal abortion among urban young adults in the Philippines: a qualitative study. Studies in family planning, 42(4), 261-272. (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1728-4465.2011.00289.x)
• Finer, L. B., & Hussain, R. (2013). Unintended pregnancy and unsafe abortion in the Philippines: context and consequences. (https://www.guttmacher.org/report/unintended-pregnancy-and-unsafe-abortion-philippines-context-and-consequences?ref=vidupdatez.com/image)
• Flavier, J. M., & Chen, C. H. (1980). Induced abortion in rural villages of Cavite, the Philippines: Knowledge, attitudes, and practice. Studies in family planning, 65-71. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/1965798)
• Gallen, M. (1979). Abortion choices in the Philippines. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-biosocial-science/article/abs/abortion-choices-in-the-philippines/853B8B71F95FEBDD0D88AB65E8364509 Journal of Biosocial Science, 11(3), 281-288.
• Holgersson, K. (2012). Is There Anybody Out There?: Illegal Abortion, Social Work, Advocacy and Interventions in the Philippines. (https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A574793&dswid=4931)

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Argumentative Essay On Legalizing Abortion

Type of paper: Argumentative Essay

Topic: Life , Law , Social Issues , Pregnancy , Women , Health , Abortion , Medicine

Words: 1900

Published: 11/22/2019

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Introduction

The debate about abortion has been going on for the last few decades with some groups supporting its legalization while other groups claiming that abortion should be banned. Every school of thought has convincing reasons why or why not abortion should be legalized. For instance, in the United States the debate about legalizing abortion started in 1960s when different states started to repeal their laws concerning abortion which had been banned there before. The US Supreme Court also ruled that the decision by various states to ban abortion was not in line with the constitution. In other countries like Australia abortion has not been allowed for many years (Pringle, 1997). This opened way for this hot debate which has been going on in different parts of the world where some countries have legalized abortion while others still hold to the traditional view that abortion is illegal and should be banned. In my opinion, I think abortion should be legalized mostly on the basis of human protection which is guaranteed in the constitution.

Reasons for legalizing abortion

There are several reasons why I think abortion should be legalized rather than to ban it. First, the use of law to prohibit women to procure abortion does not stop them from doing so. For many years women in all parts of the world have continued to carry out abortion in secret places despite the fact that it is not allowed constitutionally. When women see the need to procure abortion, they go ahead and do it in secret place without any medical assistance in very dangerous circumstances. This illegal practice has cost millions of women’s lives in different parts of the world. It is estimated that about one million women in the United States seek illegal abortion within a period of one year. Many thousands die in the process and many more are mutilated as they procure abortion without the help of a fully qualified medical assistant. If the abortion was legalized, these women would not have procured their abortion secretly. Instead they would have sought medical assistance in private and public clinics where it would have been done in a professional way. This would save many women from the harmful effects of abortion such as mutilation, infertility and even lives that are lost during secret abortions conducted by unprofessional health personnel. This fact is supported using data from Scotland for a period of two decades of banning abortion (Wilson, 2000).

Secondly, legalizing abortion will protect the health of a woman. “There are many life-threatening diseases that are related with child bearing such as kidney disease, heart disease, diabetes, severe hypertension, sick-cell anemia and other types of complications (Wilson, 2000, p. 2).” Successful childbirth of a woman suffering from these diseases will mostly likely depends with the assistance she is given in the hospital before, during and after the child birth. Illegal abortion will not provide the necessary treatment to enable the woman to come out of the process without some health consequences that are related to these diseases. In fact many deaths that occurs during abortion occurs mainly because, the woman who was procuring abortion is suffering from some of these diseases. However, if the abortion is legalized, many women will be able to seek quality medical assistance that will minimize the consequences of all the diseases that the woman may be suffering from. Thirdly, the life of a woman is more important than that of the fetus. It is absurd or arrogant to argue that the unborn fetus has equal rights with the woman and therefore demanding suffering women to risk their lives in the name of upholding fetus rights. At times pregnant women may be experiencing some complications where they are required either to sacrifice their lives or that of the unborn baby. In such situations, there is no way the life of the fetus can be equated with that of the woman and therefore legalization abortion will help to save the life of the mother which cannot be equated with that of unborn fetus.

Fourthly but more importantly, banning abortion is going against the principles of a free society. Pregnancy is a matter that is personal and at same time private. Forcing women to carry pregnancy they do not want not only interfere with their privacy, but also violate their right of choosing what they want. Rights and freedom of a woman are totally violated when the government compel the woman to give birth to a child she does not want. The constitution guarantees every individual freedom of choice and by going this extent the government does not uphold the constitution which established it in the first place. In addition, many battles have been fought and partially won in the past decades to empower women (Kane, 2008). Denying women their productive rights will not only kill their morale in searching for better positions in the society, but also waste many resources that have been spent in liberating women. Thus giving women a chance to have a legal and safe abortion will enable them to retain their personal freedom which is part and parcel of the concept of empowering women in the society. Finally, legalization of abortion will reduce the burden of the government and the society to bring up children that are born by other children. Banning abortion does not in any way stop irresponsible sexual behaviors especially among the young people. Girls as young as fourteen years continue to become mothers as result of untimely and unwanted pregnancies that come with lack of knowledge and irresponsible sexual behaviors. At this age many girls are in schools and there is no way they cannot support their fellow children they have born. Parents, society and the government are therefore given compulsory responsibility of taking care of these new born babies which is expensive in terms of resources. If the abortion is legalized such unwanted burden will be avoided where teens may be allowed to procure abortion when the need arises. This law may also apply in case of a rape or when pregnancy occurs by accidents among the couples. In short legalizing abortion will stop all unwanted pregnancies.

Counter-argument

There are many reasons why abortion should not be legalized chief among them being that, it translate the mother and the doctors to be murderers by terminating what is perceived the life of unborn child. This is a big medical-political debate that has been going on (Fasubaa, Akindele, Adelekan & Okwuokenye, 2002). The act of murder is surely against the laws of any given country and therefore killing of fetus is considered murder and thus should be illegal. However, this argument lack support because it is not clear when the fertilized egg becomes a person in legal sense and when does the rights of unborn child start. Furthermore, every woman has her rights to decide what should happen in their bodies thus aborting would be part of exercising her body rights. Secondly, life is considered sacred and only God should terminate it which means that procuring it amounts to sinning against God. Therefore, any country legalizing it would therefore be declaring to the world that it does not believe in God and allows people to take life on their hands. Nonetheless, some communities are pagan and do not believe in God. This means that making abortion illegal to them on these grounds would be baseless for in the first case they do not believe in God .Again, it is irrational to let both the mother and the child to die naturally when the mother’s health is not okay whereas abortion could have saved the mother. Thirdly abortion creates psychological problems to a mother who does it. Forever in her life the act of aborting will always haunt her for instance when she think that if the baby was born, then she could have become a great person. Also, abortion is mostly procured by young girls who are not mature enough to make good decisions which potentially put stress on them in future when they considerably recount their past acts. This argument has however proved to hold no waters because counseling by a psychologist can eliminate these future psychological problems. The other argument against abortion is that, its legalization creates burden on citizen’s tax on what is considered immoral acts. This is the money used in construction of abortion clinics and also paying the doctors by the government. People have a feeling that this money would have been invested in other development projects as well as in improving the citizen’s welfare especially in the developing countries. However the funds used is so less compared with the economic loss the country experience when working mothers die in abortion procurement under the hands of unqualified quacks when abortion is illegalized. The last but not least argument against abortion is that there are other methods of birth control and therefore it should not be used as a method of birth control. These methods include use of contraceptives, condoms, natural and withdrawal methods which all prevents the mother from getting pregnant after a sexual encounter. The aim of using these methods is to prevent unwanted pregnancies. Research has shown that some of these methods such as natural and withdrawal methods do not totally eliminate chances of unwanted pregnancies. This means that they will still occur and women will resort to visit unprofessional health personnel for abortion thus necessitating its legalization.

Response to counter thesis

Secondly, most of the counter arguments that are given to oppose legalizing abortion are based on the moral basis. According to Cornides (2008) human rights and ethical principles cannot be interchanged in the ongoing debate of abortion. For example banning abortion on the basis that it is against the law of God and that it contradict the morally accepted moral values of the society. The issue of morality is not comparable on any basis with violation of individual rights such as denying women a right to make choice on what they want as it is a guarantee of any free society. Using the argument that abortion is against the will of God is based on the assumption that everybody in the society believe in God which is not true. State law should be neutral to everybody without considering what they believe in. The constitution guarantees every citizen the freedom of worship irrespective of what they want to worship. Thus using morality and religious grounds to make state law may lead to making laws that are discriminatory. In conclusion, abortion should be legalized based on the above arguments that show the benefits of legalizing abortion to individual women, government and society at large.

Cornides, J. (2008). Human Rights Pitted Against Man. International Journal of Human Rights, 12(1), 107-134. Fasubaa, O., Akindele, S., Adelekan, A., & Okwuokenye, H. (2002).A politico-medical perspective of induced abortion in a semi-urban community of Ile-Ife, Nigeria. Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology, 22 (1), 51-57. Kane, G. (2008). Abortion law reform in Latin America: lessons for advocacy. Gender & Development, 16(2), 361-375. Pringle, H. (1997). Is abortion illegal? Australian Journal of Political Science, 32(1), 93. Wilson, W., & Murray G. (2000).Two Decades of 'Legal' Abortion in Scotland: A Spatio-temporal Analysis. Scottish Geographical Journal, 116(1), 1.

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How the Right to Legal Abortion Changed the Arc of All Women’s Lives

By Katha Pollitt

I’ve never had an abortion. In this, I am like most American women. A frequently quoted statistic from a recent study by the Guttmacher Institute, which reports that one in four women will have an abortion before the age of forty-five, may strike you as high, but it means that a large majority of women never need to end a pregnancy. (Indeed, the abortion rate has been declining for decades, although it’s disputed how much of that decrease is due to better birth control, and wider use of it, and how much to restrictions that have made abortions much harder to get.) Now that the Supreme Court seems likely to overturn Roe v. Wade sometime in the next few years—Alabama has passed a near-total ban on abortion, and Ohio, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Missouri have passed “heartbeat” bills that, in effect, ban abortion later than six weeks of pregnancy, and any of these laws, or similar ones, could prove the catalyst—I wonder if women who have never needed to undergo the procedure, and perhaps believe that they never will, realize the many ways that the legal right to abortion has undergirded their lives.

Legal abortion means that the law recognizes a woman as a person. It says that she belongs to herself. Most obviously, it means that a woman has a safe recourse if she becomes pregnant as a result of being raped. (Believe it or not, in some states, the law allows a rapist to sue for custody or visitation rights.) It means that doctors no longer need to deny treatment to pregnant women with certain serious conditions—cancer, heart disease, kidney disease—until after they’ve given birth, by which time their health may have deteriorated irretrievably. And it means that non-Catholic hospitals can treat a woman promptly if she is having a miscarriage. (If she goes to a Catholic hospital, she may have to wait until the embryo or fetus dies. In one hospital, in Ireland, such a delay led to the death of a woman named Savita Halappanavar, who contracted septicemia. Her case spurred a movement to repeal that country’s constitutional amendment banning abortion.)

The legalization of abortion, though, has had broader and more subtle effects than limiting damage in these grave but relatively uncommon scenarios. The revolutionary advances made in the social status of American women during the nineteen-seventies are generally attributed to the availability of oral contraception, which came on the market in 1960. But, according to a 2017 study by the economist Caitlin Knowles Myers, “The Power of Abortion Policy: Re-Examining the Effects of Young Women’s Access to Reproductive Control,” published in the Journal of Political Economy , the effects of the Pill were offset by the fact that more teens and women were having sex, and so birth-control failure affected more people. Complicating the conventional wisdom that oral contraception made sex risk-free for all, the Pill was also not easy for many women to get. Restrictive laws in some states barred it for unmarried women and for women under the age of twenty-one. The Roe decision, in 1973, afforded thousands upon thousands of teen-agers a chance to avoid early marriage and motherhood. Myers writes, “Policies governing access to the pill had little if any effect on the average probabilities of marrying and giving birth at a young age. In contrast, policy environments in which abortion was legal and readily accessible by young women are estimated to have caused a 34 percent reduction in first births, a 19 percent reduction in first marriages, and a 63 percent reduction in ‘shotgun marriages’ prior to age 19.”

Access to legal abortion, whether as a backup to birth control or not, meant that women, like men, could have a sexual life without risking their future. A woman could plan her life without having to consider that it could be derailed by a single sperm. She could dream bigger dreams. Under the old rules, inculcated from girlhood, if a woman got pregnant at a young age, she married her boyfriend; and, expecting early marriage and kids, she wouldn’t have invested too heavily in her education in any case, and she would have chosen work that she could drop in and out of as family demands required.

In 1970, the average age of first-time American mothers was younger than twenty-two. Today, more women postpone marriage until they are ready for it. (Early marriages are notoriously unstable, so, if you’re glad that the divorce rate is down, you can, in part, thank Roe.) Women can also postpone childbearing until they are prepared for it, which takes some serious doing in a country that lacks paid parental leave and affordable childcare, and where discrimination against pregnant women and mothers is still widespread. For all the hand-wringing about lower birth rates, most women— eighty-six per cent of them —still become mothers. They just do it later, and have fewer children.

Most women don’t enter fields that require years of graduate-school education, but all women have benefitted from having larger numbers of women in those fields. It was female lawyers, for example, who brought cases that opened up good blue-collar jobs to women. Without more women obtaining law degrees, would men still be shaping all our legislation? Without the large numbers of women who have entered the medical professions, would psychiatrists still be telling women that they suffered from penis envy and were masochistic by nature? Would women still routinely undergo unnecessary hysterectomies? Without increased numbers of women in academia, and without the new field of women’s studies, would children still be taught, as I was, that, a hundred years ago this month, Woodrow Wilson “gave” women the vote? There has been a revolution in every field, and the women in those fields have led it.

It is frequently pointed out that the states passing abortion restrictions and bans are states where women’s status remains particularly low. Take Alabama. According to one study , by almost every index—pay, workforce participation, percentage of single mothers living in poverty, mortality due to conditions such as heart disease and stroke—the state scores among the worst for women. Children don’t fare much better: according to U.S. News rankings , Alabama is the worst state for education. It also has one of the nation’s highest rates of infant mortality (only half the counties have even one ob-gyn), and it has refused to expand Medicaid, either through the Affordable Care Act or on its own. Only four women sit in Alabama’s thirty-five-member State Senate, and none of them voted for the ban. Maybe that’s why an amendment to the bill proposed by State Senator Linda Coleman-Madison was voted down. It would have provided prenatal care and medical care for a woman and child in cases where the new law prevents the woman from obtaining an abortion. Interestingly, the law allows in-vitro fertilization, a procedure that often results in the discarding of fertilized eggs. As Clyde Chambliss, the bill’s chief sponsor in the state senate, put it, “The egg in the lab doesn’t apply. It’s not in a woman. She’s not pregnant.” In other words, life only begins at conception if there’s a woman’s body to control.

Indifference to women and children isn’t an oversight. This is why calls for better sex education and wider access to birth control are non-starters, even though they have helped lower the rate of unwanted pregnancies, which is the cause of abortion. The point isn’t to prevent unwanted pregnancy. (States with strong anti-abortion laws have some of the highest rates of teen pregnancy in the country; Alabama is among them.) The point is to roll back modernity for women.

So, if women who have never had an abortion, and don’t expect to, think that the new restrictions and bans won’t affect them, they are wrong. The new laws will fall most heavily on poor women, disproportionately on women of color, who have the highest abortion rates and will be hard-pressed to travel to distant clinics.

But without legal, accessible abortion, the assumptions that have shaped all women’s lives in the past few decades—including that they, not a torn condom or a missed pill or a rapist, will decide what happens to their bodies and their futures—will change. Women and their daughters will have a harder time, and there will be plenty of people who will say that they were foolish to think that it could be otherwise.

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By Jia Tolentino

By Isaac Chotiner

By Amy Davidson Sorkin

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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Ross Douthat

The Case Against Abortion

By Ross Douthat

Opinion Columnist

A striking thing about the American abortion debate is how little abortion itself is actually debated. The sensitivity and intimacy of the issue, the mixed feelings of so many Americans, mean that most politicians and even many pundits really don’t like to talk about it.

The mental habits of polarization, the assumption that the other side is always acting with hidden motives or in bad faith, mean that accusations of hypocrisy or simple evil are more commonplace than direct engagement with the pro-choice or pro-life argument.

And the Supreme Court’s outsize role in abortion policy means that the most politically important arguments are carried on by lawyers arguing constitutional theory, at one remove from the real heart of the debate.

But with the court set this week to hear Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade, it seems worth letting the lawyers handle the meta-arguments and writing about the thing itself. So this essay will offer no political or constitutional analysis. It will simply try to state the pro-life case.

At the core of our legal system, you will find a promise that human beings should be protected from lethal violence. That promise is made in different ways by the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence; it’s there in English common law, the Ten Commandments and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We dispute how the promise should be enforced, what penalties should be involved if it is broken and what crimes might deprive someone of the right to life. But the existence of the basic right, and a fundamental duty not to kill, is pretty close to bedrock.

There is no way to seriously deny that abortion is a form of killing. At a less advanced stage of scientific understanding, it was possible to believe that the embryo or fetus was somehow inert or vegetative until so-called quickening, months into pregnancy. But we now know the embryo is not merely a cell with potential, like a sperm or ovum, or a constituent part of human tissue, like a skin cell. Rather, a distinct human organism comes into existence at conception, and every stage of your biological life, from infancy and childhood to middle age and beyond, is part of a single continuous process that began when you were just a zygote.

We know from embryology, in other words, not Scripture or philosophy, that abortion kills a unique member of the species Homo sapiens, an act that in almost every other context is forbidden by the law.

This means that the affirmative case for abortion rights is inherently exceptionalist, demanding a suspension of a principle that prevails in practically every other case. This does not automatically tell against it; exceptions as well as rules are part of law. But it means that there is a burden of proof on the pro-choice side to explain why in this case taking another human life is acceptable, indeed a protected right itself.

One way to clear this threshold would be to identify some quality that makes the unborn different in kind from other forms of human life — adult, infant, geriatric. You need an argument that acknowledges that the embryo is a distinct human organism but draws a credible distinction between human organisms and human persons , between the unborn lives you’ve excluded from the law’s protection and the rest of the human race.

In this kind of pro-choice argument and theory, personhood is often associated with some property that’s acquired well after conception: cognition, reason, self-awareness, the capacity to survive outside the womb. And a version of this idea, that human life is there in utero but human personhood develops later, fits intuitively with how many people react to a photo of an extremely early embryo ( It doesn’t look human, does it? ) — though less so to a second-trimester fetus, where the physical resemblance to a newborn is more palpable.

But the problem with this position is that it’s hard to identify exactly what property is supposed to do the work of excluding the unborn from the ranks of humans whom it is wrong to kill. If full personhood is somehow rooted in reasoning capacity or self-consciousness, then all manner of adult human beings lack it or lose it at some point or another in their lives. If the capacity for survival and self-direction is essential, then every infant would lack personhood — to say nothing of the premature babies who are unviable without extreme medical interventions but regarded, rightly, as no less human for all that.

At its most rigorous, the organism-but-not-person argument seeks to identify some stage of neurological development that supposedly marks personhood’s arrival — a transition equivalent in reverse to brain death at the end of life. But even setting aside the practical difficulties involved in identifying this point, we draw a legal line at brain death because it’s understood to be irreversible, the moment at which the human organism’s healthy function can never be restored. This is obviously not the case for an embryo on the cusp of higher brain functioning — and if you knew that a brain-dead but otherwise physically healthy person would spontaneously regain consciousness in two weeks, everyone would understand that the caregivers had an obligation to let those processes play out.

Or almost everyone, I should say. There are true rigorists who follow the logic of fetal nonpersonhood toward repugnant conclusions — for instance, that we ought to permit the euthanizing of severely disabled newborns, as the philosopher Peter Singer has argued. This is why abortion opponents have warned of a slippery slope from abortion to infanticide and involuntary euthanasia; as pure logic, the position that unborn human beings aren’t human persons can really tend that way.

But to their credit, only a small minority of abortion-rights supporters are willing to be so ruthlessly consistent. Instead, most people on the pro-choice side are content to leave their rules of personhood a little hazy, and combine them with the second potent argument for abortion rights: namely, that regardless of the precise moral status of unborn human organisms, they cannot enjoy a legal right to life because that would strip away too many rights from women.

A world without legal abortion, in this view, effectively consigns women to second-class citizenship — their ambitions limited, their privacy compromised, their bodies conscripted, their claims to full equality a lie. These kind of arguments often imply that birth is the most relevant milestone for defining legal personhood — not because of anything that happens to the child but because it’s the moment when its life ceases to impinge so dramatically on its mother.

There is a powerful case for some kind of feminism embedded in these claims. The question is whether that case requires abortion itself.

Certain goods that should be common to men and women cannot be achieved, it’s true, if the law simply declares the sexes equal without giving weight to the disproportionate burdens that pregnancy imposes on women. Justice requires redistributing those burdens, through means both traditional and modern — holding men legally and financially responsible for all the children that they father and providing stronger financial and social support for motherhood at every stage.

But does this kind of justice for women require legal indifference to the claims of the unborn? Is it really necessary to found equality for one group of human beings on legal violence toward another, entirely voiceless group?

We have a certain amount of practical evidence that suggests the answer is no. Consider, for instance, that between the early 1980s and the later 2010s the abortion rate in the United States fell by more than half . The reasons for this decline are disputed, but it seems reasonable to assume that it reflects a mix of cultural change, increased contraception use and the effects of anti-abortion legal strategies, which have made abortion somewhat less available in many states, as pro-choice advocates often lament.

If there were an integral and unavoidable relationship between abortion and female equality, you would expect these declines — fewer abortions, diminished abortion access — to track with a general female retreat from education and the workplace. But no such thing has happened: Whether measured by educational attainment, managerial and professional positions, breadwinner status or even political office holding, the status of women has risen in the same America where the pro-life movement has (modestly) gained ground.

Of course, it’s always possible that female advancement would have been even more rapid, the equality of the sexes more fully and perfectly established, if the pro-life movement did not exist. Certainly in the individual female life trajectory, having an abortion rather than a baby can offer economic and educational advantages.

On a collective level, though, it’s also possible that the default to abortion as the solution to an unplanned pregnancy actually discourages other adaptations that would make American life friendlier to women. As Erika Bachiochi wrote recently in National Review , if our society assumes that “abortion is what enables women to participate in the workplace,” then corporations may prefer the abortion default to more substantial accommodations like flexible work schedules and better pay for part-time jobs — relying on the logic of abortion rights, in other words, as a reason not to adapt to the realities of childbearing and motherhood.

At the very least, I think an honest look at the patterns of the past four decades reveals a multitude of different ways to offer women greater opportunities, a multitude of paths to equality and dignity — a multitude of ways to be a feminist, in other words, that do not require yoking its idealistic vision to hundreds of thousands of acts of violence every year.

It’s also true, though, that nothing in all that multitude of policies will lift the irreducible burden of childbearing, the biological realities that simply cannot be redistributed to fathers, governments or adoptive parents. And here, too, a portion of the pro-choice argument is correct: The unique nature of pregnancy means that there has to be some limit on what state or society asks of women and some zone of privacy where the legal system fears to tread.

This is one reason the wisest anti-abortion legislation — and yes, pro-life legislation is not always wise — criminalizes the provision of abortion by third parties, rather than prosecuting the women who seek one. It’s why anti-abortion laws are rightly deemed invasive and abusive when they lead to the investigation of suspicious-seeming miscarriages. It’s why the general principle of legal protection for human life in utero may or must understandably give way in extreme cases, extreme burdens: the conception by rape, the life-threatening pregnancy.

At the same time, though, the pro-choice stress on the burden of the ordinary pregnancy can become detached from the way that actual human beings experience the world. In a famous thought experiment, the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson once analogized an unplanned pregnancy to waking up with a famous violinist hooked up to your body, who will die if he’s disconnected before nine months have passed. It’s a vivid science-fiction image but one that only distantly resembles the actual thing that it describes — a new life that usually exists because of a freely chosen sexual encounter, a reproductive experience that if material circumstances were changed might be desired and celebrated, a “disconnection” of the new life that cannot happen without lethal violence and a victim who is not some adult stranger but the woman’s child.

One can accept pro-choice logic, then, insofar as it demands a sphere of female privacy and warns constantly against the potential for abuse, without following that logic all the way to a general right to abort an unborn human life. Indeed, this is how most people approach similar arguments in other contexts. In the name of privacy and civil liberties we impose limits on how the justice system polices and imprisons, and we may celebrate activists who try to curb that system’s manifest abuses. But we don’t (with, yes, some anarchist exceptions) believe that we should remove all legal protections for people’s property or lives.

That removal of protection would be unjust no matter what its consequences, but in reality we know that those consequences would include more crime, more violence and more death. And the anti-abortion side can give the same answer when it’s asked why we can’t be content with doing all the other things that may reduce abortion rates and leaving legal protection out of it: Because while legal restrictions aren’t sufficient to end abortion, there really are a lot of unborn human lives they might protect.

Consider that when the State of Texas put into effect this year a ban on most abortions after about six weeks, the state’s abortions immediately fell by half. I think the Texas law, which tries to evade the requirements of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey by using private lawsuits for enforcement, is vulnerable to obvious critiques and liable to be abused. It’s not a model I would ever cite for pro-life legislation.

But that immediate effect, that sharp drop in abortions, is why the pro-life movement makes legal protection its paramount goal.

According to researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, who surveyed the facilities that provide about 93 percent of all abortions in the state, there were 2,149 fewer legal abortions in Texas in the month the law went into effect than in the same month in 2020.

About half that number may end up still taking place, some estimates suggest, many of them in other states. But that still means that in a matter of months, more than a thousand human beings will exist as legal persons, rights-bearing Texans — despite still being helpless, unreasoning and utterly dependent — who would not have existed had this law not given them protection.

But, in fact, they exist already. They existed, at our mercy, all along.

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Regions & Countries

Pro-choice does not mean pro-abortion: an argument for abortion rights featuring the rev. carlton veazey.

Since the Supreme Court’s historic 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade , the issue of a woman’s right to an abortion has fostered one of the most contentious moral and political debates in America. Opponents of abortion rights argue that life begins at conception – making abortion tantamount to homicide. Abortion rights advocates, in contrast, maintain that women have a right to decide what happens to their bodies – sometimes without any restrictions.

To explore the case for abortion rights, the Pew Forum turns to the Rev. Carlton W. Veazey, who for more than a decade has been president of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. Based in Washington, D.C., the coalition advocates for reproductive choice and religious freedom on behalf of about 40 religious groups and organizations. Prior to joining the coalition, Veazey spent 33 years as a pastor at Zion Baptist Church in Washington, D.C.

A counterargument explaining the case against abortion rights is made by the Rev. J. Daniel Mindling, professor of moral theology at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary.

Featuring: The Rev. Carlton W. Veazey, President, Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice

Interviewer: David Masci, Senior Research Fellow, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life

Question & Answer

Can you explain how your Christian faith informs your views in support of abortion rights?

I grew up in a Christian home. My father was a Baptist minister for many years in Memphis, Tenn. One of the things that he instilled in me – I used to hear it so much – was free will, free will, free will. It was ingrained in me that you have the ability to make choices. You have the ability to decide what you want to do. You are responsible for your decisions, but God has given you that responsibility, that option to make decisions.

I had firsthand experience of seeing black women and poor women being disproportionately impacted by the fact that they had no choices about an unintended pregnancy, even if it would damage their health or cause great hardship in their family. And I remember some of them being maimed in back-alley abortions; some of them died. There was no legal choice before Roe v. Wade .

But in this day and time, we have a clearer understanding that men and women are moral agents and equipped to make decisions about even the most difficult and complex matters. We must ensure a woman can determine when and whether to have children according to her own conscience and religious beliefs and without governmental interference or coercion. We must also ensure that women have the resources to have a healthy, safe pregnancy, if that is their decision, and that women and families have the resources to raise a child with security.

The right to choose has changed and expanded over the years since Roe v. Wade . We now speak of reproductive justice – and that includes comprehensive sex education, family planning and contraception, adequate medical care, a safe environment, the ability to continue a pregnancy and the resources that make that choice possible. That is my moral framework.

You talk about free will, and as a Christian you believe in free will. But you also said that God gave us free will and gave us the opportunity to make right and wrong choices. Why do you believe that abortion can, at least in some instances, be the right choice?

Dan Maguire, a former Jesuit priest and professor of moral theology and ethics at Marquette University, says that to have a child can be a sacred choice, but to not have a child can also be a sacred choice.

And these choices revolve around circumstances and issues – like whether a person is old enough to care for a child or whether a woman already has more children than she can care for. Also, remember that medical circumstances are the reason many women have an abortion – for example, if they are having chemotherapy for cancer or have a life-threatening chronic illness – and most later-term abortions occur because of fetal abnormalities that will result in stillbirth or the death of the child. These are difficult decisions; they’re moral decisions, sometimes requiring a woman to decide if she will risk her life for a pregnancy.

Abortion is a very serious decision and each decision depends on circumstances. That’s why I tell people: I am not pro-abortion, I am pro-choice. And that’s an important distinction.

You’ve talked about the right of a woman to make a choice. Does the fetus have any rights?

First, let me say that the religious, pro-choice position is based on respect for human life, including potential life and existing life.

But I do not believe that life as we know it starts at conception. I am troubled by the implications of a fetus having legal rights because that could pit the fetus against the woman carrying the fetus; for example, if the woman needed a medical procedure, the law could require the fetus to be considered separately and equally.

From a religious perspective, it’s more important to consider the moral issues involved in making a decision about abortion. Also, it’s important to remember that religious traditions have very different ideas about the status of the fetus. Roman Catholic doctrine regards a fertilized egg as a human being. Judaism holds that life begins with the first breath.

What about at the very end of a woman’s pregnancy? Does a fetus acquire rights after the point of viability, when it can survive outside the womb? Or let me ask it another way: Assuming a woman is healthy and her fetus is healthy, should the woman be able to terminate her pregnancy until the end of her pregnancy?

There’s an assumption that a woman would end a viable pregnancy carelessly or without a reason. The facts don’t bear this out. Most abortions are performed in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. Late abortions are virtually always performed for the most serious medical and health reasons, including saving the woman’s life.

But what if such a case came before you? If you were that woman’s pastor, what would you say?

I would talk to her in a helpful, positive, respectful way and help her discuss what was troubling her. I would suggest alternatives such as adoption.

Let me shift gears a little bit. Many Americans have said they favor a compromise, or reaching a middle-ground policy, on abortion. Do you sympathize with this desire and do you think that both sides should compromise to end this rancorous debate?

I have been to more middle-ground and common-ground meetings than I can remember and I’ve never been to one where we walked out with any decision.

That being said, I think that we all should agree that abortion should be rare. How do we do that? We do that by providing comprehensive sex education in schools and in religious congregations and by ensuring that there is accurate information about contraception and that contraception is available. Unfortunately, the U.S. Congress has not been willing to pass a bill to fund comprehensive sex education, but they are willing to put a lot of money into failed and harmful abstinence-only programs that often rely on scare tactics and inaccurate information.

Former Surgeon General David Satcher has shown that abstinence-only programs do not work and that we should provide young people with the information to protect themselves. Education that stresses abstinence and provides accurate information about contraception will reduce the abortion rate. That is the ground that I stand on. I would say that here is a way we can work together to reduce the need for abortions.

Abortion has become central to what many people call the “culture wars.” Some consider it to be the most contentious moral issue in America today. Why do many Catholics, evangelical Christians and other people of faith disagree with you?

I was raised to respect differing views so the rigid views against abortion are hard for me to understand. I will often tell someone on the other side, “I respect you. I may disagree with your theological perspective, but I respect your views. But I think it’s totally arrogant for you to tell me that I need to believe what you believe.” It’s not that I think we should not try to win each other over. But we have to respect people’s different religious beliefs.

But what about people who believe that life begins at conception and that terminating a pregnancy is murder? For them, it may not just be about respecting or tolerating each other’s viewpoints; they believe this is an issue of life or death. What do you say to people who make that kind of argument?

I would say that they have a right to their beliefs, as do I. I would try to explain that my views are grounded in my religion, as are theirs. I believe that we must ensure that women are treated with dignity and respect and that women are able to follow the dictates of their conscience – and that includes their reproductive decisions. Ultimately, it is the government’s responsibility to ensure that women have the ability to make decisions of conscience and have access to reproductive health services.

Some in the anti-abortion camp contend that the existence of legalized abortion is a sign of the self-centeredness and selfishness of our age. Is there any validity to this view?

Although abortion is a very difficult decision, it can be the most responsible decision a person can make when faced with an unintended pregnancy or a pregnancy that will have serious health consequences.

Depending on the circumstances, it might be selfish to bring a child into the world. You know, a lot of people say, “You must bring this child into the world.” They are 100 percent supportive while the child is in the womb. As soon as the child is born, they abort the child in other ways. They abort a child through lack of health care, lack of education, lack of housing, and through poverty, which can drive a child into drugs or the criminal justice system.

So is it selfish to bring children into the world and not care for them? I think the other side can be very selfish by neglecting the children we have already. For all practical purposes, children whom we are neglecting are being aborted.

This transcript has been edited for clarity, spelling and grammar.

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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 .