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Key facts about the abortion debate in America

The U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2022 ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade – the decision that had guaranteed a constitutional right to an abortion for nearly 50 years – has shifted the legal battle over abortion to the states, with some prohibiting the procedure and others moving to safeguard it.

As the nation’s post-Roe chapter begins, here are key facts about Americans’ views on abortion, based on two Pew Research Center polls: one conducted from June 25-July 4 , just after this year’s high court ruling, and one conducted in March , before an earlier leaked draft of the opinion became public.

This analysis primarily draws from two Pew Research Center surveys, one surveying 10,441 U.S. adults conducted March 7-13, 2022, and another surveying 6,174 U.S. adults conducted June 27-July 4, 2022. Here are the questions used for the March survey , along with responses, and the questions used for the survey from June and July , along with responses.

Everyone who took part in these surveys is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories.  Read more about the ATP’s methodology .

A majority of the U.S. public disapproves of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe. About six-in-ten adults (57%) disapprove of the court’s decision that the U.S. Constitution does not guarantee a right to abortion and that abortion laws can be set by states, including 43% who strongly disapprove, according to the summer survey. About four-in-ten (41%) approve, including 25% who strongly approve.

About eight-in-ten Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (82%) disapprove of the court’s decision, including nearly two-thirds (66%) who strongly disapprove. Most Republicans and GOP leaners (70%) approve , including 48% who strongly approve.

Most women (62%) disapprove of the decision to end the federal right to an abortion. More than twice as many women strongly disapprove of the court’s decision (47%) as strongly approve of it (21%). Opinion among men is more divided: 52% disapprove (37% strongly), while 47% approve (28% strongly).

About six-in-ten Americans (62%) say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to the summer survey – little changed since the March survey conducted just before the ruling. That includes 29% of Americans who say it should be legal in all cases and 33% who say it should be legal in most cases. About a third of U.S. adults (36%) say abortion should be illegal in all (8%) or most (28%) cases.

Generally, Americans’ views of whether abortion should be legal remained relatively unchanged in the past few years , though support fluctuated somewhat in previous decades.

Relatively few Americans take an absolutist view on the legality of abortion – either supporting or opposing it at all times, regardless of circumstances. The March survey found that support or opposition to abortion varies substantially depending on such circumstances as when an abortion takes place during a pregnancy, whether the pregnancy is life-threatening or whether a baby would have severe health problems.

While Republicans’ and Democrats’ views on the legality of abortion have long differed, the 46 percentage point partisan gap today is considerably larger than it was in the recent past, according to the survey conducted after the court’s ruling. The wider gap has been largely driven by Democrats: Today, 84% of Democrats say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, up from 72% in 2016 and 63% in 2007. Republicans’ views have shown far less change over time: Currently, 38% of Republicans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, nearly identical to the 39% who said this in 2007.

However, the partisan divisions over whether abortion should generally be legal tell only part of the story. According to the March survey, sizable shares of Democrats favor restrictions on abortion under certain circumstances, while majorities of Republicans favor abortion being legal in some situations , such as in cases of rape or when the pregnancy is life-threatening.

There are wide religious divides in views of whether abortion should be legal , the summer survey found. An overwhelming share of religiously unaffiliated adults (83%) say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, as do six-in-ten Catholics. Protestants are divided in their views: 48% say it should be legal in all or most cases, while 50% say it should be illegal in all or most cases. Majorities of Black Protestants (71%) and White non-evangelical Protestants (61%) take the position that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while about three-quarters of White evangelicals (73%) say it should be illegal in all (20%) or most cases (53%).

In the March survey, 72% of White evangelicals said that the statement “human life begins at conception, so a fetus is a person with rights” reflected their views extremely or very well . That’s much greater than the share of White non-evangelical Protestants (32%), Black Protestants (38%) and Catholics (44%) who said the same. Overall, 38% of Americans said that statement matched their views extremely or very well.

Catholics, meanwhile, are divided along religious and political lines in their attitudes about abortion, according to the same survey. Catholics who attend Mass regularly are among the country’s strongest opponents of abortion being legal, and they are also more likely than those who attend less frequently to believe that life begins at conception and that a fetus has rights. Catholic Republicans, meanwhile, are far more conservative on a range of abortion questions than are Catholic Democrats.

Women (66%) are more likely than men (57%) to say abortion should be legal in most or all cases, according to the survey conducted after the court’s ruling.

More than half of U.S. adults – including 60% of women and 51% of men – said in March that women should have a greater say than men in setting abortion policy . Just 3% of U.S. adults said men should have more influence over abortion policy than women, with the remainder (39%) saying women and men should have equal say.

The March survey also found that by some measures, women report being closer to the abortion issue than men . For example, women were more likely than men to say they had given “a lot” of thought to issues around abortion prior to taking the survey (40% vs. 30%). They were also considerably more likely than men to say they personally knew someone (such as a close friend, family member or themselves) who had had an abortion (66% vs. 51%) – a gender gap that was evident across age groups, political parties and religious groups.

Relatively few Americans view the morality of abortion in stark terms , the March survey found. Overall, just 7% of all U.S. adults say having an abortion is morally acceptable in all cases, and 13% say it is morally wrong in all cases. A third say that having an abortion is morally wrong in most cases, while about a quarter (24%) say it is morally acceptable in most cases. An additional 21% do not consider having an abortion a moral issue.

Among Republicans, most (68%) say that having an abortion is morally wrong either in most (48%) or all cases (20%). Only about three-in-ten Democrats (29%) hold a similar view. Instead, about four-in-ten Democrats say having an abortion is morally  acceptable  in most (32%) or all (11%) cases, while an additional 28% say it is not a moral issue. 

White evangelical Protestants overwhelmingly say having an abortion is morally wrong in most (51%) or all cases (30%). A slim majority of Catholics (53%) also view having an 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%). Among religiously unaffiliated Americans, about three-quarters see having an abortion as morally acceptable (45%) or not a moral issue (32%).

• Religion & Abortion

What the data says about abortion in the U.S.

Support for legal abortion is widespread in many countries, especially in europe, nearly a year after roe’s demise, americans’ views of abortion access increasingly vary by where they live, by more than two-to-one, americans say medication abortion should be legal in their state, most latinos say democrats care about them and work hard for their vote, far fewer say so of gop, most popular.

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Some Hard Thought-Experiment Questions for Both Sides of the Abortion Debate

The right of abortion is one of the most contentious political and legal issues in the United States today. It is being discussed a great deal today because of recent legislation in Texas (analyzed here ) and because of the upcoming Supreme Court docket in which a major case from Mississippi will be heard in December. In this essay we do not even pretend to offer solutions to this conflict. Instead, we frame questions that we suspect the proponents of each side of the debate might find hard to adequately answer—questions that at the very least may require serious thought about the assumptions on which some arguments about abortion are based.

We note several caveats and framing considerations up front.

We do not raise questions that directly address the theological grounds for opposing or supporting the right to have an abortion, although our discussion may have ramifications for those beliefs.

Although we are both constitutional scholars, in this essay we do not purport to engage in a thorough constitutional analysis that carefully evaluates constitutional text, history, structure, judicial precedent and the like; our purpose and audience here indicate a different approach.

Many of our questions are framed in hypothetical terms. We know that the facts in some of these questions as we describe them are unlikely to occur in the real world, but (in keeping with the traditions of law professors, which we are) we think these questions have value in focusing analysis on particular issues and helping people refine their own intuitions and positions.

Abortion is a very emotional issue for many people. It is for us too. This essay, however, seeks to be dispassionate and thus may seem dryly mechanical in its language. We do not intend to disparage in any way the emotional experiences of people on any side of the abortion debate. However, we think the questions we raise have value for discussion even though they are posed in abstract and somewhat logical terms.

We are trying to focus on the core existential issues raised by the debate about abortion. To do that, we are assuming that externalities surrounding unwanted pregnancies or difficult family situations that can be mitigated by social intervention will in fact be mitigated. For example, for our purpose today we assume that society is willing to step up to the plate and take responsibility for providing for the adoption of unwanted children, for high-quality foster care for children whose material needs far exceed what their parents can provide for them, and/or for adequate subsidies for food, medical care, education, shelter and child care for the children of indigent families. We know, of course, that this is not the case in today’s world.

We are both men who have never been and will never be pregnant. We nonetheless hope that we have something helpful to offer on these matters.

Some proponents or opponents of abortion rights ground their arguments on one or the other of two discontinuous events. By this we mean that for many abortion opponents, conception is the critical event. Until conception occurs, conduct preventing pregnancy is permissible contraception. But once conception occurs, terminating a pregnancy is abortion and can be prohibited. For many proponents of abortion rights, birth is the most (though perhaps not only) relevant discontinuous event. Terminating a pregnancy during the gestation period is a permissible exercise of the right of reproductive autonomy, but after a baby is delivered, that right no longer applies. We make use, in our hypotheticals, of these triggering events to probe attitudes about their absolute centrality.

Questions For Pro-Life Advocates About the Equivalence of a Fertilized Egg and a Delivered Baby

We begin with questions about the centrality of conception. The core argument here by opponents of abortion is that after conception the fertilized egg—the conceptus, or fetus—is a baby. For moral and rights purposes, fetuses are equivalent to delivered babies and deserve to receive the same protection against harm that the state would provide to babies after they are born. The interests of the pregnant person do not outweigh these interests after conception any more than they would outweigh a baby’s interests and rights after birth. We recognize that even if one moves away from this contention of equivalence, one still might believe that conception is important in that it creates a fetus which has immediate and increasing moral value. The issue we explore is simply whether the immediate result of conception is the equivalent of a delivered baby.

We offer two questions regarding this axiom of equivalence.

• Assume the following: There is poisonous smoke in a neo-natal unit of a hospital. In the unit, there is a two-week-old baby in a kind of incubator machine on which the baby is dependent. If the baby is removed from the machine, or the machine stops functioning, the baby will die. The baby cannot survive continued exposure to the smoke (although the baby’s death would be painless), but the machine and baby can be carried out of the room safely. Also, in the unit is a machine in which a fertilized egg is stored. The fertilized egg is similarly dependent on the machine. If it is removed from the machine, the egg cannot survive. The egg also cannot survive continued exposure to the smoke, but the machine can be carried out of the room safely. X enters the room. She cannot carry out both machines. She can save only the two-week-old baby or the fertilized egg.

Is the decision X must make the equivalent of the terrible choice she would confront if there were two babies in the kind of incubator machines we describe? (We assume that in the case of delivered babies the fact that one baby may be months older than the other would be morally irrelevant.) Is saving the fertilized egg or the newborn baby a terrible, but morally equivalent decision? Or is there a difference between the two that justifies the decision to protect one more than the other?

• Assume that someone is one month into a pregnancy and receives the tragic information that the fetus being carried has a terminal illness. The fetus may survive in the womb for another three months, but there is no chance for survival beyond that time. May an abortion be performed in this circumstance? We assume that in the case of delivered babies or infants, the fact that a baby had a terminal illness would not justify medical intervention to end the baby’s life. Does the fact that the fetus in our hypothetical will never have the opportunity to live outside the womb change the analysis or does the equivalence of fetus and newborn require an equivalent prohibition against medical intervention?

Another question for abortion opponents relates to the hypothetical impact of an abortion ban on the decisions of people to conceive and bring delivered babies into existence. Assume 100 people who want to become pregnant are informed that because of their age or heredity there is a 2% chance that their babies would be born with very serious birth defects. The birth defects could be detected very early in the gestation period. Each of these people would choose to go forward with a planned pregnancy if an abortion were legally available once it is known that the baby would suffer from these serious birth defects. They would all decide not to become pregnant if abortion were unavailable. Thus, for this cohort of people, 98-100 babies who would have been born will never come into existence if all abortion is prohibited. Does this consequence have any relevance to whether these women should have the ability to obtain an abortion?

Questions For Pro-Choice Advocates About, Among Other Things, the Contention That Abortion Rights Continue Until Birth

Third-trimester abortions are rare and controversial. They virtually always involve some change in, or some new information about, the condition of the fetus or the pregnant person. Assume it is determined that the fetus has very serious birth defects a few weeks prior to the due date of delivery, or that the fetus becomes seriously ill with a marginally treatable, but not curable, illness at this time. Some advocates of abortion rights contend that the pregnant person retains the right to have an abortion in these circumstances until the delivery of the baby. They argue that in these tragic circumstances, the extraordinarily difficult decision whether to terminate the pregnancy belongs to the individual, not to the state.

One question regarding this position is this: Assume that during the delivery of a baby, unforeseen complications result in the baby being born with very serious disabilities or medical problems that are the equivalent of the birth defects or illness described in the previous paragraph. The only difference is that these medical conditions come into existence or are identified just as the baby is delivered . Are the circumstances here equally tragic as previously described? If they are, does the tragic nature of these circumstances support giving the pregnant person the right to end the baby’s life immediately after birth? If not, (and we think not) why should the tragic nature of these circumstances justify pre-birth abortion but not the post-birth termination?

A related set of questions is addressed to those who concede that abortion rights do not extend to birth, but that there should be a right to a pre-viability abortion. What, precisely, makes viability—the ability to live outside the womb—a controllingly relevant factor? The fact that a fetus is theoretically capable of surviving if it is removed from the pregnant person’s body does not alter the reality that the fetus exists within that body and removing a fetus at the point in time of viability would involve massively intrusive intervention into autonomy and bodily integrity. Moreover, if we are focusing our attention on the development of the fetus in determining either fetal rights or the interests of the state in the continued survival of the fetus, does viability correlate with fetal characteristics which are associated with personhood or a right to life? Respiratory problems, for example, may render a fetus non-viable until late in the gestation period. If a late-term fetus is fully developed a week or two from delivery, is it less of a person (or does the state have less of an interest in a baby being born alive) because at that late stage of the gestation period, the fetus would suffer respiratory failure if birth occurred at that time?

These questions raise another issue. If viability is not a controlling factor in determining the scope of the right to have an abortion, what does set the parameters of the scope of this right? The constitutional case law, Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey , both focus on the developmental status of the fetus; as fetal development progresses, the state’s interest in the life of the fetus becomes increasingly compelling and capable of overriding the individual’s decision. Interestingly, both Roe and Casey seem to suggest that aside from the medical risks of having an abortion, the pregnant person’s interest remains static and unchanging throughout the gestation period. Yet does that seem correct? To answer this question, it is necessary to describe the component interests that taken together justify a person’s right to have an abortion in the first place, something the Court has never done with precision. What exactly might those interests be?

We suggest three interests. (Although we do not contend that this is an exclusive list, it is necessary to identify at least some of these interests in order to continue with the questions we are addressing.)

One interest is bodily integrity and autonomy. We do not think this requires additional explanation. Another interest involves the psychological and emotional condition and independence of the pregnant person. Here, that person’s interest involves avoiding the psychological and emotional consequences of giving birth and then placing a baby up for adoption or in foster care. It also involves avoiding the psychological bonding that develops between the pregnant person and the fetus being carried. A third interest is the recognition that access to abortion protects the pregnant person’s interest in sexual autonomy free from the fear of an unwanted pregnancy.

Based on these interests, our question is whether these interests, rather than being stable and unchanging, may decline throughout the gestation period. With regard to the interest in bodily integrity and autonomy, the issue here would be whether there is a meaningfully greater degree of interference with bodily integrity if we compare childbirth to a very early abortion than would be the case if we compare a very late-term abortion to delivering a child. Can one argue that the later the abortion, the less this choice protects the pregnant person from significant physical burdens?

If we focus on psychological well-being and independence, can one argue that as the gestation period progresses the bond between the pregnant person and fetus becomes increasingly powerful? Late in the pregnancy, any decision that sunders this bond before or after birth will have difficult psychological consequences. If a pregnancy is terminated early after conception, before those bonds have developed to a significant extent, the psychological consequences are arguably substantially less severe. Accordingly, can one ask whether the pregnant person’s interest in avoiding these psychological effects declines as the gestation period progresses?

One might also ask whether the pregnant person’s interest in sexual autonomy free from the risk of an unwanted pregnancy and birth becomes less salient if the decision to have an abortion is not available later in the gestation period. If someone knows, for example, that abortion is available up to five months after conception, would the availability of abortion later in the pregnancy contribute in any significant way to the pregnant person’s interest in sexual autonomy?

If this analysis has some merit, does this suggest that in discussing the parameters of the scope of the right to have an abortion, courts should be looking at both the developmental changes in the fetus (which support an increased interest in continued life over time) and the declining interests in having an abortion of the pregnant person as the pregnancy progresses? Should courts be considering the intersection of these two changing interests of the fetus and the pregnant person, rather than just the former?

Our final question focuses on the issue of personhood. Under the Court’s analysis, a fetus does not become a person for constitutional purposes until a baby is born alive. What this means, if we understand the Court’s analysis correctly, is that the pregnant person has constitutional rights regarding the pregnancy and the state has an interest in the developing life, but the fetus has no rights bearing identity. Thus, the interests of the fetus are entirely dependent on the decisions of the pregnant person and the state.

Our thought experiment here assumes that a state wants to reduce the amount of money it spends on providing resources to the children of indigent families. Accordingly, it offers poor pregnant people a subsidy, say $10,000, if they elect to have an abortion. The state doesn’t care whether the abortion occurs early or late in pregnancy. It will save money by paying for an abortion rather than subsidizing the food, medical care, shelter and education of additional indigent children. Should this scheme be constitutional? Is there a way to challenge its constitutionality without recognizing the personhood of the fetus at least at some point during the gestation period?

In setting out the questions in this essay, we do not pre-judge any answers that might be offered. Instead, we simply (and deeply) believe there is value in considering and discussing some of the core issues about abortion rights as part of a civil dialogue about abortion—in a debate where true dialogue is rare.

Posted in: Reproductive Law

Tags: Abortion

Comments are closed.

by Jonathan D. Varat, William Cohen and Vikram David Amar

Edited by Vikram David Amar

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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50 years after Roe, many ethics questions shape the abortion debate: 4 essential reads

Religion and Ethics Editor

Interviewed

Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Bioethicist, University of Cincinnati

Professor of Bioethics and Humanities, School of Medicine, University of Washington

Professor of Anthropology, Northwestern University

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Jan. 22, 2023, marks the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision that recognized a constitutional right to abortion. That stood for nearly half a century, until a majority of justices reversed it in June 2022’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision.

People with a broad range of views on abortion often say their faith tradition helps inform their opinions. But beyond religion, many other ethical and moral questions shape Americans’ perspectives on the topic.

Here are some of The Conversation’s most thought-provoking articles on the underlying philosophical and bioethical issues involved in abortion debates.

1. Rethinking ‘personhood’

Activism for and against abortion rights often gets summed up into two simple-sounding terms: “pro-life” and “pro-choice.”

But “‘life’ and ‘choice’ are not, in and of themselves, really the issue,” wrote Robert Launay of Northwestern University. “The central question is what – or who – constitutes a person.”

As an anthropologist , Launay studies that question in terms of culture. Different religions and societies think about personhood in different ways, he explained. Ideas about personhood in the U.S., for example, often stem from Christian ideas about the soul and are black and white – something is or isn’t considered a person.

In some of the Indigenous African traditions where he has done research, meanwhile, “many view personhood as a process rather than a once-and-for-all phenomenon” – something humans gradually acquire over time, through relationships, or through rituals.

Read more: What does it mean to be a 'person'? Different cultures have different answers

2. Moral status

Even within a single society, defining “personhood” can be complex and controversial.

Personhood is a key concern in bioethics, wrote University of Washington philosopher Nancy Jecker . In that context, being a “person” isn’t necessarily the same as being “human” – and it’s not an easy concept to nail down.

“When philosophers talk about ‘personhood,’ they are referring to something or someone having exceptionally high moral status, often described as having a right to life, an inherent dignity, or mattering for one’s own sake,” she explained. Personhood implies that someone or something can make strong moral claims, such as a claim against being interfered with. In abortion debates, Jecker added, “no one disputes the fetus’s species, but many disagree about the fetus’s personhood.”

Americans hold three main views of when personhood begins – at conception, at birth, or sometime in between – which is a central part of the country’s inability to agree about abortion rules. But the implications of how societies define personhood go much further, Jecker said, influencing areas like care for the environment and end-of-life treatment.

Read more: What is 'personhood'? The ethics question that needs a closer look in abortion debates

3. Breaking down bioethics

Given Americans’ diverse views about religion and personhood, are there other concepts that can help forge consensus?

In another article, Jecker broke down four key bioethics terms , four bedrock principles in the field: autonomy; nonmaleficence, or “do no harm”; beneficence, or providing beneficial care; and justice.

People disagree about how to interpret those principles: Someone in favor of abortion rights, for example, might be most concerned about harm to pregnant women, while someone who opposes them could be more concerned about harm to a fetus.

Understanding how people see those principles in play, though, is at least a constructive step. Jecker suggested that, short of reaching a moral consensus, “articulating our own moral views and understanding others’ can bring all sides closer to a principled compromise.”

Read more: Abortion and bioethics: Principles to guide U.S. abortion debates

4. Beyond ‘my body, my choice’

For decades, one other phrase has dominated the U.S. abortion debate: the slogan “my body, my choice.”

At this point, the catchphrase is practically synonymous with the movement for reproductive rights. It’s profoundly shaped how people think about abortion rights: as an issue of privacy, decisions that women should make for themselves with their doctors.

But “my body, my choice” doesn’t fully capture the key ideas , argued Elizabeth Lanphier , a moral philosopher and bioethicist at the University of Cincinnati. Reproductive rights aren’t just about a lack of interference, what philosophers call “negative liberty.” Abortion is also about the right to access health care.

“‘My body, my choice’ suggests that because people own their bodies, they get to control them,” she wrote. But self-ownership isn’t so valuable without also having “positive liberty,” the freedom to do something.

“My research suggests ‘my body, my choice’ was a crucial idea at the time of Roe to emphasize ownership over bodily and health care decisions,” Lanphier concluded. “But I believe the debate has since moved on – reproductive justice is about more than owning your body and your choice; it is about a right to health care.”

Read more: With abortion heading back to the Supreme Court, is it time to retire the 'my body, my choice' slogan?

Editor’s note: This story is a roundup of articles from The Conversation’s archives.

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The Most Important Study in the Abortion Debate

Researchers rigorously tested the persistent notion that abortion wounds the women who seek it.

The demographer Diana Greene Foster was in Orlando last month, preparing for the end of Roe v. Wade , when Politico published a leaked draft of a majority Supreme Court opinion striking down the landmark ruling. The opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, would revoke the constitutional right to abortion and thus give states the ability to ban the medical procedure.

Foster, the director of the Bixby Population Sciences Research Unit at UC San Francisco, was at a meeting of abortion providers, seeking their help recruiting people for a new study . And she was racing against time. She wanted to look, she told me, “at the last person served in, say, Nebraska, compared to the first person turned away in Nebraska.” Nearly two dozen red and purple states are expected to enact stringent limits or even bans on abortion as soon as the Supreme Court strikes down Roe v. Wade , as it is poised to do. Foster intends to study women with unwanted pregnancies just before and just after the right to an abortion vanishes.

Read: When a right becomes a privilege

When Alito’s draft surfaced, Foster told me, “I was struck by how little it considered the people who would be affected. The experience of someone who’s pregnant when they do not want to be and what happens to their life is absolutely not considered in that document.” Foster’s earlier work provides detailed insight into what does happen. The landmark Turnaway Study , which she led, is a crystal ball into our post- Roe future and, I would argue, the single most important piece of academic research in American life at this moment.

The legal and political debate about abortion in recent decades has tended to focus more on the rights and experience of embryos and fetuses than the people who gestate them. And some commentators—including ones seated on the Supreme Court—have speculated that termination is not just a cruel convenience, but one that harms women too . Foster and her colleagues rigorously tested that notion. Their research demonstrates that, in general, abortion does not wound women physically, psychologically, or financially. Carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term does.

In a 2007 decision , Gonzales v. Carhart , the Supreme Court upheld a ban on one specific, uncommon abortion procedure. In his majority opinion , Justice Anthony Kennedy ventured a guess about abortion’s effect on women’s lives: “While we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon, it seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained,” he wrote. “Severe depression and loss of esteem can follow.”

Was that really true? Activists insisted so, but social scientists were not sure . Indeed, they were not sure about a lot of things when it came to the effect of the termination of a pregnancy on a person’s life. Many papers compared individuals who had an abortion with people who carried a pregnancy to term. The problem is that those are two different groups of people; to state the obvious, most people seeking an abortion are experiencing an unplanned pregnancy, while a majority of people carrying to term intended to get pregnant.

Foster and her co-authors figured out a way to isolate the impact of abortion itself. Nearly all states bar the procedure after a certain gestational age or after the point that a fetus is considered viable outside the womb . The researchers could compare people who were “turned away” by a provider because they were too far along with people who had an abortion at the same clinics. (They did not include people who ended a pregnancy for medical reasons.) The women who got an abortion would be similar, in terms of demographics and socioeconomics, to those who were turned away; what would separate the two groups was only that some women got to the clinic on time, and some didn’t.

In time, 30 abortion providers—ones that had the latest gestational limit of any clinic within 150 miles, meaning that a person could not easily access an abortion if they were turned away—agreed to work with the researchers. They recruited nearly 1,000 women to be interviewed every six months for five years. The findings were voluminous, resulting in 50 publications and counting. They were also clear. Kennedy’s speculation was wrong: Women, as a general point, do not regret having an abortion at all.

Researchers found, among other things, that women who were denied abortions were more likely to end up living in poverty. They had worse credit scores and, even years later, were more likely to not have enough money for the basics, such as food and gas. They were more likely to be unemployed. They were more likely to go through bankruptcy or eviction. “The two groups were economically the same when they sought an abortion,” Foster told me. “One became poorer.”

Read: The calamity of unwanted motherhood

In addition, those denied a termination were more likely to be with a partner who abused them. They were more likely to end up as a single parent. They had more trouble bonding with their infants, were less likely to agree with the statement “I feel happy when my child laughs or smiles,” and were more likely to say they “feel trapped as a mother.” They experienced more anxiety and had lower self-esteem, though those effects faded in time. They were half as likely to be in a “very good” romantic relationship at two years. They were less likely to have “aspirational” life plans.

Their bodies were different too. The ones denied an abortion were in worse health, experiencing more hypertension and chronic pain. None of the women who had an abortion died from it. This is unsurprising; other research shows that the procedure has extremely low complication rates , as well as no known negative health or fertility effects . Yet in the Turnaway sample, pregnancy ended up killing two of the women who wanted a termination and did not get one.

The Turnaway Study also showed that abortion is a choice that women often make in order to take care of their family. Most of the women seeking an abortion were already mothers. In the years after they terminated a pregnancy, their kids were better off; they were more likely to hit their developmental milestones and less likely to live in poverty. Moreover, many women who had an abortion went on to have more children. Those pregnancies were much more likely to be planned, and those kids had better outcomes too.

The interviews made clear that women, far from taking a casual view of abortion, took the decision seriously. Most reported using contraception when they got pregnant, and most of the people who sought an abortion after their state’s limit simply did not realize they were pregnant until it was too late. (Many women have irregular periods, do not experience morning sickness, and do not feel fetal movement until late in the second trimester.) The women gave nuanced, compelling reasons for wanting to end their pregnancies.

Afterward, nearly all said that termination had been the right decision. At five years, only 14 percent felt any sadness about having an abortion; two in three ended up having no or very few emotions about it at all. “Relief” was the most common feeling, and an abiding one.

From the May 2022 issue: The future of abortion in a post- Roe America

The policy impact of the Turnaway research has been significant, even though it was published during a period when states have been restricting abortion access. In 2018, the Iowa Supreme Court struck down a law requiring a 72-hour waiting period between when a person seeks and has an abortion, noting that “the vast majority of abortion patients do not regret the procedure, even years later, and instead feel relief and acceptance”—a Turnaway finding. That same finding was cited by members of Chile’s constitutional court  as they allowed for the decriminalization of abortion in certain circumstances.

Yet the research has not swayed many people who advocate for abortion bans, believing that life begins at conception and that the law must prioritize the needs of the fetus. Other activists have argued that Turnaway is methodologically flawed; some women approached in the clinic waiting room declined to participate, and not all participating women completed all interviews . “The women who anticipate and experience the most negative reactions to abortion are the least likely to want to participate in interviews,” the activist David Reardon argued in a 2018 article in a Catholic Medical Association journal.

Still, four dozen papers analyzing the Turnaway Study’s findings have been published in peer-reviewed journals; the research is “the gold standard,” Emily M. Johnston, an Urban Institute health-policy expert who wasn’t involved with the project, told me. In the trajectories of women who received an abortion and those who were denied one, “we can understand the impact of abortion on women’s lives,” Foster told me. “They don’t have to represent all women seeking abortion for the findings to be valid.” And her work has been buttressed by other surveys, showing that women fear the repercussions of unplanned pregnancies for good reason and do not tend to regret having a termination. “Among the women we spoke with, they did not regret either choice,” whether that was having an abortion or carrying to term, Johnston told me. “These women were thinking about their desires for themselves, but also were thinking very thoughtfully about what kind of life they could provide for a child.”

The Turnaway study , for Foster, underscored that nobody needs the government to decide whether they need an abortion. If and when America’s highest court overturns Roe , though, an estimated 34 million women of reproductive age will lose some or all access to the procedure in the state where they live. Some people will travel to an out-of-state clinic to terminate a pregnancy; some will get pills by mail to manage their abortions at home; some will “try and do things that are less safe,” as Foster put it. Many will carry to term: The Guttmacher Institute has estimated that there will be roughly 100,000 fewer legal abortions per year post- Roe . “The question now is who is able to circumvent the law, what that costs, and who suffers from these bans,” Foster told me. “The burden of this will be disproportionately put on people who are least able to support a pregnancy and to support a child.”

Ellen Gruber Garvey: I helped women get abortions in pre- Roe America

Foster said that there is a lot we still do not know about how the end of Roe might alter the course of people’s lives—the topic of her new research. “In the Turnaway Study, people were too late to get an abortion, but they didn’t have to feel like the police were going to knock on their door,” she told me. “Now, if you’re able to find an abortion somewhere and you have a complication, do you get health care? Do you seek health care out if you’re having a miscarriage, or are you too scared? If you’re going to travel across state lines, can you tell your mother or your boss what you’re doing?”

In addition, she said that she was uncertain about the role that abortion funds —local, on-the-ground organizations that help people find, travel to, and pay for terminations—might play. “We really don’t know who is calling these hotlines,” she said. “When people call, what support do they need? What is enough, and who falls through the cracks?” She added that many people are unaware that such services exist, and might have trouble accessing them.

People are resourceful when seeking a termination and resilient when denied an abortion, Foster told me. But looking into the post- Roe future, she predicted, “There’s going to be some widespread and scary consequences just from the fact that we’ve made this common health-care practice against the law.” Foster, to her dismay, is about to have a lot more research to do.

Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Abortion — Debates on Abortion: Arguments Against and For

Debates on Abortion: Arguments Against and for

• Categories: Abortion

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Words: 487 |

Published: Dec 5, 2018

Words: 487 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Abortion Argumentative Essay: Hook Examples

• A Controversial Crossroads: In the heart of one of the most polarizing debates in our nation’s history, the topic of abortion stands as a moral and ethical crossroads. As we delve into this complex issue, we’ll explore the perspectives, the consequences, and the underlying principles that shape the discourse on abortion.
• The Choice That Divides: Abortion, the deliberate termination of pregnancy, has ignited impassioned arguments on both sides of the aisle. Whether you’re pro-choice, advocating for a woman’s right to choose, or anti-choice, emphasizing the sanctity of life, the abortion debate raises profound questions about human rights, autonomy, and responsibility.
• Mind and Body: The Toll of Abortion: Beyond the legal and moral debate, abortion carries psychological and physical consequences. Join us as we explore the impact of abortion on mental health, the potential for regret, and the physical risks faced by women who choose this path.
• The Unseen Pain of the Unborn: While the debate often centers on the rights of women, we must also consider the unborn child’s experience. Recent studies suggest that fetuses can feel pain, adding a layer of complexity to the abortion discussion. Let’s examine the evidence and its implications.
• Medicine and Morality: Delving into the medical realm, we’ll explore the ethical dilemmas faced by doctors who perform abortions, the potential complications for women, and the broader implications for society as we navigate the contentious terrain of abortion rights.

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A better abortion debate is possible. Here’s where we can start.

Editor’s note: The Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade on June 24 in a 6 to 3 decision, returning the issue of abortion restrictions to the states. America has published several essays on the decision, which was first leaked to the press in May. Read other views on abortion and the reversal of Roe v. Wade here .

In 2016, I opened my doors for what I expected would be the worst event I would ever host. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, my husband and I invited about a dozen pro-choice and pro-life friends over to eat cookies and talk about abortion.

I had been part of terrible conversations on this topic, online and off-line, and I knew I wanted something different. I had friends on both sides of the divide, and it was surreal to be in a position where we all thought the other side was complicit in grave evil.

In my work at Braver Angels, I help design debates that bring people together across the political divide . When I do my opening spiel on our format and rules, I often ask people to raise their hands if they have had a bad conversation on that night’s topic before. Whatever the topic of our debate, nearly all the hands go up. Sometimes, when a topic has been in the news, I ask people to raise their hands if they have had a bad conversation about this topic in the past week ; a majority of hands go up.

I had friends on both sides of the abortion divide, and it was surreal to be in a position where we all thought the other side was complicit in grave evil.

I ask because I want everyone in the room to see that their opponents are here as an act of trust. Even though these conversations may have never gone well in the past, the attendees at a Braver Angels debate show up because they think it is possible that disagreement can be fruitful. And the higher the stakes of the issue, the more urgency they feel to find a better way to talk about what divides us.

When I asked people to come together in my living room on that night in 2016, I didn’t rely on the parliamentary structures I use at my job; I wanted to find a way to mark this night out as different from other arguments we had had. I asked my friends to look over two readings before coming over so we would have something we all shared to ground our discussion.

The essays I chose were “Thanksgiving in Mongolia,” by Ariel Levy, and “The Empathy Exams,” by Leslie Jamison. Both authors, to the best of my knowledge, identify as pro-choice. Levy’s essay narrates her miscarriage at 19 weeks; Jamison’s essay blends her experiences as both a fake patient helping doctors in training and a real patient having an abortion. I picked these two essays because they weren’t written as salvos in the abortion debate but as attempts to reckon with what it means to care for each other.

The higher the stakes of the issue, the more urgency they feel to find a better way to talk about what divides us.

If I were making my reading list now—and if I felt I could get away with asking people to read whole books, not just articles—I’d suggest a few other works.

The first is Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement before Roe v. Wade, by Daniel K. Williams, a history covering the period before pro-life activism became sharply polarized. Advocating for children before birth was an important cause for progressives, who saw it as part and parcel with advocating for those who could not speak for themselves.

Another book I would recommend is The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade, by Ann Fessler. I picked up Fessler’s book because I wanted to know what adoption as an alternative to abortion looked like. Her interviews with mothers who surrendered their children make it clear that a post-Roe world must not be a return to pre-Roe norms. Many mothers wanted to raise their children, but they were coerced into adoption because no one was willing to support them as mothers. The partings were traumatic and created lasting wounds where there should have been families.

And most of all, I would want people to read What It Means to Be Human , by O. Carter Snead. Snead’s book on law and bioethics explores how we respond to vulnerability and dependence. It covers abortion extensively but not exclusively. Snead writes about how the logic of abortion is seeded throughout our culture, which is quick to write off the humanity of anyone in need.

When the final Dobbs ruling comes out, our conversations will be better if they are an image of hope, even when we are angry or afraid.

Each of these three books exposes what must change in tandem with abortion law to create a humane culture.

I run Other Feminisms, a Substack newsletter that aims to foster a culture that values mutual dependence instead of demanding autonomy. In the wake of the leak of the possible Dobbs opinion, I asked my readers, who span the gamut from pro-choice to pro-life, what they would ask people to read to begin a conversation .

Their suggestions were marked by the tenderness and precarity that had drawn me to Levy and Jamison. People’s biggest fear is that there is not enough care to go around. Pregnancy makes babies dependent on their mothers and mothers dependent on everyone around them. A culture that takes autonomy as the norm will neglect both mother and child. Thus, it can feel like any care for a child comes at the mother’s expense since we do not trust each other or our policymakers to respond justly to her need.

At the gathering in my living room, I do not think anyone’s mind was changed on the spot, but there were some surprising moments. Some pro-lifers were surprised by how willing pro-choice friends were to consider that a child in the womb had some moral claims, even if they did not see a way to honor them without harming women. Another moment that stuck with me was when one pro-choice attendee explained he had become a vegan a few years ago because he had concluded, “If it looks like suffering, I should err on the side of assuming it is suffering.”

He knew what the pro-life rejoinder was going to be, and the tension of being so tender with a chicken or a fish but not a fetus worried him, too. But he felt stuck. He saw suffering all around, and it felt more possible to give up meat than to give up abortion, which he considered a backstop. He had found room for a little mercy for animals, but he had trouble imagining there was enough to go around for all humans.

When the final Dobbs ruling comes out, our conversations will be better if they are an image of hope, even when we are angry or afraid. Moving a conversation from online to off-line, from public venue to private, from a large group to an intimate one—all of these make it easier to ask and answer questions honestly. Ask yourself: If I were complicit in a grave, widespread evil, what would I need to be able to recognize that, repent and avoid despair? Try to give your friends the welcome and patience you would require in order to so profoundly change your life.

Leah Libresco Sargeant is the author of Building the Benedict Option , and she runs the Substack newsletter Other Feminisms . She will be helping Braver Angels host a debate on abortion on May 19th .

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EXPLAINER: What’s the role of personhood in abortion debate?

FILE - In this photo from Friday, July 8, 2022, a sign in a yard in Olathe, Kansas, promotes a proposed amendment to the Kansas Constitution to allow legislators to further restrict or ban abortion. Supporters call the measure “Value Them Both,” arguing that it protects both unborn children and the women carrying them. Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Kansas and Missouri all have personhood laws. (AP Photo/John Hanna, File)

FILE - People gather in front of the Georgia State Capital in Atlanta on Friday, June 24, 2022, to protest to protest the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Abortion rights supporters say personhood could hamper in-vitro fertilization or subject women who have abortions to murder charges. At least five states have adopted personhood laws or constitutional amendments. Georgia’s law is the most extensive, granting tax breaks and child support to fetuses. (AP Photo/Ben Gray, File)

FILE - Defenders of the Unborn founder Mary Maschmeier, sets up a table outside Planned Parenthood on June 24, 2022, in St. Louis. Most abortions are now illegal in Missouri following a U.S. Supreme Court decision that ended a constitutional protection for abortion. Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Kansas and Missouri all have personhood laws. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson, File)

FILE - A woman and a child protest in favor of banning all abortions at a rally in Cartersville, Ga., on Saturday, July 23, 2022. While Democrats hope their advocacy of abortion rights will lure moderates and shore up enthusiasm in November’s elections, some anti-abortion advocates want even stronger restrictions on abortion than those Georgia has already enacted. (James Swift/The Daily Tribune News via AP, File)

FILE - Thousands of protesters march around the Arizona Capitol after the Supreme Court decision to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade abortion decision on June 24, 2022, in Phoenix. The concept of personhood that underlies anti-abortion laws in some states considers fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses as people with the same rights as those already born. Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Kansas and Missouri all have personhood laws. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin, File)

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ATLANTA (AP) — The concept of “personhood” has come up in debates since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion . Some states have passed laws or constitutional amendments to introduce the standard, and anti-abortion advocates have pushed for similar changes elsewhere.

But the differences between personhood laws and other abortion restrictions are sometimes poorly understood. Abortion rights supporters say personhood laws could have far-reaching consequences that could hamper in vitro fertilization or subject women who have abortions to murder charges. Supporters of personhood say declaring that all human beings, including those in the womb, have rights lends important moral clarity and that changes stemming from the concept are desirable.

Here’s a look at the issue:

WHAT DOES PERSONHOOD MEAN?

In its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision providing the right to abortion nationwide, the U.S. Supreme Court majority found that “the word ‘person,’ as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn.”

Some anti-abortion advocates say that is wrong, arguing that personhood includes fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses that should be considered people with the same rights as those already born.

Those who advocate this standard of personhood want to end all abortions, and decry laws that include carve-outs allowing abortion in cases of rape or incest, or fetuses with genetic anomalies.

And the impact of personhood laws could be felt beyond abortion regulation. They could limit in vitro fertilization, criminalize women who terminate pregnancies or engage in behavior harmful to the fetus, and even grant a fetus child support, tax benefits and other rights.

Opponents say the standard of personhood is unconstitutional because of its wide-ranging and uncertain impact, and argue it puts people at risk of prosecution for any number of crimes.

“Because the Personhood Provision fails to provide adequate notice of prohibited conduct and invites arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement against Plaintiffs and their patients, it is unconstitutionally vague,” lawyers who challenged Arizona’s law wrote.

HOW MANY STATES HAVE THESE LAWS?

Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Kansas and Missouri all have personhood laws.

Georgia’s law is maybe the most far-reaching, granting specific rights including tax breaks and child support to unborn children. It took effect July 20 after a federal appeals court ruled in its favor. A federal court has put Arizona’s law on hold , at least for now.

Kansas’ 2013 law has had little practical effect since 2019, when the state Supreme Court declared abortion a fundamental right in the state. Kansans will vote Tuesday on whether to amend the state constitution to overturn that decision and allow state lawmakers to restrict or ban abortion.

In 2018, Alabama voters adopted a state constitutional amendment ensuring “the protection of the rights of the unborn child.” A 2019 abortion ban law referenced the amendment, but did not repeat the personhood standard.

Voters in several other states have rejected state constitutional amendments granting personhood, including in Colorado in 2008, 2010 and 2014, Mississippi in 2011 and North Dakota in 2014

WHAT MAKES A PERSONHOOD LAW DIFFERENT FROM AN ABORTION BAN?

There was a schism in the anti-abortion movement about a decade ago. Some saw personhood as impractical, especially as electoral and legislative defeats began to pile up. But personhood proponents argued that those other abortion opponents lacked moral clarity.

“The big difference between the personhood movement and the anti abortion-movement is that the personhood movement holds all innocent human lives as cherished and deserving of equal protection under the law. And that includes every human life in the world,” said Ricado Davis, president of Georgia Right to Life. The National Right to Life Committee cut ties with Georgia Right to Life in 2014 after it opposed bills that restricted abortion but allowed exceptions for rape and incest.

Still, the broad influence of personhood is clear in the wave of bills in states that ban abortion once a “detectable human heartbeat” is present , usually around six weeks. Such wording was inspired in part by the idea that people can embrace cardiac activity as the moment of aliveness, even though a heart is not then fully developed.

DOES THIS MEAN ABORTIONS WILL LEAD TO MURDER PROSECUTIONS?

Supporters of the laws say they only envision prosecuting abortion providers who provide illegal procedures. For example, Georgia has a criminal law that makes illegal abortions punishable by up to 10 years in prison. But opponents fear prosecutors could bring murder charges against providers and women who get an abortion, that women may be in criminal jeopardy if they miscarry, and that people who help someone get an out-of-state abortion could also face prosecution.

“If you are a person, and as a fetus you were aborted, they would be defining that as murder. Or they could potentially define that as murder,” said Jolynn Dellinger, a lecturer at Duke University Law School.

The standard of personhood already influences laws that allow people to be prosecuted in the death of a fetus and its mother if they kill a pregnant woman. At least 25 states already classify drug use during pregnancy as child abuse or neglect, according to a 2019 study by Dr. Laura Faherty, a researcher and pediatrics professor at Boston University. National Advocates for Pregnant Women, which supports abortion rights, found 1,331 arrests or detentions of women for crimes related to their pregnancy from 2006 to 2020.

“Fetal personhood becomes, I think, an issue of controlling women and pregnant people and not trusting them or allowing them to make decisions about their body and their fetus,” said Rebecca Kluchin, a professor at California State University, Sacramento, who studies the history of abortion.

WHAT ARE SOME OTHER POSSIBLE PERSONHOOD CONSEQUENCES?

A Texas woman won attention following the Supreme Court ruling by claiming she could drive in a high occupancy vehicle lane that requires two people in a vehicle because she was 34 weeks pregnant.

Supporters of abortion rights have repeatedly expressed fear that personhood laws could harm in vitro fertilization by giving rights to embryos that are created and then frozen. Georgia’s law sidesteps this issue by only giving rights to embryos in the womb. But if multiple embryos are implanted, Georgia’s law could require a woman to carry multiple children to birth, experts warn. Alabama’s amendment does not specify how its standard of personhood affects issues other than abortion, and in vitro fertilization has not been affected, abortion rights supporters say.

Georgia’s law says a woman can seek child support during pregnancy, up to the amount of her medical and other pregnancy-related expenses. It also allows her to claim an unborn child as a dependent on state income taxes, although the state has yet to clarify how that will work. The law also says unborn children should be counted in the state’s population when state government makes determinations based on the number of residents, although the federal government takes the Census.

Associated Press writers Kim Chandler in Montgomery, Alabama, and John Hanna in Topeka, Kansas, contributed.

Find AP’s full coverage of the overturning of Roe v. Wade at: https://apnews.com/hub/abortion

Key Arguments From Both Sides of the Abortion Debate

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Many points come up in the abortion debate . Here's a look at abortion from both sides : 10 arguments for abortion and 10 arguments against abortion, for a total of 20 statements that represent a range of topics as seen from both sides.

Pro-Life Arguments

• Since life begins at conception,   abortion is akin to murder as it is the act of taking human life. Abortion is in direct defiance of the commonly accepted idea of the sanctity of human life.
• No civilized society permits one human to intentionally harm or take the life of another human without punishment, and abortion is no different.
• Adoption is a viable alternative to abortion and accomplishes the same result. And with 1.5 million American families wanting to adopt a child, there is no such thing as an unwanted child.
• An abortion can result in medical complications later in life; the risk of ectopic pregnancies is increased if other factors such as smoking are present, the chance of a miscarriage increases in some cases,   and pelvic inflammatory disease also increases.  
• In the instance of rape and incest, taking certain drugs soon after the event can ensure that a woman will not get pregnant.   Abortion punishes the unborn child who committed no crime; instead, it is the perpetrator who should be punished.
• Abortion should not be used as another form of contraception.
• For women who demand complete control of their body, control should include preventing the risk of unwanted pregnancy through the responsible use of contraception or, if that is not possible, through abstinence .
• Many Americans who pay taxes are opposed to abortion, therefore it's morally wrong to use tax dollars to fund abortion.
• Those who choose abortions are often minors or young women with insufficient life experience to understand fully what they are doing. Many have lifelong regrets afterward.
• Abortion sometimes causes psychological pain and stress.  

Pro-Choice Arguments

• Nearly all abortions take place in the first trimester when a fetus is attached by the placenta and umbilical cord to the mother.   As such, its health is dependent on her health, and cannot be regarded as a separate entity as it cannot exist outside her womb.
• The concept of personhood is different from the concept of human life. Human life occurs at conception,   but fertilized eggs used for in vitro fertilization are also human lives and those not implanted are routinely thrown away. Is this murder, and if not, then how is abortion murder?
• Adoption is not an alternative to abortion because it remains the woman's choice whether or not to give her child up for adoption. Statistics show that very few women who give birth choose to give up their babies; less than 3% of White unmarried women and less than 2% of Black​ unmarried women.
• Abortion is a safe medical procedure. The vast majority of women who have an abortion do so in their first trimester.   Medical abortions have a very low risk of serious complications and do not affect a woman's health or future ability to become pregnant or give birth.  
• In the case of rape or incest, forcing a woman made pregnant by this violent act would cause further psychological harm to the victim.   Often a woman is too afraid to speak up or is unaware she is pregnant, thus the morning after pill is ineffective in these situations.
• Abortion is not used as a form of contraception . Pregnancy can occur even with contraceptive use. Few women who have abortions do not use any form of birth control, and that is due more to individual carelessness than to the availability of abortion.  
• The ability of a woman to have control of her body is critical to civil rights. Take away her reproductive choice and you step onto a slippery slope. If the government can force a woman to continue a pregnancy, what about forcing a woman to use contraception or undergo sterilization?
• Taxpayer dollars are used to enable poor women to access the same medical services as rich women, and abortion is one of these services. Funding abortion is no different from funding a war in the Mideast. For those who are opposed, the place to express outrage is in the voting booth.
• Teenagers who become mothers have grim prospects for the future. They are much more likely to leave school; receive inadequate prenatal care; or develop mental health problems.  
• Like any other difficult situation, abortion creates stress. Yet the American Psychological Association found that stress was greatest prior to an abortion and that there was no evidence of post-abortion syndrome.  

Additional References

• Alvarez, R. Michael, and John Brehm. " American Ambivalence Towards Abortion Policy: Development of a Heteroskedastic Probit Model of Competing Values ." American Journal of Political Science 39.4 (1995): 1055–82. Print.
• Armitage, Hannah. " Political Language, Uses and Abuses: How the Term 'Partial Birth' Changed the Abortion Debate in the United States ." Australasian Journal of American Studies 29.1 (2010): 15–35. Print.
• Gillette, Meg. " Modern American Abortion Narratives and the Century of Silence ." Twentieth Century Literature 58.4 (2012): 663–87. Print.
• Kumar, Anuradha. " Disgust, Stigma, and the Politics of Abortion ." Feminism & Psychology 28.4 (2018): 530–38. Print.
• Ziegler, Mary. " The Framing of a Right to Choose: Roe V. Wade and the Changing Debate on Abortion Law ." Law and History Review 27.2 (2009): 281–330. Print.

“ Life Begins at Fertilization with the Embryo's Conception .”  Princeton University , The Trustees of Princeton University.

“ Long-Term Risks of Surgical Abortion .”  GLOWM, doi:10.3843/GLOWM.10441

Patel, Sangita V, et al. “ Association between Pelvic Inflammatory Disease and Abortions .”  Indian Journal of Sexually Transmitted Diseases and AIDS , Medknow Publications, July 2010, doi:10.4103/2589-0557.75030

Raviele, Kathleen Mary. “ Levonorgestrel in Cases of Rape: How Does It Work? ”  The Linacre Quarterly , Maney Publishing, May 2014, doi:10.1179/2050854914Y.0000000017

Reardon, David C. “ The Abortion and Mental Health Controversy: A Comprehensive Literature Review of Common Ground Agreements, Disagreements, Actionable Recommendations, and Research Opportunities .”  SAGE Open Medicine , SAGE Publications, 29 Oct. 2018, doi:10.1177/2050312118807624

“ CDCs Abortion Surveillance System FAQs .” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 25 Nov. 2019.

Bixby Center for Reproductive Health. “ Complications of Surgical Abortion : Clinical Obstetrics and Gynecology .”  LWW , doi:10.1097/GRF.0b013e3181a2b756

" Sexual Violence: Prevalence, Dynamics and Consequences ." World Health Organizaion.

Homco, Juell B, et al. “ Reasons for Ineffective Pre-Pregnancy Contraception Use in Patients Seeking Abortion Services .”  Contraception , U.S. National Library of Medicine, Dec. 2009, doi:10.1016/j.contraception.2009.05.127

" Working With Pregnant & Parenting Teens Tip Sheet ." U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Major, Brenda, et al. " Abortion and Mental Health: Evaluating the Evidence ." American Psychological Association, doi:10.1037/a0017497

• The Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice Debate
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• The Roe v. Wade Supreme Court Decision
• Biography of Margaret Sanger
• Is Abortion Legal in Every State?
• Biography of Norma McCorvey, 'Roe' in the Roe v. Wade Case
• Supreme Court Decisions and Women's Reproductive Rights
• Pro-Choice Quotes
• Roe v. Wade
• 1970s Feminism Timeline
• 8 Major Issues Facing Women Today
• The Best Quotes From 19th Century Feminist Lucy Stone
• Oppression and Women's History
• Understanding Why Abortion Is Legal in the United States

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100 Original and Nuanced Abortion Essay Topics for Thoughtful Discussions

Abortion is a highly sensitive and polarizing topic, which makes it difficult to write about. Even among other controversial themes, essay topics about abortion are in a league of their own, splitting people along and across the lines of partisan divide, religious affiliation, and other, usually strong predictors of their views. As a rule, you are expected to have a clearly defined position that you make known in the title and defend vehemently from the very first sentence of your essay.

However, in the abortion essay topics we suggest in this post, we tried to balance categorical stances with those more open to different ideas, ready to explore and take a step forward to meet the opposition somewhere in the middle. If we ever want to reach a consensus on this topic, we must keep the conversation going, even if, as it seems at the moment, it is going nowhere.

Persuasive Essay Topics on Abortion

In this section, find specific topics about abortion for a persuasive essay. Some of them are linked to the free samples you can read to inform your opinion or better understand the opposing side's arguments. If you need a sample on topics that a not linked, you can always request an individually customized model paper from our essay service .

• Prenatal screening and abortion: increased awareness and preparedness or eugenics?
• Should abortion be legal argumentative essay
• Pros and cons of abortion essay
• Kantian and utilitarian view on abortion
• Summary of the essays on why abortion is wrong and counterarguments to abortion proponents
• What can be done to reduce the number of abortions while keeping termination a safe and accessible option?
• Do you think morning-after pills should be legal or outlawed following the abortion ban?
• Do you think a woman seeking abortion in a state that does not allow the procedure should be permitted to travel out of state to get the abortion, or should it still be considered a violation of state laws?
• If abortion is made illegal and punishable by law, do you think it's appropriate to introduce punishment for forced impregnation (either rape or deceit like removing protection stealthily?) If so, what punishment would you deem fit in each case?
• Do you believe that the religious sentiments of the citizens should have a bearing on the abortion debate, or should it stay strictly in the legal and medical plains?
• Adverse effects of abortion on fertility and health should be made known to any woman seeking the procedure. Agree or disagree?
• Abortion restriction is a political tool punishing those who already face overlapping systems of oppression. Discuss.
• Unrestricted abortion will inevitably lead to eugenics as technology progresses, so it must be stopped
• Criminalizing abortion contradicts the constitutional right of the women
• Forcing pregnancy and childbirth on unwilling women hurts children as much as it does mothers
• In the abortion debate, the middle ground is sorely missing. Here is where we could start
• Can pro-life philosophy be reconciled with assisted reproduction technology that results in live birth but disposes of unimplanted embryos?
• If abortion is made illegal, do you believe it is ethical to sterilize nulliparous young women per their demand?
• The criminalization of abortion will bring all miscarriages under suspicion punishing women who already suffer gravely
• Bringing a child you are not able to care for into the world is disrespectful to human life; therefore, abortion must be allowed

Abortion Argumentative Essay Topics

Most abortion topics for argumentative essays are too categorical and fail to move the discussion forward. We offer you not only to express your opinion on the big question in a definite "yes" or "no" fashion but to explore the issue in all its complexity via a more nuanced approach. Below you will find essay topics on abortion and other closely related bioethical issues that invite a thoughtful discussion.

• Where do you stand in the abortion rights debate? What are the crucial arguments of your persuasion?
• Do you believe that better adoption policies could lead to more women choosing to give birth rather than terminate unplanned pregnancies?
• Do you believe we should focus our efforts on preventing unwanted pregnancies rather than criminalizing abortion?
• Do you agree that even if the fetus has a right to life, it does not have a right to use a woman's body without her permission?
• Do you believe that the development of an artificial uterus would solve the abortion debate? If not, what other issues would arise instead?
• Do you believe both parents must be involved in the abortion decision?
• Do you believe bodily autonomy trumps all other considerations, even in the case of selective abortion?
• You can only ban safe abortion: the dangers of illegal abortion and infanticide under the ban
• Do you believe there could be "reasonable regulation on abortion" without a complete ban?
• Do you believe abortions should be covered by health insurance policies?
• Do you believe that the state should take up all medical expenses and the responsibility for the child should it deny abortion to a woman?
• Do you believe in personhood from conception, from birth, or later in life? Prove your point
• Do you believe it's ethical to deny abortion to rape and child abuse survivors?
• If abortion is made illegal in your state, what punishment would you deem appropriate for perpetration? Who should be punished (the woman, the abortion provider, anyone who knew and failed to report)?
• When Roe is overturned, do you think Griswold v. Connecticut and Eisenstadt v. Baird could be the next targets? Would you support or oppose their overturn?
• Abortion is an issue of broader civil rights struggle, especially for low-income women and POC. Discuss.
• Do you believe pregnancy termination should be allowed in case of severe fetal anomalies?
• Do you believe there is a threshold to personhood? Where should it lie (conception, fetal heartbeat, sentience, viability)?
• Fetus as a patient: what are doctor's moral obligations to the mother and to the not-yet-born
• Do you believe there can be a consensus between conservative and liberal views on abortion? What would it look like? What would you suggest as a middle ground?

Ethics of Abortion Research Questions

The undeniable fact is that however polarizing the issue might be, we, as a democratic society, must come to a consensus acceptable to most citizens. In contraversial issues like abortion, where law, health care, morality, reproductive freedom, bodily autonomy, religion, and intimate life are intertwined into the Gordian knot, the help of philosophers and ethicists is required for a nuanced solution. Here are some suggestions for research questions about abortion that look at abortion research topics from the perspective of ethics, philosophy, and morality:

• Ethics of abortion in case of detected disability of the fetus
• Ethics of abortion in case of life-threatening condition in the mother-to-be
• Ethics of selective abortion (sex, race selection, etc.)
• Abortion and mental health: tokophobia, postpartum depression, infanticide, and suicide
• Prenatal diagnosis, wrongful birth, and wrongful life: a global perspective on bioethical issues
• Ethics behind pro-life arguments and their main contradictions
• Ethics behind pro-choice arguments and their main contradictions
• Bioethics of IVF, savior siblings, stem cells, and genetic research in abortion rights debate
• Religion, morality, and reproductive decisions: moral dilemmas about abortion and spirituality
• Christianity and morality of abortion
• Islam and the ethics of abortion
• Judaism and morality of abortion
• The dilemma of defining acceptable cutoffs for abortion procedures: ethical vs. legal issues
• Moral decisions going into saving either mother or the child during traumatic and dangerous pregnancy and birth
• Ethics of parental involvement in teenage abortion: prior and beyond the age of consent
• Points to consider when covering abortion: ethical journalism, empathy, and respect
• Ethical dilemma for clinicians: respect for patient's autonomy vs. respect for country's law on abortion
• Quality of life consideration in medical abortion decisions (psychological wellbeing and physical health)
• What makes a human: moral arguments about the humanness of the fetus in the abortion debate
• The social construction of humanity and morality in the abortion debate: natural, immutable values vs. socially constructed

Abortion Controversy Research Paper Topics

Too often, abortion paper topics simplify the issue and search for one clear-cut solution that decides the debate once and for all. However, life is much more complicated. If you are not afraid of facing all the uncomfortable realities and finding nuanced answers, try exploring one of these topics:

• A historic low was reached in 2017. Why demand for abortion spiked at the anticipation of Roe overturn?
• Fifty years of anti-abortion campaigns: timeline of restriction policies
• Sexual orientation and exposure to violence among patients seeking termination
• Women prosecuted for miscarrying: the grey area of anti-abortion legislation
• Re-traumatization, stigma, and disability: Case studies of child abuse victims who were denied abortion
• The trauma of the unwanted: psychological impact for people whose mothers were denied abortion
• The vicious cycle of abuse: child brides and shotgun weddings in anti-abortion communities
• Denied abortion, co-parenting with your abuser: when biological fatherhood gives the rapist power over the victim's life
• Maternity homes for unwed mothers: the reality of sexual double-standards of the past
• Abortion, closed adoption, open adoption, single-motherhood: tradeoffs of each option for women dealing with unplanned pregnancy
• The role of ineffective sex education and abstinence-only programs in teenage pregnancy numbers and demand for abortion
• The adverse effects of the "global gag rule" and Helms Amendment on individual access to health care in underserved communities in the US and globally
• The disproportionate impact of Hyde's amendment on POC: uncovering racial health disparities
• Shaming, ideology, and misinformation: fake abortion clinics controversy
• Data misrepresentation in the abortion debate: a case study
• Adolescent's right to confidential care when considering abortion
• Abortion stigmatization via pitting "good" vs. "bad" reasons for abortion
• The Asian "missing women" generation and other consequences of selective abortions
• Down syndrome awareness and abortion laws
• Genetic research, unrestricted abortion, and the eugenics controversy

Demographics of Abortion Research Paper Topics

The following demographics-related abortion topics for research paper give a comprehensive outline of patient characteristics, their met and unmet reproductive needs, and analyze how policies influence the lives of various social groups, including the most disadvantaged ones.

• Reasons women seek abortion beyond gestational cutoffs
• Who gets an abortion in the US: a portrait of the typical patient
• Abortion numbers: age dynamics since (the 1980s to 2020s trends)
• Factors contributing to the decline in abortion figures in the past decades
• Income gap and health care access: economic factors in termination decisions
• Abortion perspectives in Red States post-Roe vs. Wade overturn
• Future of the IVF treatment and genetic research after the end of Roe
• Abortion law and statistics in each state
• Abortion vs. childbirth: Complications, morbidity, and mortality in young girls
• Politics of abortion: ensuring access to abortion, morning-after pills, and contraception post-Roe
• Abortion as contraception: verifying myths with data
• Traveling state lines for care: before and after Roe overturn
• State funding of abortion under Medicaid
• Gender-inclusive care for people who can get pregnant
• Reasons behind the reversal of the long-term decline in US abortion rates
• Abortion policies at the US prisons and jails
• Differences in abortion rates between US population by country of origin
• Disparities in abortion rates among your state's population by race/ethnicity, age, and income level
• Abortion issues in Latin America
• Reproductive rights on the African continent

These, of course, are only general suggestions. Feel free to narrow down any of the topics and tailor your research to your state, city, or community. If you need more inspiration, you are welcome to free samples from our library of essays. Also, we encourage you to avail of the personalized help of our writing experts for topic suggestions, unique model papers, editing assistance, and more. Stay curious and empathetic to keep this conversation going!

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Jana Rooheart came to WOWESSAYS™ with a mission to put together and then slice and dice our vast practical experience in crafting all kinds of academic papers. Jana is an aspired blogger with rich expertise in psychology, digital learning tools, and creative writing. In this blog, she willingly shares tricks of pencraft and mind-altering ideas about academic writing any student will find utterly beneficial.

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US: Abortion Access is a Human Right

Q&A on How Ban Will Violate Rights of Women, Girls, and Pregnant People

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(Washington, DC) – Reproductive rights, including the right to access abortion, are grounded in internationally recognized human rights. Human Rights Watch released a new question-and-answer document that articulates the human rights imperative, guided by international law, to ensure access to abortion, which is critical to guaranteeing many fundamental human rights for women, girls, and pregnant people.

Q&A: Access to Abortion is a Human Right

“Guaranteeing access to abortion is not only a public health imperative, it is a human rights imperative as well,” said Macarena Sáez , women’s rights director at Human Rights Watch. “Though more governments are taking steps to increase access to abortion, others are impeding or outright banning it, putting the rights of women, girls, and pregnant people at risk.”

The question-and-answer document addresses questions around the human rights impacts of restricted abortion access, the health consequences of unsafe abortions, and more.

Where safe and legal abortion services are restricted or not fully available, a number of human rights may be at risk, including the rights to life, to health, to information, to nondiscrimination and equality, to be free from cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, to privacy, to decide the number and spacing of children, to liberty, to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress, and to freedom of conscience and religion.

Banning or restricting abortion services does not eliminate the need for abortion. Rather than lower abortion rates, restricting abortion access increases the risk of unsafe procedures and creates a danger of introducing criminal laws so that people are reported to the police or prosecuted for suspected abortions. These risks especially affect people living in poverty or who are otherwise subject to systemic discrimination, Human Rights Watch said.  

In the question-and-answer document, Human Rights Watch details how, when abortion is restricted or banned, the worst impact is on girls and marginalized groups, including Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, people living in economic poverty, and sexual and gender minorities. |

The United States is a party to several international treaties that recognize the rights to life, to privacy and bodily autonomy and integrity, nondiscrimination, and freedom from cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, among others.

Abortion is already inaccessible for many pregnant people in many parts of the US, inconsistent with the country’s international human rights obligations. By removing constitutional protection of the right to access legal abortion, the US will fall further out of line with its human rights obligations, leading to rights violations against many people.  

The US already has the highest maternal mortality rate when compared with 10 similarly situated high-income countries, and Black women in the United States are more likely to die than white women from a pregnancy-related cause, according to the US Centers for Disease Control. 

The US is out of step with the global trend of expanding abortion access. In recent years, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ireland, Mexico, South Korea, and Thailand, among others, have decriminalized abortion or loosened restrictions. Many of these countries relied on human rights commitments and arguments when making this change.

The human rights on which a right to abortion access is predicated are set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention Against Torture, the Convention for Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, among others.

United Nations human rights treaty bodies regularly call on governments to decriminalize abortion in all cases, and to ensure access to safe, legal abortion at a minimum in certain circumstances.

Lack of access to safe, legal abortion can result in forced pregnancy, including among girls.

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QUESTIONS ON ABORTION AND THE STRUGGLE AGAINST TYRANNY

Charles K.Bellinger

[This essay was published in The Crucible: A Journal for Christian Graduate Students 3 (1992): 3-8]

Abstract : This article questions the commonly held assumption that the pro-choice and pro-life camps inhabit completely different philosophical and moral worlds. My investigation into the motivations and arguments of activists on both sides has led to the observation that the activists already share common ground in a very important sense; both sides see themselves as struggling against tyranny. The two camps diverge by maintaining differing intellectual conceptions of the tyranny against which they are fighting. The essay concludes with the articulation of a number of important philosophical questions which have been raised by the preceding observations.  

    The participants in the abortion debate seem, most of the time, to presuppose that the beliefs (moral/ scientific/ religious/ legal/ philosophical) of the pro-choice and pro-life camps are widely divergent at many points. The fact that a great cultural conflict is taking place over abortion seems to be a prima facie justification of this assumption. Yet this assumption, which to a large extent is undeniably true, may be serving to hinder a clear understanding of the nature of the conflict, as long as it remains what it is: an (unquestioned) assumption. I would like to pull this presupposition out of the shadows and into the light of day, so that a critique of it can lead to a valid perception of the actual outlines of the conflict.

    In this essay I will examine the arguments of a pro-choice author and a pro-life author. I will try to understand the basic motivations which seem to drive them to adopt their philosophical stances and argumentative positions. I will not presuppose that they live in totally different intellectual worlds; instead I will listen to their arguments with an ear for possible unrecognized similarities between them. In this way, we will arrive at a clearer understanding of the political passions which drive the continuing debate over abortion.

    In 1966 pro-choice activist Lawrence Lader published a book entitled Abortion , in which he anticipated the essentials of the reasoning behind the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Lader described the pre-Roe social situation in which a relatively small number of abortions were performed legally in hospitals, while a large number were performed illegally in underground abortion mills. Legislation regarding abortion was inconsistent from state to state, and some women who sought abortions went to other countries to have them. Lader argued that since early abortions are statistically safer for the woman than childbirth, and since the morality of such abortions is a matter of religious and philosophical dispute, the state ought not to prevent women from having legal access to abortion services:

A hospital abortion is as safe and simple as any other operation, requiring fifteen or twenty minutes of surgery and rarely keeping a patient hospitalized more than overnight. Yet a million or more women each year, automatically excluded from the realm of legality, are forced to seek out a private abortionist, to attempt abortion on themselves, or, if they are unmarried, to bear the child illegitimately. They may well wonder what bitter twist of medical logic, legal hair-splitting, or legislative inhumanity denied them the right to a safe and sacrosanct hospital abortion. [1]

Lader argued that the original intent of the anti-abortion laws which were passed in the 19th century was to protect the health of women from the dangers of quack abortionists, but since legal abortions had become so safe, the continued presence of these laws had the opposite of their intended effect, forcing women into a dangerous back-alley underground. [2]

    At that time, Lader was clearly in favor of a complete liberalization of abortion laws, and he repeatedly suggested throughout the book that the main impediment to such a liberalization was the power of the "Roman Catholic hierarchy." He spoke of situations in which "one Catholic doctor" on a hospital abortion review committee was able to veto women's requests for abortions. [3] He described the idea that a fetus is a person from the moment of conception as a "minority dogma" by which the majority of Americans was being "tyrannized." [4] He summed up what can be called the standard pro-choice "argument from pluralism" in this way:

    Every shade of belief must be protected under our democratic system, including the belief of the Catholic or anyone else that life starts at the moment of conception. The whole basis of abortion reform is to insure that all rights are respected.     No religion or group, on the other hand, should impose its position on the rest of the nation. No religion, by demanding adherence to the status quo, by refusing to allow the slightest legal reform, should use the power of the law to force its belief on others....     Richard Cardinal Cushing, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Boston, has already proclaimed in eloquent language: "Catholics do not need the support of civil law to be faithful to their own religious convictions and they do not seek to impose by law their moral views on other members of society." Unfortunately, the Cardinal's pronouncement remains unheeded by most of the Catholic hierarchy.     As long as the Catholic Church, or any faith, continues to block legislation allowing individual conscience and free choice in abortion, the core of our democratic system is crippled. The right to abortion is the foundation of Society's long struggle to guarantee that every child comes into this world wanted, loved, and cared for. The right to abortion, along with all birth-control measures, must establish the Century of the Wanted Child. [5]

    Earlier, Lader had written a book entitled, The Bold Brahmins: New England's War Against Slavery: 1831-1863 . In Lader's mind there was a very definite connection between the struggle to abolish slavery in the 19th century and the struggle to abolish legal restrictions on access to abortion in the 20th. The last chapter of his book on abortion is entitled, "Legalized Abortion: The Final Freedom," and on the last page of the book one finds these paragraphs:

"When rulers have inverted their functions and enacted wickedness into a law which treads down the inalienable rights of man to such a degree as this," abolitionist minister Theodore Parker of Boston declared after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Bill in 1850, "then I know no ruler but God, no law but natural Justice."     What rulers are we to acknowledge today? We have remained silent too long. We pay obeisance on the surface to laws we disregard in secret. We maintain a system by hypocritical silence when the time has come to seek natural justice. If men and women are going to break U.S. abortion laws at least a million times a year, let them declare their freedom boldly. Let them announce it at their clubs and town meetings and proclaim it in the press. Let them affirm with conviction: No law is a real law that prohibits the inalienable rights of human beings. [6]

    I will now pose the question: "What motivates pro-choice activists to think and act as they do?" It would seem that Lader is motivated by (a) a concern to end back-alley abortions, because they harm women, and (b) a concern to abolish laws which restrict access to abortion, because they are a product of the tyrannical imposition of the moral beliefs of some citizens on others, and result in a diminishment of a woman's freedom to make decisions about the course which her life will take.

    We will now consider the story of Bernard Nathanson, an obstetrician/ gynecologist who was one of the main leaders of the pro-choice movement in the late '60s and early '70s. Since that time he has changed his mind about the morality of abortion and has become a leader of the pro-life movement.

    In the late '60s, Nathanson was a close associate of Lawrence Lader. They, along with others, founded NARAL, the National Association for Repeal of Abortion Laws (later changed to the National Abortion Rights Action League). The lobbying efforts of this group contributed to the liberalization of abortion laws in the State of New York before Roe v. Wade, and no doubt had an indirect effect on that decision itself. Nathanson told the story of his involvement in this group in his 1979 book, Aborting America . Nathanson described the various characters which he met during that era, and recreated the atmosphere of the pre-Roe days with accounts of the illegal abortion subculture, the appearance at hospitals of women who were suffering the after-effects of botched abortions, the under-the-table referral of women to abortionists in Puerto Rico and elsewhere, and the way in which hospital abortion committees were used to rubber stamp requests for "therapeutic" abortions.

    Nathanson was a respected physician in New York City, but he had, in effect, one foot in the abortion subculture through his contacts and his involvement in pro-choice activism. Nathanson served as the director of a large abortion clinic in New York City for a period of a year and a half. In the years which followed his resignation from that position, he began to reflect on the social revolution in which he had been involved, and came to have doubts about the morality of unrestricted access to abortion. In 1974 he published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine entitled "Deeper into Abortion," in which he expressed in public his growing doubts about the ethical legitimacy of the pro-choice cause which he had been championing for years. The following are excerpts from this important article.

    Some time ago--after a tenure of a year and a half--I resigned as director of the Center for Reproductive and Sexual Health. The Center had performed 60,000 abortions with no maternal deaths--an outstanding record of which we are proud. However, I am deeply troubled by my own increasing certainty that I had in fact presided over 60,000 deaths.     There is no longer serious doubt in my mind that human life exists within the womb from the very onset of pregnancy, despite the fact that the nature of the intrauterine life has been the subject of considerable dispute in the past. Electrocardiographic evidence of heart function has been established in embryos as early as six weeks. Electroencephalographic recordings of human brain activity have been noted in embryos at eight weeks.     We must courageously face the fact--finally--that human life of a special order is being taken. And since the vast majority of pregnancies are carried successfully to term, abortion must be seen as the interruption of a process that would otherwise have produced a citizen of the world. Denial of this reality is the crassest kind of moral evasiveness.     Somewhere in the vast philosophic plateau between the two implacably opposed camps--past the slogans, past the pamphlets, past even the demonstrations and the legislative threats--lies the infinitely agonizing truth. We are taking life, and the deliberate taking of life, even of a special order and under special circumstances, is an inexpressibly serious matter. [7]

    In 1983 Nathanson published a second book called The Abortion Papers: Inside the Abortion Mentality . In this work he discussed coverage of the abortion issue in the media, the ongoing developments in fetology, and the "anti-Catholic strategy" of the pro-choice movement, which Nathanson claims was formulated chiefly by his former associate, Lawrence Lader. Nathanson has very harsh words for his former colleague. Referring to Lader's book on the abolitionists, Nathanson says:

    For Lader to have equated himself with these great men, even by implication, and drawn parallels between the abortion monster and the ineffable purity of the Brahmin cause, is a despicable claim in itself.     I believe the abortion ethic is fatally and forever flawed by the immorality of the means of its victory. A political victory achieved by such odious tactics is at best an unstable tyranny spawned by an unscrupulous and unprincipled minority. At the very least this disclosure of those odious tactics should compel those who are uneasy with permissive abortion to re-examine the issue. I believe that an America which permits a junta of moral thugs to foist an evil of incalculable dimensions upon it, and continues to permit that evil to flower, creates for itself a deadly legacy: a millenium of shame. [8]

In the Epilogue to The Abortion Papers , Nathanson placed the abortion debate within the broader context of American history in this way:

    Abortion is the most bitterly contested civil rights issue of our time. The nature of the oppressed, a defenseless, mute, and invisible minority (though increasingly less so with the advent of realtime ultrasound and other technologies) sets it apart from all other civil rights conflicts. The most eloquent angry spokesmen for the black civil rights movement were black themselves. Women speak and write passionately for the feminist cause. Gays parade through the streets of our cities decrying sexual prejudice and demanding the nation's approval. The human unborn is the ultimate civil rights victim. It cannot be heard; it cannot be read; it cannot demonstrate or parade through the streets. It cannot even be arrested and thrown into jail for civil disorder. The victim's silent anguished pleas are heard only by the pro-life cause. Paradoxically, Americans who have historically been deeply sympathetic to the plight of the oppressed and the downtrodden turn a deaf ear to these pleas. Congressman Henry Hyde, that lion of pro-life, has characterized the movement as one of the most admirable in history since those who labor in this cause reap absolutely no material gain from its success. It is a movement distinguished from all others in this nation's history, excepting perhaps the Abolitionists, by its pure and perfect altruism. Compare the crystalline selflessness of the pro-life cause to the shabby materialism of the abortion industry and the ruthless self-gratification of the Abortion People. [9]

    When Nathanson was a pro-choice activist, it seems that his primary motivation was a concern for the health of women who were involved in the illegal abortion underground. But as his thinking on the morality of abortion gradually changed, he began to see the fetus as a very important being whose life ought not to be ended except under extraordinary circumstances. He came to see the pro-choice platform as morally inadequate and tyrannical since it did not grant any real ethical importance to the existence of the fetus. It seems that he, as a doctor motivated to protect the health of his patients, came to acknowledge the fetus as another patient alongside its mother.

    I have briefly summarized the arguments concerning abortion which have been put forward by two authors. We have seen that the idea of struggling against tyranny is a vital component of each author's self-understanding. Further exploration of essays and books on abortion, by both male and female authors, would serve to strengthen this observation--that both camps see themselves as fighting against oppression and for freedom. [10] It seems that there is a tacit agreement between pro-choice and pro-life activists on the idea that tyrannical conditions exist or could possibly exist, and that there is a moral imperative to struggle against these conditions. We can attempt to articulate this tacit understanding by suggesting that both camps are working with the inchoate idea that tyranny is present when a law or a governmental policy or a social practice in some way harms human beings by adversely affecting the developing course of their life. The two camps diverge in that they focus their vision on different "objects" which are ostensibly being tyrannized--either the woman or the unborn child.

    When we think about the abortion debate as it has developed in the context of American cultural history, the preceding analysis makes sense. What did the American colonists do at the time of the Revolution? They threw off the tyranny of the King of England. What was at the heart of the Civil War? Was it not a struggle between those who saw slavery as tyrannical and those who saw the power of the federal government to interfere with the states as tyrannical? Have not Americans in this century struggled against the "tyranny" of the Germans, the Japanese, the Communists, and Saddam Hussein? It is clear that Americans want to see themselves as people who are active participants in an ongoing struggle to overcome tyranny and expand the sphere of human freedom.

    I am suggesting that if we consider the abortion debate as a clash between two philosophically divergent camps, who live in completely different intellectual worlds, then we are failing to recognize a crucially important element of the debate. In fact, the two camps are products of the same "world" that is American history. Perhaps this fact is so obvious that it is too painful to look at squarely. When one is attempting to separate oneself from "tyranny" it is very difficult to see one's opponents as one's philosophical siblings.

    My primary purpose in this essay is not to provide answers for the abortion debate, but to facilitate its advancement by suggesting thought-provoking questions. Too often the way in which people think about the problem of abortion is like a broken record or a repeating tape loop. The same arguments get hurled at the "opponents" day after day, protest after protest, year after year. If my thoughts can serve to break this tape loop and challenge people to ask new questions, then I have succeeded in my purpose.

    1) Why do different people have different understandings of the tyranny against which they are struggling? This question opens up problems of personal biography which can be approached from the perspectives of education, psychology, sociology, philosophical anthropology, and religion. For instance, we can ask: How did the social/ philosophical/ religious environment in which a person was raised affect the way in which that individual thinks about tyranny in general, and the problem of abortion in particular? If a person was raised in a particular environment and has rejected that upbringing and "gone over to the other side," what are the main factors which contributed to this "conversion"? Why are some articles or books which an individual may read influential in shaping that person's thought? How does "peer pressure" shape a person's moral views? How has an individual's study of history in high school and/or college affected his or her perception of social injustice and the current political groups which are struggling on behalf of "freedom"?

    2) What is the significance of the language of "rights" in the abortion debate? When one camp argues that women's "reproductive rights" must be protected and another camp argues that the fetus' "right to life" must be protected, we seem to have reached an impasse which the language of rights, in and of itself, cannot lead us out of. [11] We are now led to ask, who is right about rights? Where do rights come from? The Constitution? The Creator? The social contract? The human will to power? Is access to health care a right? Is employment a right? Is housing a right? How do we know what rights "exist"? How do we know that "rights" exist at all? Alasdair MacIntyre is one contemporary philosopher who has argued that the language of rights is a grand philosophical mistake which has been foisted upon us by the Enlightenment. He argues that the rhetoric of rights is an intellectual cul-de-sac which was created in the wake of modernity's rejection of the Greek understanding of virtue and the Christian understanding of charity. How would one answer MacIntyre's claim that rights have as much reality as do unicorns and witches? [12] These are the sorts of questions which rarely if ever enter the minds of the activists, who seem not to be fully aware of the profound historical, ontological, and epistemological problems which are generated by the language of rights.

    3) How ought we go about the task of defining (understanding) tyranny? How should we apply ourselves to the problem of developing a more adequate and rationally coherent understanding of tyranny? Should we read Plato and allow ourselves to be tutored by him concerning the tyrannical personality? Would we have to have attained a certain degree of intellectual maturity in order to understand what he was saying? Would we read the Bible and treat it as a source of enlightenment concerning the problem of tyranny? Would we have to be a Jew or a Christian in order to understand the vision of human nature and society which was being communicated there? Would we study the understandings of tyranny which can be found in various cultures at various times and places and somehow gain an understanding of tyranny through this study? In other words, is there some basic methodology for going about the process of thinking about a fundamental philosophical problem such as the nature of tyranny?

    4) Why do people struggle against tyranny at all? This question may seem too simplistic to ask. One could say that people naturally struggle against tyranny whenever they feel that they are being oppressed. This is basic common sense, and is fine as far as it goes, but it does not explain why pro-life advocates would struggle against easy access to abortion when they are not being personally oppressed by it, or why some men would hold pro-choice views when they cannot become pregnant. Pro-life advocates see themselves as acting on behalf of unborn children, who cannot protect themselves. Why is there this concern for the unseen fetus? Is the basic motivation a desire to feel self-righteous in relation to others who are seen as morally inferior? Is it a concern for the moral progress of the human race, as with the Abolitionists? Is it a belief that abortion on demand is a form of legal anarchy which is eroding the moral fabric of Western civilization? Is it a concern to prevent women from harming themselves psychologically by deciding to end the lives of their own children? On the pro-choice side, is the basic motivation a desire to feel self-righteous in relation to others who are seen as politically and philosophically "backward" in our modern liberal society? Is it a concern for the moral progress of the human race, as with the Abolitionists? Is it a belief that abortion on demand is a triumph of respect for individual moral autonomy? Is it a concern to relieve the suffering of distressed women?

    These are the sorts of questions which will have to be asked and wrestled with if our society is ever to make any progress toward a solution to the problem of abortion. They are very profound philosophical and religious questions which shake the foundations of our understanding of ourselves, our society, and the natural order. Most of us are ill prepared by our high school and/or college educations to even be aware that such questions exist. And the most highly educated among us are certainly not in agreement as to how they ought to be answered. This means that we live in an environment of de facto moral and intellectual disorder. But there is always the possibility that order will be brought out of this chaos. It will be an arduous process taking many years of struggle. We need to begin, however, with a recognition that the problem of abortion is a moral civil war which has arisen out of the unclarity of the concept of tyranny in American legal, philosophical, and religious thought.

[1] Lawrence Lader, Abortion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 4. [2] Lader, 92. [3] Lader, 25. [4] Lader, 145. [5] Lader, 166. [6] Lader, 175. [7] Bernard Nathanson, Aborting America (Garden City: Doubleday, 1979), 164-166. [8] Nathanson, The Abortion Papers: Inside the Abortion Mentality (New York: Frederick Fell Publishers, 1983), 208-209. [9] Nathanson, The Abortion Papers , 216-217. [10] In the bibliography below, see, for example, on the pro- choice side: D. Callahan, D. Richards, B. Harrison, and J. Thomson; on the pro-life side see: J. Garton, J. Wiley, S. Callahan, and G. Grant. For an objective overview of the abortion debate in a vein which parallels the present essay, see M. Vanderford. [11] For an interesting discussion of rights language, see Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (New York: The Free Press, 1991). [12] Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1981), 69-70.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Callahan, Daniel. Abortion: Law, Choice and Morality . New York: Macmillan, 1970.

Callahan, Sidney, and Daniel Callahan, eds. Abortion: Understanding Differences . New York: Plenum Press, 1984.

Dumond, Dwight Lowell. Antislavery Origins of the Civil War in the United States . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959.

Garton, Jean Staker. Who Broke the Baby? Minneapolis: Bethany House Publishers, 1979.

Glendon, Mary Ann. Abortion and Divorce in Western Law . Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1987

______. Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse . New York: The Free Press, 1991.

Grant, George Parkin. English-Speaking Justice . Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985.

Harrison, Beverly Wildung. "Theology of Pro-choice: A Feminist Perspective," in Edward Batchelor, ed., Abortion: The Moral Issues . New York: The Pilgrim Press, 1982.

Hunter, James Davison. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America . BasicBooks, 1991.

Jung, Patricia Beattie and Thomas A. Shannon, eds. Abortion and Catholicism: The American Debate . New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1988.

Lader, Lawrence. Abortion . Boston: Beacon Press, 1966.

______. The Bold Brahmins: New England's War Against Slavery: 1831-1863 . New York: E.P. Dutton, 1961.

Luker, Kristin. Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory . Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984.

Mohr, James C. Abortion in America: The Origins and Evolution of National Policy, 1800-1900 . New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Nathanson, Bernard N., with Richard N. Ostling. Aborting America . Garden City: Doubleday, 1979.

Nathanson, Bernard N. The Abortion Papers: Inside the Abortion Mentality . New York: Frederick Fell Publishers, 1983.

Noonan, John T., Jr., ed. The Morality of Abortion: Legal and Historical Perspectives . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970.

Noonan, John T., Jr. A Private Choice: Abortion in America in the Seventies . New York: The Free Press, 1979.

Powell, John. Abortion: The Silent Holocaust . Allen, Texas: Argus Communications, 1981.

Richards, David A. J. "Constitutional Privacy, Religious Disestablishment, and the Abortion Decisions," in Jay L. Garfield and Patricia Hennessey, eds. Abortion: Moral and Legal Perspectives . Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984.

Thomson, Judith Jarvis. "A Defense of Abortion." Philosophy and Public Affairs 1/1 (1971): 47-66.

Vanderford, Marsha L. "Vilification and Social Movements: A Case Study of Pro-Life and Pro-Choice Rhetoric." The Quarterly Journal of Speech 75/2 (1989): 166-182.

Wiley, Juli Loesch. "Solidarity and Shalom," in Phyllis Tickle, ed. Confessing Conscience: Churched Women on Abortion . Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990.

Charles Bellinger's home page: http://lib.tcu.edu/staff/bellinger/cbhome.htm

Brite Divinity School: http://www.brite.tcu.edu/

TCU: http://www.tcu.edu/

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• Rom J Morphol Embryol
• v.61(1); Jan-Mar 2020

A research on abortion: ethics, legislation and socio-medical outcomes. Case study: Romania

Andreea mihaela niţă.

1 Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Craiova, Romania

Cristina Ilie Goga

This article presents a research study on abortion from a theoretical and empirical point of view. The theoretical part is based on the method of social documents analysis, and presents a complex perspective on abortion, highlighting items of medical, ethical, moral, religious, social, economic and legal elements. The empirical part presents the results of a sociological survey, based on the opinion survey method through the application of the enquiry technique, conducted in Romania, on a sample of 1260 women. The purpose of the survey is to identify Romanians perception on the decision to voluntary interrupt pregnancy, and to determine the core reasons in carrying out an abortion.

The analysis of abortion by means of medical and social documents

Abortion means a pregnancy interruption “before the fetus is viable” [ 1 ] or “before the fetus is able to live independently in the extrauterine environment, usually before the 20 th week of pregnancy” [ 2 ]. “Clinical miscarriage is both a common and distressing complication of early pregnancy with many etiological factors like genetic factors, immune factors, infection factors but also psychological factors” [ 3 ]. Induced abortion is a practice found in all countries, but the decision to interrupt the pregnancy involves a multitude of aspects of medical, ethical, moral, religious, social, economic, and legal order.

In a more simplistic manner, Winston Nagan has classified opinions which have as central element “abortion”, in two major categories: the opinion that the priority element is represented by fetus and his entitlement to life and the second opinion, which focuses around women’s rights [ 4 ].

From the medical point of view, since ancient times there have been four moments, generally accepted, which determine the embryo’s life: ( i ) conception; ( ii ) period of formation; ( iii ) detection moment of fetal movement; ( iv ) time of birth [ 5 ]. Contemporary medicine found the following moments in the evolution of intrauterine fetal: “ 1 . At 18 days of pregnancy, the fetal heartbeat can be perceived and it starts running the circulatory system; 2 . At 5 weeks, they become more clear: the nose, cheeks and fingers of the fetus; 3 . At 6 weeks, they start to function: the nervous system, stomach, kidneys and liver of the fetus, and its skeleton is clearly distinguished; 4 . At 7 weeks (50 days), brain waves are felt. The fetus has all the internal and external organs definitively outlined. 5 . At 10 weeks (70 days), the unborn child has all the features clearly defined as a child after birth (9 months); 6 . At 12 weeks (92 days, 3 months), the fetus has all organs definitely shaped, managing to move, lacking only the breath” [ 6 ]. Even if most of the laws that allow abortion consider the period up to 12 weeks acceptable for such an intervention, according to the above-mentioned steps, there can be defined different moments, which can represent the beginning of life. Nowadays, “abortion is one of the most common gynecological experiences and perhaps the majority of women will undergo an abortion in their lifetimes” [ 7 ]. “Safe abortions carry few health risks, but « every year, close to 20 million women risk their lives and health by undergoing unsafe abortions » and 25% will face a complication with permanent consequences” [ 8 , 9 ].

From the ethical point of view, most of the times, the interruption of pregnancy is on the border between woman’s right over her own body and the child’s (fetus) entitlement to life. Judith Jarvis Thomson supported the supremacy of woman’s right over her own body as a premise of freedom, arguing that we cannot force a person to bear in her womb and give birth to an unwanted child, if for different circumstances, she does not want to do this [ 10 ]. To support his position, the author uses an imaginary experiment, that of a violinist to which we are connected for nine months, in order to save his life. However, Thomson debates the problem of the differentiation between the fetus and the human being, by carrying out a debate on the timing which makes this difference (period of conception, 10 weeks of pregnancy, etc.) and highlighting that for people who support abortion, the fetus is not an alive human being [ 10 ].

Carol Gilligan noted that women undergo a true “moral dilemma”, a “moral conflict” with regards to voluntary interruption of pregnancy, such a decision often takes into account the human relationships, the possibility of not hurting the others, the responsibility towards others [ 11 ]. Gilligan applied qualitative interviews to a number of 29 women from different social classes, which were put in a position to decide whether or not to commit abortion. The interview focused on the woman’s choice, on alternative options, on individuals and existing conflicts. The conclusion was that the central moral issue was the conflict between the self (the pregnant woman) and others who may be hurt as a result of the potential pregnancy [ 12 ].

From the religious point of view, abortion is unacceptable for all religions and a small number of abortions can be seen in deeply religious societies and families. Christianity considers the beginning of human life from conception, and abortion is considered to be a form of homicide [ 13 ]. For Christians, “at the same time, abortion is giving up their faith”, riot and murder, which means that by an abortion we attack Jesus Christ himself and God [ 14 ]. Islam does not approve abortion, relying on the sacral life belief as specified in Chapter 6, Verse 151 of the Koran: “Do not kill a soul which Allah has made sacred (inviolable)” [ 15 ]. Buddhism considers abortion as a negative act, but nevertheless supports for medical reasons [ 16 ]. Judaism disapproves abortion, Tanah considering it to be a mortal sin. Hinduism considers abortion as a crime and also the greatest sin [ 17 ].

From the socio-economic point of view, the decision to carry out an abortion is many times determined by the relations within the social, family or financial frame. Moreover, studies have been conducted, which have linked the legalization of abortions and the decrease of the crime rate: “legalized abortion may lead to reduced crime either through reductions in cohort sizes or through lower per capita offending rates for affected cohorts” [ 18 ].

Legal regulation on abortion establishes conditions of the abortion in every state. In Europe and America, only in the XVIIth century abortion was incriminated and was considered an insignificant misdemeanor or a felony, depending on when was happening. Due to the large number of illegal abortions and deaths, two centuries later, many states have changed legislation within the meaning of legalizing voluntary interruption of pregnancy [ 6 ]. In contemporary society, international organizations like the United Nations or the European Union consider sexual and reproductive rights as fundamental rights [ 19 , 20 ], and promotes the acceptance of abortion as part of those rights. However, not all states have developed permissive legislation in the field of voluntary interruption of pregnancy.

Currently, at national level were established four categories of legislation on pregnancy interruption area:

( i )  Prohibitive legislations , ones that do not allow abortion, most often outlining exceptions in abortion in cases where the pregnant woman’s life is endangered. In some countries, there is a prohibition of abortion in all circumstances, however, resorting to an abortion in the case of an imminent threat to the mother’s life. Same regulation is also found in some countries where abortion is allowed in cases like rape, incest, fetal problems, etc. In this category are 66 states, with 25.5% of world population [ 21 ].

( ii )  Restrictive legislation that allow abortion in cases of health preservation . Loosely, the term “health” should be interpreted according to the World Health Organization (WHO) definition as: “health is a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity” [ 22 ]. This type of legislation is adopted in 59 states populated by 13.8% of the world population [ 21 ].

( iii )  Legislation allowing abortion on a socio-economic motivation . This category includes items such as the woman’s age or ability to care for a child, fetal problems, cases of rape or incest, etc. In this category are 13 countries, where we have 21.3% of the world population [ 21 ].

( iv )  Legislation which do not impose restrictions on abortion . In the case of this legislation, abortion is permitted for any reason up to 12 weeks of pregnancy, with some exceptions (Romania – 14 weeks, Slovenia – 10 weeks, Sweden – 18 weeks), the interruption of pregnancy after this period has some restrictions. This type of legislation is adopted in 61 countries with 39.5% of the world population [21].

The Centre for Reproductive Rights has carried out from 1998 a map of the world’s states, based on the legislation typology of each country (Figure ​ (Figure1 1 ).

The analysis of states according to the legislation regarding abortion. Source: Centre for Reproductive Rights. The World’s Abortion Laws, 2018 [ 23 ]

An unplanned pregnancy, socio-economic context or various medical problems [ 24 ], lead many times to the decision of interrupting pregnancy, regardless the legislative restrictions. In the study “Unsafe abortion: global and regional estimates of the incidence of unsafe abortion and associated mortality in 2008” issued in 2011 by the WHO , it was determined that within the states with restrictive legislation on abortion, we may also encounter a large number of illegal abortions. The illegal abortions may also be resulting in an increased risk of woman’s health and life considering that most of the times inappropriate techniques are being used, the hygienic conditions are precarious and the medical treatments are incorrectly administered [ 25 ]. Although abortions done according to medical guidelines carry very low risk of complications, 1–3 unsafe abortions contribute substantially to maternal morbidity and death worldwide [ 26 ].

WHO has estimated for the year 2008, the fact that worldwide women between the ages of 15 and 44 years carried out 21.6 million “unsafe” abortions, which involved a high degree of risk and were distributed as follows: 0.4 million in the developed regions and a number of 21.2 million in the states in course of development [ 25 ].

Case study: Romania

Legal perspective on abortion

In Romania, abortion was brought under regulation by the first Criminal Code of the United Principalities, from 1864.

The Criminal Code from 1864, provided the abortion infringement in Article 246, on which was regulated as follows: “Any person, who, using means such as food, drinks, pills or any other means, which will consciously help a pregnant woman to commit abortion, will be punished to a minimum reclusion (three years).

The woman who by herself shall use the means of abortion, or would accept to use means of abortion which were shown or given to her for this purpose, will be punished with imprisonment from six months to two years, if the result would be an abortion. In a situation where abortion was carried out on an illegitimate baby by his mother, the punishment will be imprisonment from six months to one year.

Doctors, surgeons, health officers, pharmacists (apothecary) and midwives who will indicate, will give or will facilitate these means, shall be punished with reclusion of at least four years, if the abortion took place. If abortion will cause the death of the mother, the punishment will be much austere of four years” (Art. 246) [ 27 ].

The Criminal Code from 1864, reissued in 1912, amended in part the Article 246 for the purposes of eliminating the abortion of an illegitimate baby case. Furthermore, it was no longer specified the minimum of four years of reclusion, in case of abortion carried out with the help of the medical staff, leaving the punishment to the discretion of the Court (Art. 246) [ 28 ].

The Criminal Code from 1936 regulated abortion in the Articles 482–485. Abortion was defined as an interruption of the normal course of pregnancy, being punished as follows:

“ 1 . When the crime is committed without the consent of the pregnant woman, the punishment was reformatory imprisonment from 2 to 5 years. If it caused the pregnant woman any health injury or a serious infirmity, the punishment was reformatory imprisonment from 3 to 6 years, and if it has caused her death, reformatory imprisonment from 7 to 10 years;

2 . When the crime was committed by the unmarried pregnant woman by herself, or when she agreed that someone else should provoke the abortion, the punishment is reformatory imprisonment from 3 to 6 months, and if the woman is married, the punishment is reformatory imprisonment from 6 months to one year. Same penalty applies also to the person who commits the crime with the woman’s consent. If abortion was committed for the purpose of obtaining a benefit, the punishment increases with another 2 years of reformatory imprisonment.

If it caused the pregnant woman any health injuries or a severe disablement, the punishment will be reformatory imprisonment from one to 3 years, and if it has caused her death, the punishment is reformatory imprisonment from 3 to 5 years” (Art. 482) [ 29 ].

The criminal legislation from 1936 specifies that it is not considered as an abortion the interruption from the normal course of pregnancy, if it was carried out by a doctor “when woman’s life was in imminent danger or when the pregnancy aggravates a woman’s disease, putting her life in danger, which could not be removed by other means and it is obvious that the intervention wasn’t performed with another purpose than that of saving the woman’s life” and “when one of the parents has reached a permanent alienation and it is certain that the child will bear serious mental flaws” (Art. 484, Par. 1 and Par. 2) [ 29 ].

In the event of an imminent danger, the doctor was obliged to notify prosecutor’s office in writing, within 48 hours after the intervention, on the performance of the abortion. “In the other cases, the doctor was able to intervene only with the authorization of the prosecutor’s office, given on the basis of a medical certificate from hospital or a notice given as a result of a consultation between the doctor who will intervene and at least a professor doctor in the disease which caused the intervention. General’s Office Prosecutor, in all cases provided by this Article, shall be obliged to maintain the confidentiality of all communications or authorizations, up to the intercession of any possible complaints” (Art. 484) [ 29 ].

The legislation of 1936 provided a reformatory injunction from one to three years for the abortions committed by doctors, sanitary agents, pharmacists, apothecary or midwives (Art. 485) [ 29 ].

Abortion on demand has been legalized for the first time in Romania in the year 1957 by the Decree No. 463, under the condition that it had to be carried out in a hospital and to be carried out in the first quarter of the pregnancy [ 30 ]. In the year 1966, demographic policy of Romania has dramatically changed by introducing the Decree No. 770 from September 29 th , which prohibited abortion. Thus, the voluntary interruption of pregnancy became a crime, with certain exceptions, namely: endangering the mother’s life, physical or mental serious disability; serious or heritable illness, mother’s age over 45 years, if the pregnancy was a result of rape or incest or if the woman gave birth to at least four children who were still in her care (Art. 2) [ 31 ].

In the Criminal Code from 1968, the abortion crime was governed by Articles 185–188.

The Article 185, “the illegal induced abortion”, stipulated that “the interruption of pregnancy by any means, outside the conditions permitted by law, with the consent of the pregnant woman will be punished with imprisonment from one to 3 years”. The act referred to above, without the prior consent from the pregnant woman, was punished with prison from two to five years. If the abortion carried out with the consent of the pregnant woman caused any serious body injury, the punishment was imprisonment from two to five years, and when it caused the death of the woman, the prison sentence was from five to 10 years. When abortion was carried out without the prior consent of the woman, if it caused her a serious physical injury, the punishment was imprisonment from three to six years, and if it caused the woman’s death, the punishment was imprisonment from seven to 12 years (Art. 185) [ 32 ].

“When abortion was carried out in order to obtain a material benefit, the maximum punishment was increased by two years, and if the abortion was made by a doctor, in addition to the prison punishment could also be applied the prohibition to no longer practice the profession of doctor”.

Article 186, “abortion caused by the woman”, stipulated that “the interruption of the pregnancy course, committed by the pregnant woman, was punished with imprisonment from 6 months to 2 years”, quoting the fact that by the same punishment was also sanctioned “the pregnant woman’s act to consent in interrupting the pregnancy course made out by another person” (Art. 186) [ 26 ].

The Regulations of the Criminal Code in 1968, also provided the crime of “ownership of tools or materials that can cause abortion”, the conditions of this holding being met when these types of instruments were held outside the hospital’s specialized institutions, the infringement shall be punished with imprisonment from three months to one year (Art. 187) [ 32 ].

Furthermore, the doctors who performed an abortion in the event of extreme urgency, without prior legal authorization and if they did not announce the competent authority within the legal deadline, they were punished by imprisonment from one month to three months (Art. 188) [ 32 ].

In the year 1985, it has been issued the Decree No. 411 of December 26 th , by which the conditions imposed by the Decree No. 770 of 1966 have been hardened, meaning that it has increased the number of children, that a woman could have in order to request an abortion, from four to five children [ 33 ].

The Articles 185–188 of the Criminal Code and the Decree No. 770/1966 on the interruption of the pregnancy course have been abrogated by Decree-Law No. 1 from December 26 th , 1989, which was published in the Official Gazette No. 4 of December 27 th , 1989 (Par. 8 and Par. 12) [ 34 ].

The Criminal Code from 1968, reissued in 1997, maintained Article 185 about “the illegal induced abortion”, but drastically modified. Thus, in this case of the Criminal Code, we identify abortion as “the interruption of pregnancy course, by any means, committed in any of the following circumstances: ( a ) outside medical institutions or authorized medical practices for this purpose; ( b ) by a person who does not have the capacity of specialized doctor; ( c ) if age pregnancy has exceeded 14 weeks”, the punishment laid down was the imprisonment from 6 months to 3 years” (Art. 185, Par. 1) [ 35 ]. For the abortion committed without the prior consent of the pregnant woman, the punishment consisted in strict prison conditions from two to seven years and with the prohibition of certain rights (Art. 185, Par. 2) [ 35 ].

For the situation of causing serious physical injury to the pregnant woman, the punishment was strict prison from three to 10 years and the removal of certain rights, and if it had as a result the death of the pregnant woman, the punishment was strict prison from five to 15 years and the prohibition of certain rights (Art. 185, Par. 3) [ 35 ].

The attempt was punished for the crimes specified in the various cases of abortion.

Consideration should also be given in the Criminal Code reissued in 1997 for not punishing the interruption of the pregnancy course carried out by the doctor, if this interruption “was necessary to save the life, health or the physical integrity of the pregnant woman from a grave and imminent danger and that it could not be removed otherwise; in the case of a over fourteen weeks pregnancy, when the interruption of the pregnancy course should take place from therapeutic reasons” and even in a situation of a woman’s lack of consent, when it has not been given the opportunity to express her will, and abortion “was imposed by therapeutic reasons” (Art. 185, Par. 4) [ 35 ].

Criminal Code from 2004 covers abortion in Article 190, defined in the same way as in the prior Criminal Code, with the difference that it affects the limits of the punishment. So, in the event of pregnancy interruption, in accordance with the conditions specified in Paragraph 1, “the penalty provided was prison time from 6 months to one year or days-fine” (Art. 190, Par. 1) [ 36 ].

Nowadays, in Romania, abortion is governed by the criminal law of 2009, which entered into force in 2014, by the section called “aggression against an unborn child”. It should be specified that current criminal law does not punish the woman responsible for carrying out abortion, but only the person who is involved in carrying out the abortion. There is no punishment for the pregnant woman who injures her fetus during pregnancy.

In Article 201, we can find the details on the pregnancy interruption infringement. Thus, the pregnancy interruption can be performed in one of the following circumstances: “outside of medical institutions or medical practices authorized for this purpose; by a person who does not have the capacity of specialist doctor in Obstetrics and Gynecology and the right of free medical practice in this specialty; if gestational age has exceeded 14 weeks”, the punishment is the imprisonment for six months to three years, or fine and the prohibition to exercise certain rights (Art. 201, Par. 1) [ 37 ].

Article 201, Paragraph 2 specifies that “the interruption of the pregnancy committed under any circumstances, without the prior consent of the pregnant woman, can be punished with imprisonment from 2 to 7 years and with the prohibition to exercise some rights” (Art. 201, Par. 1) [ 37 ].

If by facts referred to above (Art. 201, Par. 1 and Par. 2) [ 37 ] “it has caused the pregnant woman’s physical injury, the punishment is the imprisonment from 3 to 10 years and the prohibition to exercise some rights, and if it has had as a result the pregnant woman’s death, the punishment is the imprisonment from 6 to 12 years and the prohibition to exercise some rights” (Art. 201, Par. 3) [ 37 ]. When the facts have been committed by a doctor, “in addition to the imprisonment punishment, it will also be applied the prohibition to exercise the profession of doctor (Art. 201, Par. 4) [ 37 ].

Criminal legislation specifies that “the interruption of pregnancy does not constitute an infringement with the purpose of a treatment carried out by a specialist doctor in Obstetrics and Gynecology, until the pregnancy age of twenty-four weeks is reached, or the subsequent pregnancy interruption, for the purpose of treatment, is in the interests of the mother or the fetus” (Art. 201, Par. 6) [ 37 ]. However, it can all be found in the phrases “therapeutic purposes” and “the interest of the mother and of the unborn child”, which predisposes the text of law to an interpretation, finally the doctors are the only ones in the position to decide what should be done in such cases, assuming direct responsibility [ 38 ].

Article 202 of the Criminal Code defines the crime of harming an unborn child, pointing out the punishments for the various types of injuries that can occur during pregnancy or in the childbirth period and which can be caused by the mother or by the persons who assist the birth, with the specification that the mother who harms her fetus during pregnancy is not punished and does not constitute an infringement if the injury has been committed during pregnancy or during childbirth period if the facts have been “committed by a doctor or by an authorized person to assist the birth or to follow the pregnancy, if they have been committed in the course of the medical act, complying with the specific provisions of his profession and have been made in the interest of the pregnant woman or fetus, as a result of the exercise of an inherent risk in the medical act” (Art. 202, Par. 6) [ 37 ].

The fact situation in Romania

During the period 1948–1955, called “the small baby boom” [ 39 ], Romania registered an average fertility rate of 3.23 children for a woman. Between 1955 and 1962, the fertility rate has been less than three children for a woman, and in 1962, fertility has reached an average of two children for a woman. This phenomenon occurred because of the Decree No. 463/1957 on liberalization of abortion. After the liberalization from 1957, the abortion rate has increased from 220 abortions per 100 born-alive children in the year 1960, to 400 abortions per 100 born-alive children, in the year 1965 [ 40 ].

The application of provisions of Decrees No. 770 of 1966 and No. 411 of 1985 has led to an increase of the birth rate in the first three years (an average of 3.7 children in 1967, and 3.6 children in 1968), followed by a regression until 1989, when it was recorded an average of 2.2 children, but also a maternal death rate caused by illegal abortions, raising up to 85 deaths of 100 000 births in the year of 1965, and 170 deaths in 1983. It was estimated that more than 80% of maternal deaths between 1980–1989 was caused by legal constraints [ 30 ].

After the Romanian Revolution in December 1989 and after the communism fall, with the abrogation of Articles 185–188 of the Criminal Code and of the Decree No. 770/1966, by the Decree of Law No. 1 of December 26 th , 1989, abortion has become legal in Romania and so, in the following years, it has reached the highest rate of abortion in Europe. Subsequently, the number of abortion has dropped gradually, with increasing use of birth control [ 41 ].

Statistical data issued by the Ministry of Health and by the National Institute of Statistics (INS) in Romania show corresponding figures to a legally carried out abortion. The abortion number is much higher, if it would take into account the number of illegal abortion, especially those carried out before 1989, and those carried out in private clinics, after the year 1990. Summing the declared abortions in the period 1958–2014, it is to be noted the number of them, 22 037 747 exceeds the current Romanian population. A detailed statistical research of abortion rate, in terms of years we have exposed in Table ​ Table1 1 .

The number of abortions declared in Romania in the period 1958–2016

Source: Pro Vita Association (Bucharest, Romania), National Institute of Statistics (INS – Romania), EUROSTAT [ 42 , 43 , 44 ]

Data issued by the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) in June 2016, for the period 1989–2014, in matters of reproductive behavior, indicates a fertility rate for Romania with a continuous decrease, in proportion to the decrease of the number of births, but also a lower number of abortion rate reported to 100 deliveries (Table ​ (Table2 2 ).

Reproductive behavior in Romania in 1989–2014

Source: United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), Transformative Monitoring for Enhanced Equity (TransMonEE) Data. Country profiles: Romania, 1989–2015 [ 45 ].

By analyzing data issued for the period 1990–2015 by the International Organization of Health , UNICEF , United Nations Fund for Population Activity (UNFPA), The World Bank and the United Nations Population Division, it is noticed that maternal mortality rate has currently dropped as compared with 1990 (Table ​ (Table3 3 ).

Maternal mortality estimation in Romania in 1990–2015

Source: World Health Organization (WHO), Global Health Observatory Data. Maternal mortality country profiles: Romania, 2015 [ 46 ].

Opinion survey: women’s opinion on abortion

Argument for choosing the research theme

Although the problematic on abortion in Romania has been extensively investigated and debated, it has not been carried out in an ample sociological study, covering Romanian women’s perception on abortion. We have assumed making a study at national level, in order to identify the opinion on abortion, on the motivation to carry out an abortion, and to identify the correlation between religious convictions and the attitude toward abortion.

Examining the literature field of study

In the conceptual register of the research, we have highlighted items, such as the specialized literature, legislation, statistical documents.

Formulation of hypotheses and objectives

The first hypothesis was that Romanian women accept abortion, having an open attitude towards this act. Thus, the first objective of the research was to identify Romanian women’s attitude towards abortion.

The second hypothesis, from which we started, was that high religious beliefs generate a lower tolerance towards abortion. Thus, the second objective of our research has been to identify the correlation between the religious beliefs and the attitude towards abortion.

The third hypothesis of the survey was that, the main motivation in carrying out an abortion is the fact that a woman does not want a baby, and the main motivation for keeping the pregnancy is that the person wants a baby. In this context, the third objective of the research was to identify main motivation in carrying out an abortion and in maintaining a pregnancy.

Another hypothesis was that modern Romanian legislation on the abortion is considered fair. Based on this hypothesis, we have assumed the fourth objective, which is to identify the degree of satisfaction towards the current regulatory provisions governing the abortion.

Research methodology

The research method is that of a sociological survey by the application of the questionnaire technique. We used the sampling by age and residence looking at representative numbers of population from more developed as well as underdeveloped areas.

Determination of the sample to be studied

Because abortion is a typical women’s experience, we have chosen to make the quantitative research only among women. We have constructed the sample by selecting a number of 1260 women between the ages of 15 and 44 years (the most frequently encountered age among women who give birth to a child). We also used the quota sampling techniques, taking into account the following variables: age group and the residence (urban/rural), so that the persons included in the sample could retain characteristic of the general population.

By the sample of 1260 women, we have made a percentage of investigation of 0.03% of the total population.

The Questionnaires number applied was distributed as follows (Table ​ (Table4 4 ).

The sampling rates based on the age, and the region of residence

Source: Sample built, based on the population data issued by the National Institute of Statistics (INS – Romania) based on population census conducted in 2011 [ 47 ].

Data collection

Data collection was carried out by questionnaires administered by 32 field operators between May 1 st –May 31 st , 2018.

The analysis of the research results

In the next section, we will present the main results of the quantitative research carried out at national level.

Almost three-quarters of women included in the sample agree with carrying out an abortion in certain circumstances (70%) and only 24% have chosen to support the answer “ No, never ”. In modern contemporary society, abortion is the first solution of women for which a pregnancy is not desired. Even if advanced medical techniques are a lot safer, an abortion still carries a health risk. However, 6% of respondents agree with carrying out abortion regardless of circumstances (Table ​ (Table5 5 ).

Opinion on the possibility of carrying out an abortion

Although abortions carried out after 14 weeks are illegal, except for medical reasons, more than half of the surveyed women stated they would agree with abortion in certain circumstances. At the opposite pole, 31% have mentioned they would never agree on abortions after 14 weeks. Five percent were totally accepting the idea of abortion made to a pregnancy that has exceeded 14 weeks (Table ​ (Table6 6 ).

Opinion on the possibility of carrying out an abortion after the period of 14 weeks of pregnancy

For 53% of respondents, abortion is considered a crime as well as the right of a women. On the other hand, 28% of the women considered abortion as a crime and 16% associate abortion with a woman’s right (Table ​ (Table7 7 ).

Opinion on abortion: at the border between crime and a woman’s right

Opinions on what women abort at the time of the voluntary pregnancy interruption are split in two: 59% consider that it depends on the time of the abortion, and more specifically on the pregnancy development stage, 24% consider that regardless of the period in which it is carried out, women abort a child, and 14% have opted a fetus (Table ​ (Table8 8 ).

Abortion of a child vs. abortion of a fetus

Among respondents who consider that women abort a child or a fetus related to the time of abortion, 37.5% have considered that the difference between a baby and a fetus appears after 14 weeks of pregnancy (the period legally accepted for abortion). Thirty-three percent of them have mentioned that the distinction should be performed at the first few heartbeats; 18.1% think it is about when the child has all the features definitively outlined and can move by himself; 2.8% consider that the difference appears when the first encephalopathy traces are being felt and the child has formed all internal and external organs. A percentage of 1.7% of respondents consider that this difference occurs at the beginning of the central nervous system, and 1.4% when the unborn child has all the features that we can clearly see to a newborn child (Table ​ (Table9 9 ).

The opinion on the moment that makes the difference between a fetus and a child

We noticed that highly religious people make a clear association between abortion and crime. They also consider that at the time of pregnancy interruption it is aborted a child and not a fetus. However, unexpectedly, we noticed that 27% of the women, who declare themselves to be very religious, have also stated that they see abortion as a crime but also as a woman’s right. Thirty-one percent of the women, who also claimed profound religious beliefs, consider that abortion may be associated with the abortion of a child but also of a fetus, this depending on the time of abortion (Tables ​ (Tables10 10 and ​ and11 11 ).

The correlation between the level of religious beliefs and the perspective on abortion seen as a crime or a right

The correlation between the level of religious beliefs and the perspective on abortion procedure conducted on a fetus or a child

More than half of the respondents have opted for the main reason for abortion the appearance of medical problems to the child. Baby’s health represents the main concern of future mothers, and of each parent, and the birth of a child with serious health issues, is a factor which frightens any future parent, being many times, at least theoretically, one good reason for opting for abortion. At the opposite side, 12% of respondents would not choose abortion under any circumstances. Other reasons for which women would opt for an abortion are: if the woman would have a medical problem (22%) or would not want the child (10%) (Table ​ (Table12 12 ).

Potential reasons for carrying out an abortion

Most of the women want to give birth to a child, 56% of the respondents, representing also the reason that would determine them to keep the child. Morality (26%), faith (10%) or legal restrictions (4%), are the three other reasons for which women would not interrupt a pregnancy. Only 2% of the respondents have mentioned other reasons such as health or age.

A percentage of 23% of the surveyed people said that they have done an abortion so far, and 77% did not opted for a surgical intervention either because there was no need, or because they have kept the pregnancy (Table ​ (Table13 13 ).

Rate of abortion among women in the sample

Most respondents, 87% specified that they have carried out an abortion during the first 14 weeks – legally accepted limit for abortion: 43.6% have made abortion in the first four weeks, 39.1% between weeks 4–8, and 4.3% between weeks 8–14. It should be noted that 8.7% could not appreciate the pregnancy period in which they carried out abortion, by opting to answer with the option “ I don’t know ”, and a percentage of 4.3% refused to answer to this question.

Performing an abortion is based on many reasons, but the fact that the women have not wanted a child is the main reason mentioned by 47.8% of people surveyed, who have done minimum an abortion so far. Among the reasons for the interruption of pregnancy, it is also included: women with medical problems (13.3%), not the right time to be a mother (10.7%), age motivation (8.7%), due to medical problems of the child (4.3%), the lack of money (4.3%), family pressure (4.3%), partner/spouse did not wanted. A percentage of 3.3% of women had different reasons for abortion, as follows: age difference too large between children, career, marital status, etc. Asked later whether they regretted the abortion, a rate of 69.6% of women who said they had at least one abortion regret it (34.8% opted for “ Yes ”, and 34.8% said “ Yes, partially ”). 26.1% of surveyed women do not regret the choice to interrupted the pregnancy, and 4.3% chose to not answer this question. We noted that, for women who have already experienced abortion, the causes were more diverse than the grounds on which the previous question was asked: “What are the reasons that determined you to have an abortion?” (Table ​ (Table14 14 ).

The reasons that led the women in the sample to have an abortion

The majority of the respondents (37.5%) considered that “nervous depression” is the main consequence of abortion, followed by “insomnia and nightmares” (24.6%), “disorders in alimentation” and “affective disorders” (each for 7.7% of respondents), “deterioration of interpersonal relationships” and “the feeling of guilt”(for 6.3% of the respondents), “sexual disorders” and “panic attacks” (for 6.3% of the respondents) (Table ​ (Table15 15 ).

Opinion on the consequences of abortion

Over half of the respondents believe that abortion should be legal in certain circumstances, as currently provided by law, 39% say it should be always legal, and only 6% opted for the illegal option (Table ​ (Table16 16 ).

Opinion on the legal regulation of abortion

Although the current legislation does not punish pregnant women who interrupt pregnancy or intentionally injured their fetus, survey results indicate that 61% of women surveyed believe that the national law should punish the woman and only 28% agree with the current legislation (Table ​ (Table17 17 ).

Opinion on the possibility of punishing the woman who interrupts the course of pregnancy or injures the fetus

For the majority of the respondents (40.6%), the penalty provided by the current legislation, the imprisonment between six months and three years or a fine and deprivation of certain rights for the illegal abortion is considered fair, for a percentage of 39.6% the punishment is too small for 9.5% of the respondents is too high. Imprisonment between two and seven years and deprivation of certain rights for an abortion performed without the consent of the pregnant woman is considered too small for 65% of interviewees. Fourteen percent of them think it is fair and only 19% of respondents consider that Romanian legislation is too severe with people who commit such an act considering the punishment as too much. The imprisonment from three to 10 years and deprivation of certain rights for the facts described above, if an injury was caused to the woman, is considered to be too small for more than half of those included in the survey, 64% and almost 22% for nearly a quarter of them. Only 9% of the respondents mentioned that this legislative measure is too severe for such actions (Table ​ (Table18 18 ).

Opinion on the regulation of abortion of the Romanian Criminal Code (Art. 201)

Conclusions

After analyzing the results of the sociological research regarding abortion undertaken at national level, we see that 76% of the Romanian women accept abortion, indicating that the majority accepts only certain circumstances (a certain period after conception, for medical reasons, etc.). A percentage of 64% of the respondents indicated that they accept the idea of abortion after 14 weeks of pregnancy (for solid reasons or regardless the reason). This study shows that over 50% of Romanian women see abortion as a right of women but also a woman’s crime and believe that in the moment of interruption of a pregnancy, a fetus is aborted. Mostly, the association of abortion with crime and with the idea that a child is aborted is frequently found within very religious people. The main motivation for Romanian women in taking the decision not to perform an abortion is that they would want the child, and the main reason to perform an abortion is the child’s medical problems. However, it is noted that, in real situations, in which women have already done at least one abortion, most women resort to abortion because they did not want the child towards the hypothetical situation in which women felt that the main reason of abortion is a medical problem. Regarding the satisfaction with the current national legislation of the abortion, the situation is rather surprising. A significant percentage (61%) of respondents felt as necessary to punish the woman who performs an illegal abortion, although the legislation does not provide a punishment. On the other hand, satisfaction level to the penalties provided by law for various violations of the legal conditions for conducting abortion is low, on average only 25.5% of respondents are being satisfied with these, the majority (average 56.2%) considering the penalties as unsatisfactory. Understood as a social phenomenon, intensified by human vulnerabilities, of which the most obvious is accepting the comfort [ 48 ], abortion today is no longer, in Romanian society, from a legal or religious perspective, a problem. Perceptions on the legislative sanction, moral and religious will perpetual vary depending on beliefs, environment, education, etc. The only and the biggest social problem of Romania is truly represented by the steadily falling birth rate.

Conflict of interests

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interests.

Don’t Be Fooled By Trump’s Failure to Endorse a Nationwide Abortion Ban

F ormer President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that he favors state control over abortion law and policy and declined to endorse a nationwide ban. He also claimed that the Supreme Court’s overturning of  Roe v. Wade  in  Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization  was favored by “all legal scholars” on “both sides.” Abortion is “where everybody wanted it, from a legal standpoint,” according to Trump.

All of this is patently false, of course. Decades of legal scholarship and advocacy support the federal constitutional right to abortion that Dobbs eliminated. Some scholars who support legal abortion as a matter of policy have criticized the result the Court reached in  Roe , but they are in the minority. Others have critiqued the  reasoning  of  Roe v. Wade . Some, like Ruth Bader Ginsburg , prefer the equality rationale of  Planned Parenthood v. Casey   (1992), where the Court noted the central importance of reproductive freedom to women’s ability to participate fully and equally in the social, political, and economic life of the nation. But the notion that all or most legal scholars wanted the Court to obliterate the right to choose abortion is ludicrous.

No one should be fooled by Trump’s failure to endorse any of the proposed nationwide abortion bans, a move designed to appear “moderate” and lull voters into a false sense of complacency. Make no mistake: a second Trump administration will empower an anti-abortion movement determined to make abortion illegal everywhere. Even if Republicans do not take over Congress, there are plans in place to make medication abortion unavailable and to resurrect the 1873 Comstock Act, an archaic anti-vice law, to ban abortion nationwide. Proponents of fetal personhood, which defines an embryo as a legal person from the moment of fertilization, will be closer to realizing their goal, threatening not only abortion and miscarriage care but also IVF and common forms of contraception. Trump promotes the grotesque lie that Democrats want to “execute babies” to distract from his own party’s extremism.

Trump peddles these false and misleading claims because he understands that the truth about abortion endangers his candidacy and Republicans generally. Far from ending the controversy, returning abortion to the states already has led to outcomes wildly out of step with public opinion. Doctors and hospitals routinely deny patients basic medical care, including miscarriage treatment, because they are not close enough to death to have their rights outweigh those of an embryo or fetus. State laws with no or ineffective exceptions force children, survivors of rape and incest, and people with nonviable fetuses to carry pregnancies regardless of the consequences to their health and future fertility. Maternal health deserts multiply because doctors fear criminal and civil liability. Abortion bans exacerbate a maternal and infant mortality crisis that makes pregnancy a mortal danger to American women— especially Black women , who are almost three times more likely to die from pregnancy and childbirth than their white counterparts.

Read More: How Louisiana Has Become a Microcosm of the Abortion Access Fight

Even people with qualms about abortion in theory don’t favor these horrific results in fact. Recent polling from Gallup and Axios respectively reveals supermajority popular opposition to total and near-total bans on abortion, and majority support , even among Republicans, for keeping the government out of reproductive health care decisions altogether. Every ballot initiative since Dobbs has been resolved in favor of abortion rights and access. In fact, abortion motivates Americans to turn out and vote for candidates who support reproductive freedom.

Perhaps the most pernicious of Trump’s lies is that returning abortion to the states is a victory for democracy. Depriving people of the right to make the most basic decisions about their bodies and lives is deeply undemocratic and a hallmark of authoritarian regimes worldwide. Extreme abortion bans and fetal personhood laws pass  despite  popular opposition because of unchecked partisan gerrymandering that gives Republicans supermajorities. Even the most conservative lawmakers live in fear of a primary challenge from the right if they support any exceptions, however minor and ineffective, to total abortion bans. Trump says abortion law after Dobbs is “all about the will of the people.” But in fact, Republicans are scrambling to take decisions about abortion out of the people’s hands by preventing referenda from reaching the ballot, protecting state courts that defy public opinion from accountability for their decisions, and disenfranchising voters.

The GOP has long used abortion to secure the support of voters to promote a much broader right-wing agenda. Trump, as promised, packed the federal judiciary with jurists who would destroy the government’s ability to regulate corporations, combat climate change and political corruption, enact sensible gun-safety laws, provide for affordable health care, expand opportunities for women and people of color, fight discrimination, protect the rights of workers and immigrants, ask the wealthy to pay their fair share in taxes, and so on. The problem is that a majority of Americans actually support each of the policies the Right is determined to undo. To remain in power, Republicans must undermine democratic institutions and practices. Partisan and racial gerrymandering, voter suppression, and the evisceration of campaign finance regulation and voting rights laws are longstanding strategies; more recently, election denialism, insurrection, political violence, and white supremacist resurgence—all fomented by Trump—place democracy and the rule of law in mortal danger. All of this is at stake in Trump’s ultimate lie: his claim to be a champion of democracy rather than the architect of its demise.

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Arizona abortion: Chants of 'shame' as lawmakers spar over 1864 law

• Published 11 April
• US abortion debate

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Watch: Shouts of "shame" as Arizona lawmakers spar over abortion ban

Arizona's legislature descended into cries of "shame!" as senior Republicans blocked attempts to repeal the state's 1864 law banning abortion.

Republican majority leaders on Wednesday cut off two attempts to discuss a repeal and adjourned for the week, prompting chants from Democrats.

One Republican described it as "extremist, insurrectionist" behaviour.

The state's top court on Tuesday ruled the law was enforceable, but put the ruling on hold for at least 14 days.

The disagreements among state lawmakers follow a wave of protests about the Arizona supreme court's decision, which has potentially sweeping implications for women's healthcare and election-year politics in a battleground state.

The ruling was criticised by both Donald Trump and the White House. Governor Katie Hobbs called for a repeal and Attorney General Kris Mayes, a fellow Democrat, has said she would not prosecute those performing or obtaining abortions.

However, Republicans in the legislature on Wednesday said there was no reason to rush the debate. The party's chief whip, Teresa Martinez, said the House was "navigating an extremely complex, emotional and important area of law and policy".

She accused Democrats of "screaming at us and engaging in extremist and insurrectionist behaviour on the House floor", and said "pregnancy... should be celebrated. It is an abortion that terminates life."

The 1864 law criminalises abortion except to save a mother's life. There is no provision for victims of rape or incest. A 14-day moratorium on the court's ruling is in place while a lower court considers added arguments about the law's constitutionality.

Hobbs called the inaction unconscionable. "Radical legislators protected a Civil War-era total abortion ban that jails doctors, strips women of our bodily autonomy and puts our lives at risk," she said.

The row in the legislature came hours after Mr Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate, said Arizona's supreme court ruling had gone too far but he believed it would quickly be "straightened out".

In the video statement posted on his social media platform Truth Social , Mr Trump also took credit for the US Supreme Court's 2022 ruling that overturned Roe v Wade, the landmark decision that protected abortion access across the US for nearly 50 years.

An Arizona clinic told CBS, the BBC's partner in the US, that it intended to stay open until the last moment before the court ruling is confirmed.

Ashleigh Feiring, a registered nurse at Camelback Family Planning in Phoenix, said abortion services were still available and that staff hopes emergency legislation would stop the law's enforcement.

Dr Gabrielle Goodrick, Camelback's founder, told the BBC the possible ban was "draconian". "My reaction has been shock, dismay, disgust," she said. "This law is going back in time when people didn't have bodily autonomy."

Anti-abortion groups including SBA Pro-Life America meanwhile urged Arizona residents to oppose a proposed ballot initiative aimed at placing abortion rights in Arizona's state constitution.

"They would wipe away all pro-life laws put in place by the Legislature, reflective of the will of the people," SBA President Marjorie Dannenfelser said in a statement.

She said the 1964 law was an "enormous victory for unborn children and their mothers".

If it is enforced, Arizona residents seeking an abortion would have to travel to a neighbouring state where the procedure is still legal, such as California, New Mexico or Nevada.

Related Topics

• Donald Trump
• United States

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• Published 26 March

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Putting Abortion Question to Florida Voters Is Unlikely to End Court Fights

Though the Florida Supreme Court allowed a ballot question on expanding abortion rights, it also laid out a way for anti-abortion groups to challenge such an expansion.

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By Patricia Mazzei

Reporting from Miami

Abortion-rights supporters celebrated last week when the Florida Supreme Court said voters could decide this fall whether to approve a state constitutional amendment protecting and expanding abortion rights in Florida. But the court also laid out a road map for anti-abortion groups to challenge any expansion, by raising the prospect of “fetal personhood.”

In concurring and dissenting opinions that accompanied the ruling, four of the seven justices on the conservative court indicated that they may interpret the State Constitution to grant fetuses the same legal rights as people, foretelling the next likely court fight over abortion. The proposed state constitutional amendment would guarantee access to abortion “before viability,” or before about 24 weeks of pregnancy.

“If this does pass — but even if it doesn’t pass — I think that there is an open door to go to the Florida Supreme Court,” said Mathew D. Staver, a lawyer for two anti-abortion groups that oppose the ballot measure, the Liberty Counsel and Florida Voters Against Extremism.

Anti-abortion activists have promoted the fetal personhood legal strategy since the U.S. Supreme Court eliminated the federal right to abortion in 2022. What has been perhaps their biggest success came in February, when the Alabama Supreme Court held that a frozen embryo should be considered a person, opening a new front in the legal debate over abortion.

What was striking in Florida was that the argument was not raised by one of the lawyers opposing the abortion ballot measure, but rather by the court.

Chief Justice Carlos G. Muñiz asked during oral arguments in February — before the Alabama ruling — whether the proposed Florida amendment might interfere with the rights of the fetus.

Put on the spot by Chief Justice Muñiz, neither side took a firm position. But after the hearing, anti-abortion lawyers filed an additional brief that cited the Alabama case and urged the court to consider fetal rights in its deliberations.

When the court’s ruling came down on April 1, Chief Justice Muñiz sided with the 4-3 majority in allowing the proposed amendment to go to voters. But a footnote in the majority opinion called the question of fetal rights “unsettled.”

“Someone is certainly going to take him up on that,” said Mary Ziegler, an abortion law expert at the University of California, Davis, who previously taught at Florida State University in Tallahassee. “Someone is going to test the water.”

The three justices in the minority — Justices Renatha Francis, Jamie R. Grosshans and Meredith L. Sasso — also directly addressed fetal rights in separate dissents.

“The voter may think this amendment results in settling this issue once and for all,” Justice Grosshans wrote. “It does not.”

The court, she wrote, has yet to address whether the rights guaranteed by the Florida Constitution “apply to the unborn and, if so, what the scope of those rights could be.” She went on to call the amendment defective because it did not make clear to voters that the question was not yet settled.

Aadika Singh, a lawyer for the Public Rights Project, which filed a court brief in support of the ballot measure, said it was “troubling” that the justices had signaled they would be willing to take up a challenge to the amendment, even as they ruled that voters could decide whether to approve it.

“They went out of their way,” she said of the court, to say, “‘We are willing, in a future case, to undermine that democratic decision.’”

Still, she added: “The ballot measure decision is an important victory. It allows Floridians to weigh in directly on the issue, and that is a win for abortion rights and democracy.”

Supporters of abortion rights are trying to put measures on the ballot in about 10 states to secure access to the procedure. Former President Donald J. Trump, who had given mixed signals on his position, said in a video statement on Monday that abortion restrictions should be left up to the states: “It’s all about the will of the people,” he said.

In a separate ruling last week, the Florida justices affirmed a state abortion ban at 15 weeks of pregnancy — a decision that effectively allowed a more recently enacted 6-week ban to take effect by May 1.

The fine print of the court’s opinions underscored that getting the abortion measure on the ballot was not likely to end the battle, even if the amendment gets more than 60 percent of the vote in November, as is needed for it to pass.

There is precedent for a Florida constitutional amendment to be challenged before Election Day and overturned long afterward. The state Supreme Court ruled in 2000 that an amendment adopted nearly two years earlier, regarding the wording of the death penalty in the State Constitution, was unconstitutional because it had misled voters.

Mr. Staver said he was aware of that precedent and was considering options for challenging the abortion measure. “That’s an avenue that we are looking at,” he said.

The Florida Legislature could also try to thwart the amendment if it passes. After voters in Ohio protected abortion rights with a constitutional amendment last year , some Republican lawmakers tried to strip state courts of the power to enforce the amendment.

In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis and fellow Republicans in control of the State Legislature could seek to define key terms in the constitutional amendment, including “viability,” said Barbara J. Pariente, a former chief justice on the Florida Supreme Court who retired in 2019.

“My feeling is that, in Florida, because of the governor we have and the Republican majority, that there will be every attempt to interfere with the intent of the amendment,” she said.

In 2018, Florida voters approved a constitutional amendment restoring voting rights for most felons. By 2020, much of the measure had been gutted by lawmakers and the courts.

Patricia Mazzei is the lead reporter for The Times in Miami, covering Florida and Puerto Rico. More about Patricia Mazzei

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NPR defends its journalism after senior editor says it has lost the public's trust

David Folkenflik

NPR is defending its journalism and integrity after a senior editor wrote an essay accusing it of losing the public's trust. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

NPR is defending its journalism and integrity after a senior editor wrote an essay accusing it of losing the public's trust.

NPR's top news executive defended its journalism and its commitment to reflecting a diverse array of views on Tuesday after a senior NPR editor wrote a broad critique of how the network has covered some of the most important stories of the age.

"An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don't have an audience that reflects America," writes Uri Berliner.

A strategic emphasis on diversity and inclusion on the basis of race, ethnicity and sexual orientation, promoted by NPR's former CEO, John Lansing, has fed "the absence of viewpoint diversity," Berliner writes.

NPR's chief news executive, Edith Chapin, wrote in a memo to staff Tuesday afternoon that she and the news leadership team strongly reject Berliner's assessment.

"We're proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories," she wrote. "We believe that inclusion — among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage — is critical to telling the nuanced stories of this country and our world."

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She added, "None of our work is above scrutiny or critique. We must have vigorous discussions in the newsroom about how we serve the public as a whole."

A spokesperson for NPR said Chapin, who also serves as the network's chief content officer, would have no further comment.

Praised by NPR's critics

Berliner is a senior editor on NPR's Business Desk. (Disclosure: I, too, am part of the Business Desk, and Berliner has edited many of my past stories. He did not see any version of this article or participate in its preparation before it was posted publicly.)

Berliner's essay , titled "I've Been at NPR for 25 years. Here's How We Lost America's Trust," was published by The Free Press, a website that has welcomed journalists who have concluded that mainstream news outlets have become reflexively liberal.

Berliner writes that as a Subaru-driving, Sarah Lawrence College graduate who "was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother ," he fits the mold of a loyal NPR fan.

Yet Berliner says NPR's news coverage has fallen short on some of the most controversial stories of recent years, from the question of whether former President Donald Trump colluded with Russia in the 2016 election, to the origins of the virus that causes COVID-19, to the significance and provenance of emails leaked from a laptop owned by Hunter Biden weeks before the 2020 election. In addition, he blasted NPR's coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict.

On each of these stories, Berliner asserts, NPR has suffered from groupthink due to too little diversity of viewpoints in the newsroom.

The essay ricocheted Tuesday around conservative media , with some labeling Berliner a whistleblower . Others picked it up on social media, including Elon Musk, who has lambasted NPR for leaving his social media site, X. (Musk emailed another NPR reporter a link to Berliner's article with a gibe that the reporter was a "quisling" — a World War II reference to someone who collaborates with the enemy.)

When asked for further comment late Tuesday, Berliner declined, saying the essay spoke for itself.

The arguments he raises — and counters — have percolated across U.S. newsrooms in recent years. The #MeToo sexual harassment scandals of 2016 and 2017 forced newsrooms to listen to and heed more junior colleagues. The social justice movement prompted by the killing of George Floyd in 2020 inspired a reckoning in many places. Newsroom leaders often appeared to stand on shaky ground.

Leaders at many newsrooms, including top editors at The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times , lost their jobs. Legendary Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron wrote in his memoir that he feared his bonds with the staff were "frayed beyond repair," especially over the degree of self-expression his journalists expected to exert on social media, before he decided to step down in early 2021.

Since then, Baron and others — including leaders of some of these newsrooms — have suggested that the pendulum has swung too far.

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New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger warned last year against journalists embracing a stance of what he calls "one-side-ism": "where journalists are demonstrating that they're on the side of the righteous."

"I really think that that can create blind spots and echo chambers," he said.

Internal arguments at The Times over the strength of its reporting on accusations that Hamas engaged in sexual assaults as part of a strategy for its Oct. 7 attack on Israel erupted publicly . The paper conducted an investigation to determine the source of a leak over a planned episode of the paper's podcast The Daily on the subject, which months later has not been released. The newsroom guild accused the paper of "targeted interrogation" of journalists of Middle Eastern descent.

Heated pushback in NPR's newsroom

Given Berliner's account of private conversations, several NPR journalists question whether they can now trust him with unguarded assessments about stories in real time. Others express frustration that he had not sought out comment in advance of publication. Berliner acknowledged to me that for this story, he did not seek NPR's approval to publish the piece, nor did he give the network advance notice.

Some of Berliner's NPR colleagues are responding heatedly. Fernando Alfonso, a senior supervising editor for digital news, wrote that he wholeheartedly rejected Berliner's critique of the coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict, for which NPR's journalists, like their peers, periodically put themselves at risk.

Alfonso also took issue with Berliner's concern over the focus on diversity at NPR.

"As a person of color who has often worked in newsrooms with little to no people who look like me, the efforts NPR has made to diversify its workforce and its sources are unique and appropriate given the news industry's long-standing lack of diversity," Alfonso says. "These efforts should be celebrated and not denigrated as Uri has done."

After this story was first published, Berliner contested Alfonso's characterization, saying his criticism of NPR is about the lack of diversity of viewpoints, not its diversity itself.

"I never criticized NPR's priority of achieving a more diverse workforce in terms of race, ethnicity and sexual orientation. I have not 'denigrated' NPR's newsroom diversity goals," Berliner said. "That's wrong."

Questions of diversity

Under former CEO John Lansing, NPR made increasing diversity, both of its staff and its audience, its "North Star" mission. Berliner says in the essay that NPR failed to consider broader diversity of viewpoint, noting, "In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans."

Berliner cited audience estimates that suggested a concurrent falloff in listening by Republicans. (The number of people listening to NPR broadcasts and terrestrial radio broadly has declined since the start of the pandemic.)

Former NPR vice president for news and ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin tweeted , "I know Uri. He's not wrong."

Others questioned Berliner's logic. "This probably gets causality somewhat backward," tweeted Semafor Washington editor Jordan Weissmann . "I'd guess that a lot of NPR listeners who voted for [Mitt] Romney have changed how they identify politically."

Similarly, Nieman Lab founder Joshua Benton suggested the rise of Trump alienated many NPR-appreciating Republicans from the GOP.

In recent years, NPR has greatly enhanced the percentage of people of color in its workforce and its executive ranks. Four out of 10 staffers are people of color; nearly half of NPR's leadership team identifies as Black, Asian or Latino.

"The philosophy is: Do you want to serve all of America and make sure it sounds like all of America, or not?" Lansing, who stepped down last month, says in response to Berliner's piece. "I'd welcome the argument against that."

"On radio, we were really lagging in our representation of an audience that makes us look like what America looks like today," Lansing says. The U.S. looks and sounds a lot different than it did in 1971, when NPR's first show was broadcast, Lansing says.

A network spokesperson says new NPR CEO Katherine Maher supports Chapin and her response to Berliner's critique.

The spokesperson says that Maher "believes that it's a healthy thing for a public service newsroom to engage in rigorous consideration of the needs of our audiences, including where we serve our mission well and where we can serve it better."

Disclosure: This story was reported and written by NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik and edited by Deputy Business Editor Emily Kopp and Managing Editor Gerry Holmes. Under NPR's protocol for reporting on itself, no NPR corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.