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Why Abortion Should Be Legalized

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

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Published: Jan 28, 2021

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Introduction, why abortion should be legal.

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

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Why abortion should be legal

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Pro and Con: Abortion

To access extended pro and con arguments, sources, and discussion questions about whether abortion should be legal, go to ProCon.org .

The debate over whether abortion should be a legal option has long divided people around the world. Split into two groups, pro-choice and pro-life, the two sides frequently clash in protests.

A June 2, 2022 Gallup poll , 55% of Americans identified as “pro-choice,” the highest percentage since 1995. 39% identified as “pro-life,” and 5% were neither or unsure. For the first time in the history of the poll question (since 2001), 52% of Americans believe abortion is morally acceptable. 38% believed the procedure to be morally wrong, and 10% answered that it depended on the situation or they were unsure.

Surgical abortion (aka suction curettage or vacuum curettage) is the most common type of abortion procedure. It involves using a suction device to remove the contents of a pregnant woman’s uterus. Surgical abortion performed later in pregnancy (after 12-16 weeks) is called D&E (dilation and evacuation). The second most common abortion procedure, a medical abortion (aka an “abortion pill”), involves taking medications, usually mifepristone and misoprostol (aka RU-486), within the first seven to nine weeks of pregnancy to induce an abortion. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that 67% of abortions performed in 2014 were performed at or less than eight weeks’ gestation, and 91.5% were performed at or less than 13 weeks’ gestation. 77.3% were performed by surgical procedure, while 22.6% were medical abortions. An abortion can cost from $500 to over $1,000 depending on where it is performed and how long into the pregnancy it is.

• Abortion is a safe medical procedure that protects lives.
• Abortion bans endangers healthcare for those not seeking abortions.
• Abortion bans deny bodily autonomy, creating wide-ranging repercussions.
• Life begins at conception, making abortion murder.
• Legal abortion promotes a culture in which life is disposable.
• Increased access to birth control, health insurance, and sexual education would make abortion unnecessary.

This article was published on June 24, 2022, at Britannica’s ProCon.org , a nonpartisan issue-information source.

THE PRINCETON LEGAL JOURNAL

Princeton Legal Journal > The Forum

4 Prin.L.J.F. 12

The First Amendment and the Abortion Rights Debate

Sofia Cipriano

Spring 2024

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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A World Without Legal Abortion: How Activists Envision A 'Post-Roe' Nation

Sarah McCammon

Anti-abortion-rights activists participate in the March for Life rally near the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 24. Susan Walsh/AP hide caption

Anti-abortion-rights activists participate in the March for Life rally near the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 24.

Judge Amy Coney Barrett's Supreme Court confirmation could open the door to a world that many anti-abortion-rights activists have been envisioning for decades.

A Look At Amy Coney Barrett's Record On Abortion Rights

"I hope and pray that we will be in a world post- Roe v. Wade ," said Carrie Murray Nellis, 41, an adoption attorney based in Georgia.

Murray Nellis is the founder of Abiding Love Adoptions, which operates in Georgia, Florida and Alabama. She hopes Barrett's confirmation will lead to the overturning of the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationwide, which would thereby allow states to further restrict or ban the procedure.

With Roe v. Wade On The Line, Some States Take Steps To Protect Abortion Rights

Americans' Support For Abortion Rights Wanes As Pregnancy Progresses

Preparing for a post- Roe s ociety

Murray Nellis believes organizations like hers, which works primarily with birth mothers who are choosing adoption for their babies, need to be ready to help more women facing unplanned pregnancies.

"We as a pro-life community have got to get ready and get our ducks in a row," she said. "Because this could likely be happening, and I don't think we're ready."

Heather Lawless, 39, is co-founder of the Reliance Center in Idaho, which counsels women against abortion and provides services for new and expectant mothers. Stellar Styles Photography, Lewiston, Idaho hide caption

Heather Lawless, 39, is co-founder of the Reliance Center in Idaho, which counsels women against abortion and provides services for new and expectant mothers.

Persuasion and the law

A majority of Americans favor some restrictions on abortion but support Roe v. Wade , according to national polls. But activists dedicated to the goal of ending abortion in the U.S. have been organizing for decades at every level of government. They often say their goal is to make abortion both " illegal and unthinkable ."

"There's always a reason why a woman is choosing abortion," said Heather Lawless, co-founder of the Reliance Center in Idaho, which counsels women against abortion and offers free pregnancy tests and screenings for sexually transmitted infections. "And I believe that if we work together, we can provide them with the resources and the tools that they need to not make that choice."

Lawless said that this can mean helping a pregnant woman find housing or get treatment for addiction. But ultimately, she said, abortion should not be a choice.

"I don't think abortion should be legal, period. Because abortion at any stage is willfully taking a human life, and I don't think that should be legal — at all," Lawless said.

That includes, Lawless said, pregnancies resulting from rape or incest.

Questions of enforcement

Banning abortion would mean civil or criminal penalties for those who are convicted of violating those laws. In the post- Roe world Lawless envisions, doctors could be prosecuted for providing the procedure, though Lawless said she would not support penalties for pregnant patients.

Murray Nellis, the adoption attorney from Georgia, said she supports early-abortion bans like one passed in 2019 in her state, which critics said was less than clear about how it would be enforced and against whom. That law, as well as several other so-called "heartbeat laws" in other states, has been blocked in federal court. But advocates hope the Supreme Court might use such a law as an opportunity to reconsider Roe and related precedent.

Murray Nellis said she would not want to see patients punished if abortion were banned.

"I just think that that is cruel," she said. "I just think the responsibility and liability should be at the hands of the individual she [would be] literally paying to do something illegal."

That's the position of many of the major national anti-abortion-rights activist groups. But it's not a universal one.

Catherine Davis is the founder of the Restoration Project, a group based in Georgia that promotes an anti-abortion message primarily among African American pastors. She hopes to see abortion banned nationwide. Davis said the focus of prosecution should be on doctors, though she wouldn't rule out one day punishing women who induce their own abortions.

Catherine Davis is founder of the Restoration Project, a group in Georgia that opposes abortion rights. Charles Joseph/Courtesy Catherine Davis hide caption

"If she decides to self-abort herself, then she's subjected to the same penalty as the doctor," Davis said.

Davis said she believes abortion should be treated exactly like murder — up to and including capital punishment.

"If a doctor makes the decision in a jurisdiction that he or she knows the penalty for taking the life of another human being is the death penalty, and they decide to do it anyway, then they've subjected themselves to the death penalty," Davis said.

Punishing women?

Mary Ziegler, the Stearns Weaver Miller professor at Florida State University College of Law, said that while many groups opposed to abortion rights have historically said they wouldn't support laws that punish pregnant women who get abortions, the growing availability of medication to self-induce abortion at home could complicate that position.

"I don't see how you do that without punishing women, because we're going to be in an environment where women can end pregnancies without a third-party being present," she said.

Leslie Reagan is a history professor at the University of Illinois and author of the book When Abortion Was a Crime. If Roe falls, Reagan said, women will still seek out illegal and sometimes unsafe abortions, as they did before Roe .

Reagan said activists who've been organizing with that thought in mind for decades are likely to insist on enforcing state abortion bans.

"We have a movement — a religiously based movement that's led by the churches and can organize out of the church — that wants these laws changed and will want these laws enforced," Reagan said.

In written responses to Senate Judiciary Committee members, Judge Amy Coney Barrett declines to say, if Roe is overturned, whether states could: -ban IVF -make abortion, use of certain contraceptives a felony -make abortion a crime punishable by death https://t.co/WsAIacjquC pic.twitter.com/gaTJmKjxTB — Sarah McCammon📻 (@sarahmccammon) October 22, 2020

It's impossible to know how any justice might rule in a given case. But in a written exchange with Senate Judiciary Committee members, Barrett was asked if states could make getting an abortion a felony or a capital crime punishable by death.

Barrett responded that as a judge and Supreme Court nominee, "It would not be appropriate for me to offer an opinion on abstract legal issues or hypotheticals."

With Abortion Restrictions On The Rise, Some Women Induce Their Own

• Supreme Court
• judge amy coney barrett
• punishing women

Review of David Boonin, Beyond Roe: Why Abortion Should be Legal Even if the Fetus is a Person (Oxford University Press, 2019)

• Book Review
• Open access
• Published: 14 May 2021
• Volume 15 , pages 535–544, ( 2021 )

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Should abortion be legal even if the human fetus is a person? “Person” is intended here in its philosophical sense, to mean a being possessed of equal moral standing and rights as you and me. Most importantly of all, a person is a being with the fundamental right to life. The question about what follows morally and legally when fetal personhood is presumed has occupied a sizeable part of abortion ethics for some time. Far and away the most influential reflection on that question was the philosopher Judith Thomson’s “violinist analogy argument” in defence of abortion rights. Footnote 1 There, Thomson argued that abortion is morally defensible even if it is true that the fetus is a rights-holding person. Her argument rested on a view of pregnancy as supererogatory, and, conversely, of abortion as the mere refusal to be a good Samaritan. Though it might be laudable to do so, no one is morally required to surrender her very body in order to keep another person alive for nine months, Thomson claimed. Ergo, even if fetuses are persons, women are not morally obliged to provide them with life-saving bodily aid by gestating them. They are morally permitted to refuse that bodily aid by means of abortion. They are permitted to choose not to be good Samaritans.

Thomson memorably posed this argument through an analogy in which you are kidnapped by a musical society and hooked up to an unconscious violinist whose kidneys are failing, and who needs to be plugged into your own kidneys for the next nine months in order to survive. After that, he will detach, and you can go your separate ways. As fate would have it, you are the only kidney match. Certainly, Thomson argued, it would be admirable for you to undertake this burden, but surely you do not have to. You are morally permitted to reach around your back and unplug yourself, knowing that the violinist will sadly die, she claimed, confident that the reader will share this judgement. Well, just so with pregnancy and abortion. I think of this as the “good Samaritan view” of abortion rights, since the kernel of the argument is that abortion is no more than the refusal to be a good Samaritan. The violinist analogy is aimed at making the moral permissibility of abortion difficult to refute, including if we presuppose fetal personhood. The violinist is certainly a person, and yet you may unplug. If one is permitted to unplug the violinist, knowing he will die, why is one not permitted to expel a fetus, knowing the same?

In Beyond Roe: Why Abortion Should be Legal Even if the Fetus is a Person (Oxford University Press, 2019), David Boonin presents an engaging restatement of this way of thinking about abortion, citing Thomson as its intellectual progenitor, and defending it against the more prominent objections to stack up in the years since Thomson’s watershed intervention. In concert with Thomson, Boonin’s main proposition is as the title makes plain: that the right to abortion is defensible in moral and, even more assuredly, in legal terms, even if the fetus is a person with the right to life. He writes in the preface:

My main goal in this book is to take the argument that Thomson pioneered in the moral context, adapt it to the legal context, and use it to argue that abortion should be legal even if the fetus is a person. (x)

Like Thomson, Boonin argues that abortion amounts to the refusal to provide an embryo or a fetus with life-sustaining aid that a pregnant person cannot be morally required to provide. Certainly, he claims, no one ought to be forced by law to provide that bodily support. Emulating Thomson’s strategy, Boonin anchors his argument on an extended analogue. Unlike Thomson’s hypothetical violinist, though, Boonin’s is a real life case, which even found its way before a court. The case concerned an American man, Robert McFall, and his cousin, David Shimp. McFall had been diagnosed with aplastic anaemia, a life-threatening condition which threatened to soon take his life if he did not receive a bone marrow transplant. Initial tests indicated that McFall’s cousin, David Shimp, was a potential match. But Shimp did not wish to donate his bone marrow in order to save McFall. In light of the refusal, McFall brought a legal action, effectively asking the court to force Shimp to donate. In McFall v. Shimp , that action was summarily dismissed by the presiding Judge Flaherty. Footnote 2 ‘Flaherty’s basic point was simple:’, writes Boonin, ‘it would be wrong for the state to force Shimp to give McFall the bone marrow he needed. I’ll bet you agree with Judge Flaherty about this.’ (4).

In the first part of the book, Boonin draws out the main lesson of McFall v. Shimp , and seeks to show that if the reader agrees with that principle and the judge’s decision in that case, she must, perforce, agree that abortion should remain legal even if the fetus is a person. The main lesson of the case, Boonin takes it, is that the right to life does not entail the right to the use of another person’s body to stay alive. McFall definitely possessed the right to life. Still, he could not demand the use of Shimp’s bone marrow in order to save his life. And certainly, we should think, the state ought not to force Shimp to make that bodily sacrifice. ‘[B]eing a person doesn’t give you the right to use another person’s bone marrow even if you need to use it.’, Boonin writes (8).

Boonin sets out to establish that the same analysis applies to abortion on the assumption that the fetus is a person. If you believe that Shimp ought not to be forced to donate his bone marrow to McFall, then you should hold that the state ought not to force women to provide life-sustaining bodily aid to fetuses through gestation. But this it would do if it prohibited abortion, it is argued. He traces a number of different abortion scenarios, inviting the reader to presume in each that the fetus, like McFall, really is a person (amusingly, the fetuses are even given names, such as “Al” and “Bob” to help lock that presumption in place). Despite their various features, Boonin claims that all of these abortions are subsumed by the basic principle of McFall v. Shimp .

The second part of the book tackles a cache of objections to this initial argument, which largely proceed by asserting morally relevant disanalogies that may well hold between McFall v. Shimp and the abortion situation. Perhaps a pregnant woman is responsible for the situation that has now arisen, or could be said to have consensually risked pregnancy (both non-issues in McFall v. Shimp ). Perhaps the precise way in which abortion causes fetal death raises distinct moral issues. Does it change things that a woman stands in a relation of biological parenthood to her fetus? And so on.

In the final part, Boonin argues that if you agree with the decision in McFall v. Shimp , you ought to hold not only that abortion prohibitions are illicit, but also that numerous restrictions on abortion access are indefensible as a matter of justice. Among the restrictions he addresses directly are mandatory counselling, waiting periods, and ultrasound requirements, all of which are in operation in some American states.

The importance of the entire ‘good Samaritan’ strain of abortion defence is patently apparent. On a typical reckoning, the philosophical personhood of the fetus is deeply inimical to abortion rights. This is because, while unwanted pregnancy no doubt imposes severe hardships on women, it is hard to make the case that homicide is a proportionate method of avoiding them in almost all cases. In morality and law, homicide is justified only in the direst of circumstances. Considering this, it would appear that everything in the abortion rights battle depends on the correct answer to the personhood question. Needless to say, though, the conditions for philosophical personhood are deeply (maybe even essentially) contested. If the permissibility of abortion can, somehow, be maintained in the face of prenatal personhood, we can spare ourselves grappling with the thorny question about the moral status of the fetus—and, indeed, about what confers personhood universally—on the path to defending abortion rights.

The good Samaritan argument has both moral and legal analogues. While Thomson was primarily concerned with establishing the moral permissibility of abortion, Boonin more emphatically sets out to make the case for the legal right to abort a fetus-person. Footnote 3 On both scores, by grounding his version of the good Samaritan argument on a real life case, Boonin’s account has the relative virtue of being slightly closer to earth than Thomson’s, where we might worry that the sheer bizarreness of the scenario makes it difficult to formulate reliable judgements. McFall v. Shimp actually happened, and Boonin is surely correct to suppose that its decision will be endorsed by most people. Relying on readers’ judgements about that case is hence a solid departure point for further argument.

Admittedly, this advantage is diluted each time the original case is amended to something more outlandish so as to account for a possible morally relevant disanalogy with abortion. I am less sure, for instance, what the correct legal and moral response is where Shimp begins the scenario connected up to a ‘bone marrow transferring machine’ which is slowly extracting his bone marrow and transferring it to McFall, or where McFall turns out to be Shimp’s offspring, than I am about the original case. This “changing-the-case” strategy—a staple of contemporary moral philosophy—is the argumentative method of choice for most of the book, and McFall v. Shimp undergoes multiple emendations to press the main thesis in the face of objections. For example, perhaps we are unsure that McFall v. Shimp applies equally to abortions in which the woman was in some way responsible in becoming pregnant, say, by engaging in consensual sex and forgoing contraceptive use. In that case, we should simply ask ourselves how things ought to stand in an amended case where Shimp is somehow responsible for the situation in which he is now connected up to McFall and already donating his bone marrow, the cessation of which will spell McFall’s death—maybe he went tearing around McFall’s hospital room in full knowledge that he might trip on the slippery floor and wind up stuck on the ‘bone marrow transferring machine’ (24). If we remain convinced that the law ought not to force Shimp to remain hooked up, his negligence notwithstanding, the disanalogy doesn’t bite.

The doubt always lingers, though, that not every morally salient feature of the pregnancy situation can be adequately captured by a McFall v. Shimp Redux. And none, surely, can capture the combined force of everything that seems to matter in this domain. How would it change our moral evaluations of McFall and Shimp’s case if people donating bone marrow to their cousins had been the method of bringing new humans into existence since time immemorial; if our private, social, and working lives were structured against the backdrop of this possibility, and even sat in expectation of it; if the act of donation had come to be considered (rightly or wrongly) as a pivotal aspect of the human experience, but one that also imposed disproportionate social and physical burdens upon the donors, an already disadvantaged class of citizens? It is unlikely that any tweaking of McFall v. Shimp can replicate all the realities which inform our moral response to the abortion problem, and, indeed, against the backdrop of which those moral sensibilities are developed and finessed to begin with. Perhaps the misgivings some have about the methodology which characterises Beyond Roe are not entirely without merit, then.

This critical perspective having been duly noted, Boonin’s constant appeal to intuitions about cases, changing the case in response to objections, and confidently escorting the reader from one conclusion to the next (“if the McFall v. Shimp principle applies to X abortion scenario, then it should also apply to Y abortion scenario”), makes for a readable and compelling discussion, well suited to the aims of the book and its intended wide readership. The arguments are elegantly simple and straightforward; the writing has a crisp, conversational style, and the book moves along at a good pace, with each concise chapter devoted to progressing the argument in one small step, or refuting an objection with little ceremony. Boonin clearly takes pains to make the book suitable for those unfamiliar with abortion ethics literature and the philosophically novice. As he states in the preface, the aim is for the book to be ‘informal and accessible’ (xii), and in this he succeeds, with a minor reservation about some parts in which the appeal to yet more “cases” feels like more of a hindrance than a help. The book does not presume any familiarity with either law or philosophy and is pleasingly free of disciplinary jargon.

Much of the book is in fact a précis of arguments more elaborately made by Boonin in his 2002 book A Defense of Abortion , repackaged and simplified for the general reader. Footnote 4 In the earlier book, Boonin devotes an impressive chapter of over 200 pages to the systematic defence of Thomson’s version of the good Samaritan argument. The chapter contains the most rigorous and robust defence of the view that abortion is morally permissible regardless of fetal personhood of which I am aware (my own copy is dog-eared and underlined throughout). Beyond Roe distils the essence of these arguments, and of the good Samaritan thesis, in a way that will be particularly useful for students or for those encountering philosophical abortion arguments for the first time. But it also has plenty to offer the more inducted, reminding us of the various pulse points in this corner of the discussion, and of where the exchanges will likely bottom out. The flip side of the book’s punchy style is that there is little breathing space to expand arguments and attend to nuances. This can hardly be a complaint in the context, and it is only once or twice that the discussion suffers for it, by my lights. One possible example of where it does is around the discussions of sex-selective and fetal abnormality (or “disability”) abortions—both tricky cases for one or other side of the abortion divide—where no reference is made to some salient moral and legal considerations beyond the so-called fetal-maternal conflict.

The timing of Beyond Roe , at what appears to be a critical juncture for the abortion right in the United States, cannot be a coincidence. After recent personnel shifts on the US Supreme Court, Roe v. Wade , along with its determination against fetal personhood, is seemingly more precarious now than it has been in decades. The landmark decision in Roe v. Wade is familiar to most people as the case in which women’s constitutional right to terminate their pregnancies was first recognised, Footnote 5 Fewer people are aware that Justice Blackmun premised the court’s majority judgment on the denial of the fetus’s personhood under the Constitution. Women’s right to privacy did afford them the qualified right to abortion, it was held, but could not have done if the fetus were a recognised person under the law, and entitled to the constitutional protections that triggered. Had the Constitution recognised prenatal persons, the abortion right would fail, Justice Blackmun reasoned, ‘for the fetus’s right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the amendment’. Footnote 6

In so holding, Roe embraced the orthodox view of abortion ethics set out above: that the right to abortion is incompatible with the personhood of the fetus. As the antithesis to this view, the good Samaritan argument has increased legal and political relevance in any climate where the ascription of legal personhood to the fetus is a real possibility. Boonin articulates a basis for the abortion right that is impervious to a finding of fetal personhood. It is in this sense that his argument goes “beyond Roe”. By pre-empting a legal turn affirming the constitutional personhood of the fetus, and illustrating how the abortion right could be defended consistently with it, the book is a welcome example of what philosophical legal advocacy can look like.

Garnering the reader’s sympathy for the main principle about the limits of positive bodily duties (the ‘lesson’ of McFall v. Shimp ) is always going to be the easier part for the good Samaritan argument. To reiterate, the principle is that the right to life does not entail the right to use another person’s body in order to live. This is because the right to life does not ground a correlative duty on others to keep someone alive by such means, and no one should be forced to undertake burdens they are not morally required to bear. (This is not to deny that there are morally egregious refusals to save: Thomson herself admits that someone who refused to sustain the violinist for merely one hour, when that is all it would take to save him, would be ‘morally indecent’. Footnote 7 )

Few would probably object thus far. The harder sell is always to show that the principle applies to pregnancy and abortion the same way it applies to McFall v. Shimp , and that morally relevant disanalogies do not knock it out of the arena. Boonin documents some of the main objections along these lines and provides a good demonstration of how someone defending the good Samaritan view could defuse them, the persuasiveness of which it is for the reader to evaluate. A cluster of those objections raise the possibility that the positive obligations a woman might owe to her fetus do not match up with McFall v. Shimp . This is the tenor of the responsibility objection (pp. 69–83), which points out that pregnant women can be responsible for the fetus’s situation of need in a way that is not true of Shimp vis-à-vis McFall. And it is trite that greater responsibility grounds greater obligations.

But a more fundamental objection targets the very framing of the abortion issue in terms of whether woman has a positive duty to gestate a fetus. On the good Samaritan view, the ethical question is whether one person’s positive obligations of assistance extend to proffering the use of her body for someone else’s survival, the answer being that, certainly in abortion, they do not. Yet an obvious objection is that abortion is not a positive obligations problem to begin with, but rather a problem about when one is permitted to breach the negative duty not to kill. We may be satisfied that Shimp merely allowed McFall to die when he refused to donate his bone marrow. In that case, the immanent moral issue is only whether Shimp ought to have saved McFall or not. But it seems that when “Alice” aborts “Al”, she (or her doctors) is positively killing Al. If so, the good Samaritan analysis is in some trouble. In both law and morality, the circumstances in which we are permitted to kill outright are far stricter than those in which we are permitted to refuse to save. It doesn’t follow, then, from the fact that Shimp has no duty to rescue McFall that Alice is permitted to kill Al to spare herself similar (or, even, worse) burdens. This is the familiar “killing v letting die” objection to Thomson’s original defence of abortion.

As Boonin notes, it looks as though only some types of abortions, such as those which expel a pre-viable fetus from the uterus without attacking it directly, are readily analysable in terms of refusing to save, on a par with Shimp’s omission (109). Other abortion methods better resemble direct killing which, presuming fetal personhood, would make the issue one of homicide. Homicide may yet be justified, of course, but its road to justification is not easy.

Boonin’s general strategy against the killing v letting die objection, only really glimpsed at here, is to press the implications of special constraints on positive killing where they most rub. For example, most people, Boonin says, will likely think it matters not whether an abortion is carried out by dilation and curettage, a method that directly kills the fetus in the process of extraction, or instead by hysterotomy, where a pre-viable fetus is removed from the uterine environment it needs to survive, given that the result, fetal death, is the same. Added pressure can be applied using another amended version of McFall v. Shimp . Let us change the case again, Boonin suggests, to have it that Shimp is already unhappily hooked up to the bone-marrow transferring machine, only this time it is not enough to free Shimp to simply sever the connection; to free Shimp, a doctor must kill McFall outright, albeit painlessly in his sleep (114). If you think the doctor ought to be able to do this, Boonin argues, then you can have no objection to a mode of abortion that directly kills Al the fetus. More than this, though, you should have no objection to the direct killing of McFall in the amended case:

Since McFall has no right to the life support he’s receiving and would be dead if he weren’t receiving it, you may well think Shimp is entitled to withdraw that support even if doing so involves taking McFall’s life. Since McFall has no right to remain alive at Shimp’s expense after all, doing so would not make McFall any worse off than he has the right to be.’ (115–116)

But that cannot be a full and correct statement of a condition for permissible killing. It is not the case that one is permitted to kill just whenever the killing is done so as to liberate oneself from a burden one would not have been duty-bound to offer, or when the killing will not leave the victim any worse off than she has a right to be, vis-à-vis the killer. Let us assume I have no duty to save you from rough sleeping and death from exposure by handing you over the contents of my bank account. Footnote 8 Does that mean I am permitted to kill you so as to prevent you from commandeering those funds by force? Unlike Boonin, I am less sure we can read directly off a person’s rights to life-saving assistance the extent of her rights against being killed so as to spare someone that that assistance.

Anyone unimpressed by the idea of an intrinsic moral difference between killing and letting die will no doubt deny that Alice cannot abort Al by dilation and curettage if she can abort by hysterotomy. This may seem all the more the case when the outcome for the fetus is the same either way but where the latter “letting die” method is more physically costly to Alice. Footnote 9 Yet those who embrace strict deontological constraints on positive killing know that it will sometimes prove costly on other metrics of goodness. This line of reply only seems to beg the question against the killing/letting die distinction wholesale. We know that the difference is of moral consequence: my moral duty to save people from starvation through charitable donations is nothing like my moral duty not to poison those same people. If the distinction matters morally and intrinsically, why does it not matter here? That is the challenge.

If the morality and legality of abortion cannot, ultimately, fall to be treated as a positive obligations problem, we may find ourselves directed back to the more fundamental matter of fetal moral status. This brings me around, finally, to what motivates the good Samaritan thesis and the entire strain of personhood-bypassing abortion argument. ‘The traditional approach of arguing about fetal personhood doesn’t appear to be working too well’, Boonin writes toward the beginning of the book (6). By what standards, though? One could well say the same thing about the good Samaritan view, given how little favour it has found among those who really do avow prenatal personhood. Footnote 10 The personhood question is intractable insofar as it has not yielded universal agreement about the fetus. Is this different, in this respect, from any other core moral dispute that bears on our legal rights? (Consider: there is not yet universal agreement that the institution of property rights is anything other than state-sanctioned theft.) It is a virtue of the good Samaritan defence of abortion, Boonin says, that it is not susceptible to sorites-type anxieties about where the exact threshold of personhood lies, or about how we are to morally distinguish abortion from infanticide, although he acknowledges that personhood-denying defences of abortion do field answers to these quandaries. And indeed they do. Is it much harder to persuade someone of those answers than to persuade her that abortion is tantamount to the morally permissible refusal to proffer life-saving bodily aid?

Asking what follows about abortion rights if the fetus is indeed a person is without doubt a revealing and worthwhile exercise. Even so, our imaginations tend to buckle under the strain of that presumption at certain points—hence, perhaps, the need to assist by giving the fetuses names (“Al”, “Bob”, “Daniel”), and help animate them as persons. What moral duties do we owe to abstract “persons” that are nothing like persons as we ordinarily conceive of them: without their separateness, their embedment in social life, their transparent vulnerability and emotion? This is perhaps not a question our moral sensibilities have been honed to answer. To object that it chafes too much to speak of the fetuses “Al” and “Bob” invites the obvious retort that one has simply stopped playing the intellectual game. Still, finding the game unplayable on these terms can be telling in itself.

A minor theme of Beyond Roe is the explanatory power of the good Samaritan defence of abortion rights over personhood-denying accounts. Footnote 11 But the personhood-denying defence has explanatory heft of its own. I end by noting just one way in which this is so. Like Thomson, Boonin accepts that the defence of abortion he outlines in Beyond Roe is more narrowly what has been called a defence of extraction . Boonin does not here assert a specific right to kill a fetus-person, only the right to end gestational support knowing this will spell fetal death (47–48). This poses clear problems for post-viability abortions, at which point the fetus could alternatively be extracted alive, still ending the woman’s bodily support. If a woman can expel a fetus alive, the good Samaritan argument does not hold that she is entitled to insist on fetal death, it seems.

Boonin regards this problem as being of limited practical import given how few abortions occur past the point of fetal viability. But recent developments in artificial womb technology threaten to force the issue of whether it is abortion or extraction (or both) that is ethically and legally licit. Whilst still exploratory, these developments hint at new possibilities for early fetal, and even embryonic, survival outside of the uterine environment. Suppose that an unwanted ten-week embryo could be removed from a pregnant woman’s womb and artificially gestated though to maturity. Where does this leave the abortion right on the good Samaritan defence? If we think the woman still ought to be able to control her procreative destiny by intentionally ending the life of that embryo, it is not the good Samaritan argument which will tell us this is so. What this action amounts to in moral terms, and how it should be treated under the law, will surely then depend on the intrinsic moral status of that embryo. Is it a creature whose life we are permitted to end so as to secure the all-round wellbeing of a more developed human being, or is it not?

With possibilities such as ectogenesis on the horizon, the question about the moral status of the fetus cannot be easily batted aside (and it would be remiss not to mention here that Boonin has elsewhere advanced developed views about moral status before birth Footnote 12 ). Changing legal and bio-technological landscapes will likely continue to press on both core questions in abortion ethics: is the fetus a rights-holding person, and, if so, what is the normative relevance of that? What Boonin presents here is a perspicuous and engaging treatment of the second issue.

J. J. Thomson, ‘A Defense of Abortion’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 1:1 (Autumn 1971): 47–66.

McFall v. Shimp , 10 Pa. D. & C. 3d 90 (July 26, 1978).

Although, one might think the claim about legal permissibility is implied in Thomson’s version of the argument. It is passé to think that plenty of morally sub-optimal behaviour is not the law’s proper concern, and even less legitimate, we should therefore think, for the law to enforce positive assistance over and above what even morality requires us to do.

D. Boonin, A Defense of Abortion (Cambridge University Press, 2002).

Roe v. Wade 410 U.S. 113 (1973).

Thomson, ‘A Defense of Abortion’, 59.

I am by no means convinced that I would have no such duty.

Boonin discusses this issue at 117–119.

I have yet to come across someone who subscribes to prenatal personhood and yet regards abortion as morally and legally defensible in broadly good Samaritan terms.

For instance, he suggests, it explains why there is in fact no inconsistency in defending abortion rights while maintaining that fetuses can be adjudged victims of crimes, through, inter alia, ‘feticide’ laws. At a glance, feticide laws seem to ‘stand or fall together’ with the prohibition of abortion, all depending on one’s view of prenatal personhood. But the good Samaritan thesis explains why the abortion right could sit alongside feticide laws. The fact that Shimp should not be forced to let McFall use his bone marrow does not mean that McFall should not be treated as a victim if an armed robber comes along and kills him (55).

See: A Defense of Abortion (above).

Boonin, D (2002) A Defense of Abortion (Cambridge University Press)

Boonin, D (2019) Beyond Roe: Why Abortion Should be Legal Even if the Fetus is a Person (Oxford University Press)

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Greasley, K. Review of David Boonin, Beyond Roe: Why Abortion Should be Legal Even if the Fetus is a Person (Oxford University Press, 2019). Criminal Law, Philosophy 15 , 535–544 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-021-09580-x

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Accepted : 29 April 2021

Published : 14 May 2021

Issue Date : October 2021

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-021-09580-x

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• America’s Abortion Quandary

2. Social and moral considerations on abortion

Table of contents.

• 1. Americans’ views on whether, and in what circumstances, abortion should be legal
• Public views of what would change the number of abortions in the U.S.
• A majority of Americans say women should have more say in setting abortion policy in the U.S.
• How do certain arguments about abortion resonate with Americans?
• In their own words: How Americans feel about abortion 
• 3. How the issue of abortion touches Americans personally
• Acknowledgments
• Methodology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Why Abortion Should Be Legal – Essay Writing Tips & Tricks

Table of Contents

The topic of abortion legalization or criminalization has been topical in many countries recently. Even though technology and progress are fast-moving forward, pro-life advocates continue insisting on the fact that women do not possess the right to kill their embryos.

Thus, with the debate going on across multiple domains, you can receive an assignment to compose an essay on abortion at a Law, Medicine, or Politics course.

The key topics considering in essays on abortion today include:

• Whether the unborn fetuses can be considered human beings with the right to protection of their life by law.
• At which term of pregnancy a fetus can already be considered a living human being.
• What legal exceptions should be set in place to regulate women’s right to abortion.
• What countries have already established successful legal precedents to regulate the issue.
• Arguments of pro-and anti-abortion legislation advocates.
• Arguments of women for and against the right to conduct abortion.

Whether you’re for or against abortion in this debate, you can face a situation in which you’ll need to debate your point. That situation is a home assignment to write a why abortion should be made legal essay. And if you’re confused about this task and don’t know how to perform it quickly and easily, we’re here to help you out.

Why Abortion Should Be Legal: Our Thoughts

Here are some ideas for why abortion should be made legal essay that our writing experts share with students needing help. You can borrow any of these themes and examine them in more depth in your argumentative essay about abortion.

• Women’s right to have or not to have children is violated with laws regulating abortion. Such laws can cause serious socio-demographic problems as teenage girls often get pregnant because of their ignorance of birth control methods or lack of essential sexual education. Depriving them of a chance for abortion can ruin their life and health.
• Biological research suggests that a human fetus is not a living organism at the first couple of weeks of its development, which can be aborted. Besides, women typically commit abortion at the early stages of pregnancy, knowing that aborting a child at a later term is a psychologically traumatic experience equaling murder.
• Sometimes, pregnancy results from a crime; some women get pregnant because of a traumatic rape experience. Thus, they are totally reluctant to have a child from a rapist who committed violence against them and caused severe physical and psychological damage.
• In the process of pregnancy development, genetic screening can reveal serious genetic disorders or risks for the fetus. Parents who are not ready to bear the burden of caring for the disabled child should have the right to terminate such a pregnancy. It’s not a violation of disabled people’s rights (as the disabled community tends to claim); it’s natural for a parent to wish to avoid giving birth to a child if they know they will doom that person to suffering.
• In countries where abortion is illegal, shady medical practices of illegal abortions are flourishing. Women are ready to pay huge money and undergo medical manipulations in non-sterile environments to terminate their pregnancies, which is a serious legal and medical issue.
• Women have the right to decide what to do with their bodies. If a woman doesn’t want to be pregnant and give birth to an unwanted child, she shouldn’t be urged by the law to go through this life-changing experience. Parenting should be a wanted, planned act so that children grow up in happy, welcoming families. Giving birth to an unwanted child may later lead to instances of home violence or abuse.

Any of these topics are suitable for why abortion should be made legal essay. We’ve just touched upon the theme broadly, outlining various ethical, medical, and legal issues surrounding this subject. You can take any perspective that speaks to you and develop it in more depth to craft a well-grounded essay to impress your tutor.

Pros and Cons of Abortion You Should Consider

When talking about abortion in academic works, students commonly face the challenge of evaluating the pros and cons of legalization. It’s a typical problem every researcher faces when dealing with evergreen debatable subjects, like marijuana and euthanasia legalization, ban on the death penalty and abortion, animal testing, etc.

Here are the key points you should include in your essay to show your competence in this topic.

Pros of Legal Ban on Abortion

• Women’s disability rates resulting from improper abortions will reduce.
• The post-abortion infertility rates will go down.
• Unborn children’s rights will be protected.
• The unethical practice of killing unborn children will be strictly regulated.
• A ban on abortions is compliant with Christian ethics.
• Birth control and sex education will be emphasized.

Cons of Legal Ban on Abortion

• Illegal abortions are likely to flourish.
• Raped women will have to undergo the trauma of giving birth to an unwanted child.
• Parents of children with severe genetic disorders will have to give birth to disabled children.
• The rate of abandoned children will rise because of unwanted infants’ abandonment in the birth hospitals.
• Many more families will become unhappier because of the economic and psychological burden of rearing unwanted children.
• Women will fight for their rights and feel the oppression of being not the masters of their bodies.

Follow Argumentative Articles on Abortion as Examples

Whenever you talk about sensitive subjects like abortion, the key to sounding competent and non-opinionated is to back your claims with reliable evidence.

In terms of abortion, there are hundreds of valuable sources written by competent professionals backing each side of the debate. Thus, to make your essay look professional and informed, you should first formulate your topic concisely and then conduct a library search for reliable evidence.

We recommend using professional databases for such search so that your arguments look convincing. It’s easy to say that you think that abortion should be made legal because it will be fair for women to make the final decision in this regard. But that argument is not enough for the readers to take your side.

Thus, you can follow this algorithm:

• Choose a perspective for your analysis (ethical, religious, political, medical).
• Find a database with credible academic sources in this area (e.g., for medical research, we strongly recommend using Google Scholar, CINAHL, or PubMed, while sources from HeinOnline or LOC can inform legal papers on abortion).
• Sort the sources you find by relevance to your argument and strength of argumentation, using only those that fit your content and support your point.
• It’s also vital to credit the other side of the debate (otherwise, you will sound biased). So, make sure to find sources supporting the opposite position as well, appealing to their arguments and rebating them in the process of your analysis.

Steps to Writing an Abortion Essay

Now, let’s proceed to the actual process of writing on abortion. As a rule, an essay should consist of three major parts – an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. Once you get to the chosen topic, we advise completing a pre-writing exercise: making an outline for your essay. As soon as you have a couple of credible sources at hand and want to outline your significant argumentation points, use a simple outline template to do so.

OUTLINE INTRODUCTION – broad introduction of the subject. Setting the context. A thesis statement. BODY PARAGRAPH #1 – argument #1 (topic sentence). Supporting evidence. A transition to the next point. PARAGRAPH #2 – argument #2 (topic sentence). Supporting evidence. A transition to the next point. PARAGRAPH #3 – argument #3 (topic sentence). Supporting evidence. A transition to the concluding section. CONCLUSION – summary of your key points and a reference to the broader significance of the subject.

Main Difficulties When Discussing an Abortion Topic

You should keep in mind that abortion is a sensitive topic that touches the deepest strings of people’s hearts for various reasons. Some women debate the ban of abortion because of their unfortunate juvenile experiences with abortion leaving them infertile. Others want abortion to be legal because of women’s moral, ethical, and legal right to decide what to do with their bodies and lives.

Thus, whenever you write an abortion essay, make sure to choose words appropriately, use delicate, non-judgmental phrases, and not accuse anyone of right or wrong decisions regarding abortion.

Any Questions?

Having any troubles with your why abortion should be made legal essay? No panic, as our experts are always on standby to help you out. We can write a well-structured, interesting paper on this subject to cover your back and avoid delays in-home task submission.

So, if you have little time for home tasks or simply don’t want to dig into books this weekend, you can delegate the assignment to us. Talk to our managers today, and they’ll assign a competent legal or medical writer to handle an essay on abortion for you with ease.

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Abortion Law and Policy Around the World

Marge berer.

International coordinator of the International Campaign for Women’s Right to Safe Abortion, London, UK, and was the editor of Reproductive Health Matters , which she founded, from 1993 to 2015.

The aim of this paper is to provide a panoramic view of laws and policies on abortion around the world, giving a range of country-based examples. It shows that the plethora of convoluted laws and restrictions surrounding abortion do not make any legal or public health sense. What makes abortion safe is simple and irrefutable—when it is available on the woman’s request and is universally affordable and accessible. From this perspective, few existing laws are fit for purpose. However, the road to law reform is long and difficult. In order to achieve the right to safe abortion, advocates will need to study the political, health system, legal, juridical, and socio-cultural realities surrounding existing law and policy in their countries, and decide what kind of law they want (if any). The biggest challenge is to determine what is possible to achieve, build a critical mass of support, and work together with legal experts, parliamentarians, health professionals, and women themselves to change the law—so that everyone with an unwanted pregnancy who seeks an abortion can have it, as early as possible and as late as necessary.

Toward a definition of decriminalization of abortion

In simple terms, the decriminalization of abortion means removing specific criminal sanctions against abortion from the law, and changing the law and related policies and regulations to achieve the following:

• not punishing anyone for providing safe abortion,
• not punishing anyone for having an abortion,
• not involving the police in investigating or prosecuting safe abortion provision or practice,
• not involving the courts in deciding whether to allow an abortion, and
• treating abortion like every other form of health care—that is, using best practice in service delivery, the training of providers, and the development and application of evidence-based guidelines, and applying existing law to deal with any dangerous or negligent practices.

Some history

Abortion was legally restricted in almost every country by the end of the nineteenth century. The most important sources of such laws were the imperial countries of Europe—Britain, France, Portugal, Spain, and Italy—who imposed their own laws forbidding abortion on their colonies.

According to the United Nations Population Division’s comprehensive website on abortion laws, legal systems under which abortion is legally restricted fall into three main categories, developed mostly during the period of colonialism from the sixteenth century onward:

• common law: the UK and most of its former colonies—Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, India, Ireland, Malaysia, New Zealand, Pakistan, Singapore, the United States, and the Anglophone countries of Africa, the Caribbean, and Oceania;
• civil law: most of the rest of Europe, including Belgium, France, Portugal, Spain, and their former colonies, Turkey and Japan, most of Latin America, non-Anglophone sub-Saharan Africa, and the former Soviet republics of Central and Western Asia. In addition, the laws of several North African and Middle Eastern countries have been influenced by French civil law; and
• Islamic law: the countries of North Africa and Western Asia and others with predominantly Muslim populations, and having an influence on personal law, for example, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Pakistan. 1

Historically, restrictions on abortion were introduced for three main reasons:

• Abortion was dangerous and abortionists were killing a lot of women. Hence, the laws had a public health intention to protect women—who nevertheless sought abortions and risked their lives in doing so, as they still do today if they have no other choice.
• Abortion was considered a sin or a form of transgression of morality, and the laws were intended to punish and act as a deterrent.
• Abortion was restricted to protect fetal life in some or all circumstances.

Since abortion methods have become safe, laws against abortion make sense only for punitive and deterrent purposes, or to protect fetal life over that of women’s lives. While some prosecutions for unsafe abortions that cause injury or death still take place, far more often existing laws are being used against those having and providing safe abortions outside the law today. Ironically, it is restrictive abortion laws—leftovers from another age—that are responsible for the deaths and millions of injuries to women who cannot afford to pay for a safe illegal abortion.

This paper provides a panoramic view of current laws and policies on abortion in order to show that, from a global perspective, few of these laws makes any legal or public health sense. The fact is that the more restrictive the law, the more it is flouted, within and across borders. Whatever has led to the current impasse in law reform for women’s benefit—whether it is called stigma, misogyny, religion, morality, or political cowardice—few, if any, existing laws on abortion are fit for purpose.

Efforts to reform abortion law and practice since 1900

The first country to reform its abortion law was the Soviet Union, spurred by feminist Alexandra Kollantai, through a decree on women’s health care in October 1920. 2 Since then, progressive abortion law reform (the kind that benefits women) has been justified on public health and human rights grounds, to promote smaller families for population and environmental reasons, and because women’s education and improved socioeconomic status have created alternatives to childbearing. Perhaps most importantly, controlling fertility has become both technically feasible and acceptable in almost all cultures today. Yet despite 100 years of campaigning for safe abortion, the use of contraception has been completely decriminalized while abortion has not.

Abortion is one of the safest medical procedures if done following the World Health Organization’s (WHO) guidance. 3 But it is also the cause of at least one in six maternal deaths from complications when it is unsafe. 4 In 2004, research by WHO based on estimates and data from all countries showed that the broader the legal grounds for abortion, the fewer deaths there are from unsafe abortions. 5 In fact, the research found that there are only six main grounds for allowing abortion apply in most countries:

• ground 1 – risk to life
• ground 2 – rape or sexual abuse
• ground 3 – serious fetal anomaly
• ground 4 – risk to physical and sometimes mental health
• ground 5 – social and economic reasons
• ground 6 – on request

With each additional ground, moving from ground 1 to 6, the findings show that the number of deaths falls. Countries with almost no deaths from unsafe abortion are those that allow abortion on request without restriction.

This is proof that that the best way to consign unsafe abortion to history is by removing all legal restrictions and providing universal access to safe abortion. But the question remains, how do we get from where things are now to where they could (and should) be?

Attempts to move from almost total criminalization to partial (let alone total) decriminalization of abortion have been slow and fraught with difficulties. Why? Because the best way to control women’s lives is through (the risk of) pregnancy. The traditional belief that women should accept “all the children God gives,” the recent glorification of the fetus as having more value than the woman it is dependent on, and male-dominated culture are all used extremely effectively to justify criminal restrictions. Nevertheless, the need for abortion is one of the defining experiences of having a uterus.

Globally, 25% of pregnancies ended in induced abortion in 2010–2014, including in countries with high rates of contraceptive prevalence. 6 Increasingly, thanks to years of effective campaigning, more and more women are defending the need for abortion, as well as the right to a safe abortion—and access to it if and when they need it. Moreover, a growing number of governments, in both the Global North and more recently the Global South, have begun to acknowledge that preventing unsafe abortions is part of their commitment to reducing avoidable maternal deaths and their obligations under international human rights law.

While some people still wish that this could be achieved through a higher prevalence of contraceptive use or post-abortion care alone, the facts are against it. Those facts include both the occurrence of contraceptive failure among those who do use a method and the failure to use contraception, both of which are common events and sexual behaviors.

The role of international human rights bodies in calling for law reform

A new layer of involvement in advocacy for safe abortion, based on an analysis of how existing laws affect women and girls and whether they meet international human rights standards, has emerged in recent years. United Nations human rights bodies—including the Human Rights Committee, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, the Committee on Economic, Social and Political Rights, the Working Group on discrimination against women in law and practice, and the Special Rapporteurs on the right to the highest attainable standard of health, the rights of women in Africa, and torture—have played an increasingly visible role in calling for progressive abortion law reform. 7

Regional bodies such as the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the European Court of Human Rights, and the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR) have been very active in this regard as well. The ACHPR called in January 2016 for the decriminalization of abortion across Africa, in line with the Maputo Protocol, and renewed that call in January 2017, making waves across the region. 8

Legalize or decriminalize: What’s in a word?

Interestingly, no human rights body has gone so far as to call for abortion to be permitted at the request of the woman, yet many have called for abortion to be decriminalized. This raises the question of what is understood in different quarters by the term “decriminalization.”

For many years, the abortion rights movement internationally has called for “safe, legal abortion.” More recently, calls for the “decriminalization of abortion” have also emerged. Do these mean the same thing? In simplistic terms, they might be differentiated like this: legalizing abortion means keeping abortion in the law in some form by identifying the grounds on which it is allowed, while decriminalizing abortion means removing criminal sanctions against abortion altogether.

In that sense, abortion is legal on one or more grounds (mostly as exceptions to the law) in all but a few countries today, while Canada stands out as the only country to date that, through a Supreme Court decision in 1988, effectively decriminalized abortion altogether. 9 No other country, no matter how liberal its law reform, has been willing to take abortion completely out of the law that delimits it.

However, this distinction is often not what is meant. Instead, the two terms are used interchangeably—that is, abortion may be legalized or decriminalized on some or all grounds. No one is likely to be able to change this lack of differentiation in terminology. Nevertheless, it is crucial when recommending abortion law reform to be clear what exactly is and is not intended. I will come back to this later in the paper, after exploring the complexity of the changes being called for, no matter which of the two terms is used.

The law on abortion in countries today

Criminal restrictions on the practice of abortion are contained in statute law—in other words, laws passed by legislatures, sometimes as part of criminal or penal codes, which consolidate a group of criminal statutes. In the UK, for example, abortion was criminalized in sections 58 and 59 of the Offences against the Person Act of 1861, with one aspect further defined in the Infant Life Preservation Act of 1929, and then allowed on certain grounds and conditions in Great Britain (but not Northern Ireland) in the 1967 Abortion Act, which was then amended further in the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act of 1990. In the 1967 Abortion Act, legal grounds for abortion are set out as exceptions to the criminal law, yet the 1861 act is still in force and still being used to prosecute illegal abortions today. 10

Ireland, formerly a part of the UK, was also subject to the 1861 Offences against the Person Act and revoked sections 58–59 only in the Protection of Life during Pregnancy Act of 2013, which imposed its own almost total criminalization of abortion. 11 Sierra Leone, a former British colony, also revoked the 1861 Offences against the Person Act in the Safe Abortion Act, passed in December 2015 and again a second time unanimously in February 2016. That act allows abortion on request during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, and until week 24 in cases of rape, incest, or risk to health of the fetus or the woman or girl, but it was not finally signed into law. 12

At the end of the twentieth century, abortion was legally permitted to save the life of the woman in 98% of the world’s countries. 13 The proportion of countries allowing abortion on other grounds was as follows: to preserve the woman’s physical health (63%); to preserve the woman’s mental health (62%); in case of rape, sexual abuse, or incest (43%); fetal anomaly or impairment (39%); economic or social reasons (33%); and on request (27%).

The number of countries in 2002 that permitted each of these grounds varied greatly by region. Thus, abortion was permitted upon request in 65% of developed countries but only 14% of developing countries, and for economic and social reasons in 75% of developed countries but only 19% of developing countries. 14 Some countries permit additional grounds for abortion, such as if the woman has HIV, is under the age of 16 or over the age of 40, is not married, or has many children. A few also allow it to protect existing children or because of contraceptive failure. 15

These percentages, published in 2002, are out of date, but they have not changed dramatically. In late 2017, research updating the world’s laws on abortion and adding new information about related policies, conducted under the aegis of the Department of Reproductive Health and Research/Human Reproductive Programme at WHO, will be incorporated into the United Nations Population Division’s website. 16

Regulating abortion

There is much more to this story, however. In addition to statute law, other ways to liberalize, restrict, or regulate access to abortion, which also have legal standing, include the following:

• national constitutions in at least 20 countries, such as the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution (1983) in Ireland;
• supreme court decisions, such as in the United States (1973, 2016), Canada (1988), Colombia (2006), and Brazil (2012), as well as higher court decisions, such as in India (2016, 2017) allowing individual women abortions beyond the 20-week upper limit;
• customary or religious law, such as interpretations of Muslim law that allow abortion up to 120 days in Tunisia and the United Arab Emirates but do not allow abortion at all in other majority Muslim countries;
• regulations that require confidentiality on the part of health professionals on the one hand, but on the other hand require health professionals to report a criminal act they may learn of, for example, while providing treatment for complications of unsafe abortion;
• medical ethical codes, which, for example, allow or disallow conscientious objection; and
• clinical and other regulatory standards and guidelines governing the provision of abortion, such as reporting guidelines, disciplinary procedures, parental or spousal consent, and restrictions on which health professionals may provide abortions and where, who may approve an abortion, and which methods may be used—as adjuncts to (though not always formally part of) the law.

Reed Boland has found that the distinction between laws and regulations governing abortion is not always clear and that some countries, usually those where abortion laws are highly restrictive, have issued no regulations at all. In the most complex cases, there are multiple texts over many years which may contain conflicting provisions and obscure and outdated language. The upshot may be that no one is sure when abortion is actually allowed and when it isn’t, which may serve to stop it being provided safely and openly at all. 17

Uganda is a case in point. According to a recently published paper by Amanda Cleeve et al., Uganda’s Constitution and Penal Code conflict with each other, leading to ambiguous interpretations and lack of awareness of the fact that abortion is legal to protect women’s health and life. Moreover, while Uganda has a national reproductive health policy, it is not supported in law and is not being implemented. In 2015, in order to clarify this situation, the minister of health and other stakeholders developed Standards and Evidence-based Guidelines on the Prevention of Unsafe Abortion . These included details of who can provide abortions, and where and how, and assigned health service responsibilities, such as level of care and post-abortion care. However, the guidelines were withdrawn in January 2016 due to religious and political opposition. 18

Post-abortion care to treat the consequences of unsafe abortions has been instituted since it was approved in the International Conference on Population and Development’s Programme of Action in 1994, in countries where there was little or no prospect of law reform, as a stopgap measure, to save lives. But this has not been a success in African countries such as Tanzania, where, under the 1981 Revised Penal Code, it remains unclear whether abortion is legal to preserve a woman’s physical or mental health or her life, and where 16% of maternal deaths are still due to unsafe abortions. 19 Although the government has tried to expand the availability of post-abortion care, a 2015 study found that “significant gaps still existed and most women were not receiving the care they needed.” 20 In early 2016, according to a CCTV-Africa report, the newly appointed prime minister, in tandem with the president, threatened to dismiss and possibly imprison doctors performing illegal abortions following recent reports of doctors in both public and private hospitals accepting payments for doing abortions and a reported increase in cases of complications. 21

Sometimes, other laws unrelated to abortion create barriers. In Morocco, the abortion law was established in 1920 when Morocco was a French protectorate. In May 2015, following a public debate arising from reports of women’s deaths from unsafe abortion, a reform process to expand legal protections was initiated by a directive of the king. According to the Moroccan Family Planning Association, despite a consensus that abortion should be permitted within the first three months if the woman’s physical and mental health is in danger, and in cases of rape, incest, or congenital malformation, unmarried women would be excluded because it is illegal to have sex outside marriage. 22

In India, a very liberal abortion law for its day was passed in 1971, but it has been poorly and unevenly implemented, such that high rates of morbidity and mortality persist to this day. 23 Even 15 years ago, the process for clinic registration as an approved abortion provider was arduous, limiting the number of clinics. 24 Moreover, two other laws have led to restrictions on abortion access: the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act, which forbids ultrasound for purposes of sex determination and has led to restrictions on all second-trimester abortion provision, and the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, which requires reporting of underage sex, so that minors who become pregnant cannot feel safe if they seek an abortion. 25

Restricting abortion without changing the law

Decent laws and policies can be sabotaged and access to abortion can be restricted without amending the law itself, but instead through policies pressuring women to have more children, public denunciation of abortion by political and religious leaders, or restricting access to services. Bureaucratic obstacles may be placed in women’s paths, such as requiring unnecessary medical tests, counselling even if women feel no need for it, having to get one or more doctors’ signatures, having to wait between making an appointment and having an abortion, or having to obtain consent from a partner, parent(s) or guardian, or even a judge.

In Turkey, for example, in 1983, in response to population growth, the government passed a law allowing fertility regulation, termination of pregnancy on request up to 10 weeks after conception, and sterilization. A married woman seeking an abortion was required only to obtain her husband’s permission or submit a formal statement of assumption of all responsibility prior to the procedure. 26 In recent years, however, President Erdogan has taken a pronatalist stance and urged Turkish couples to have at least three children. Since 2012, he has been calling abortion murder, expressing opposition to the provision of abortion services and threatening to restrict the law. Women protested against these threats in such large numbers in 2012 that to date there have been no changes to the law itself. But administrative changes were made in order to make the procedure for booking an appointment for an abortion—which is still primarily provided by gynecologists in hospitals—more difficult.

These changes have made it nearly impossible to obtain an abortion in a state hospital; indeed, some state hospitals have stopped providing abortions altogether. Although comparative data are not available, a 2016 study found that of 431 state hospitals with departments of obstetrics and gynecology, only 7.8% provided abortions without restriction as to reason, 78% provided abortions only if there was a medical necessity, and 11.8% did not provide abortions at all. Of the 58 teaching and research hospitals with departments of obstetrics and gynecology, only 17.3% provided abortion services without restriction as to reason, 71.1% only if there was a medical necessity, and 11.4% not at all. Overall, 53 of 81 provinces in Turkey did not have a state hospital that provided abortions without restriction as to reason, although this is permitted under the law. 27

Thus, the availability of safe abortion depends not only on permissive legislation but also on a permissive environment, political support, and the ability and willingness of health services and health professionals to make abortion available. In contrast to Turkey, Ethiopia is an example of the success of that support.

Law reform for the better—slowly but surely

In 2005, Ethiopia liberalized its abortion law. Previously, abortion was allowed only to save the life of the woman or protect her physical health. The current law allows abortion in cases of rape, incest, or fetal impairment, as well as if the life or physical health of the woman is in danger, if she has a physical or mental disability, or if she is a minor who is physically or mentally unprepared for childbirth. 28 This is a liberal law for sub-Saharan Africa, but for a long time, little was known about the extent of its implementation. In 2006, the government published national standards and guidelines on safe abortion that permitted the use of misoprostol, with or without mifepristone, in accordance with WHO guidance. A nationwide study in 2008 by the Guttmacher Institute estimated that within a few years, 27% of abortions were legal, though most abortions were still unsafe.

A 2011 study by Jemila Abdi and Mulugeta Gebremariam found that Ethiopian health care providers’ reasons for not providing abortions were mainly personal or due to lack of permission from an employer or the unavailability of services at their facility. Only 27% felt comfortable working at a site where abortion was provided. Reasons for not being comfortable were mainly religious, but also included personal values and a lack of training. Although 29% thought it should be a woman’s choice to have an abortion, 55% disagreed. The study also uncovered a lack of medical equipment and trained personnel, and bureaucratic problems at clinical sites. 29

Even so, major efforts were and are still being made to improve access at the primary level by constructing more health centers and training more mid-level providers. Between 2008 and 2014, the proportion of abortions provided in health facilities almost doubled. In 2014, almost three-fourths of facilities that could potentially provide abortions or post-abortion care did so, including 67% of the 2,600 public health centers nationwide, 80% of the 1,300 private or nongovernmental facilities, and 98% of the 120 public hospitals. The proportion of all abortion-related services provided by mid-level health workers increased from 48% in 2008 to 83% in 2014. While a substantial number of abortions continue to occur outside of health facilities, the proportion is falling, showing that change is possible but also that it takes time. 30

In recent decades in Latin America, a combination of legal reforms, court rulings, and public health guidelines have improved access to safe abortion for women. 31 These include allowing abortion on request in the first trimester of pregnancy, as in Mexico City (since 2007), and in Uruguay (since 2012). In Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, and Costa Rica, higher courts have been instrumental in interpreting the constitutionality and scope of specific grounds for abortion, though their judgments are not always implemented. In countries such as Peru, guidelines issued by hospitals or by governments at federal or state levels govern the enforcement of permitted grounds. 32 Additional steps needed constitute a huge task, as Ethiopia has shown—training providers and ensuring that services provide legal abortions, as well as informing women that these changes are taking place and that services are available.

Self-use of medical abortion in the absence of law and policy reform

In other Latin American countries, abortion laws have remained highly restrictive in spite of campaigns for women’s sexual and reproductive rights and human rights for more than 30 years. As a result, and thanks to the advent of new technology, women have begun to take matters into their own hands. An uncounted number of women, probably in the millions, has been obtaining and using misoprostol to self-induce abortion (widely available for gastric ulcers) from a range of sources—pharmacies, websites, black market—since its abortifacient effectiveness was first discovered in the late 1980s. This practice, begun in Brazil, has spread to many other countries and regions. In response, legal restrictions and regulations on access to medical abortion pills have been imposed by countries such as Brazil and Egypt in an effort to stop the unstoppable.

Moreover, in the past decade, feminist groups have set up safe abortion information hotlines in at least 20 countries, and health professionals are providing information and access to abortion pills via telemedicine, including Women Help Women, Women on Web, safe2choose, the Tabbot Foundation in Australia, and TelAbortion in the United States. 33

In Uruguay, which has hospital-based outpatient abortion care, Lilian Abracinskas, executive director of Mujer y Salud en Uruguay, said in a recent interview, “ In Uruguay, we don’t have doctors who do abortions. Abortion with pills is the only way and it isn’t possible to choose another method, such as manual vacuum aspiration. Health professionals are willing to be involved before and after, but not in the abortion.” 34 Thus, abortion service delivery has been reduced to providing information, prescribing pills, and conducting a follow-up appointment if the woman has concerns. It can be that simple (although it does restrict access to aspiration and surgical methods).

Abortion law as a political football and a weapon against women

While the overall trend globally is toward more progressive laws, some countries where the rightwing has taken power have gone backward. In Chile, from 1931 to 1989, the law allowed abortion on therapeutic grounds, described in the Penal Code as “termination of a pregnancy before the fetus becomes viable for the purpose of saving the mother’s life or safeguarding her health.” Pinochet, the dictator who overthrew the Allende government, banned abortion in 1989 as he left office, leaving no legal grounds at all. 35 It took until 2016 for Michelle Bachelet’s government, during her second term in office, to introduce a bill permitting three grounds for legal abortion—to save the woman’s life, in cases of rape or sexual abuse, and in cases of fatal fetal anomaly—which are more narrow than what was in place between 1931 and 1989 but are the best that its supporters think they can achieve today. 36

In Russia, the law has gone back and forth between permissive and restrictive with every change of political head of state. Stalin made abortion illegal when he took over from Lenin, and then after 1945, abortion was again permitted on broad grounds across the Soviet Union and in its satellite countries in Eastern Europe and West Asia, while under Vladimir Putin a long list of restrictions has been imposed, greatly reducing the number of grounds on which abortion is permitted. In January 2016, a bill aiming to “rule out the uncontrolled use of pharmaceutical drugs destined for termination of pregnancy” was tabled in parliament. It would have banned retail sales and limited the list of organizations permitted to buy medical abortion pills wholesale. It would also have banned abortions in private clinics and removed payment for them from state insurance policies. And it would not have allowed abortions to be covered by state health care unless the pregnancy threatened the woman’s life. The bill was withdrawn after strong public protest that was coordinated by the Russian Association for Population and Development; however, attempts at further restriction are likely to continue. 37

In a number of Central and Eastern European countries, the backlash against communist rule and the increasing influence of conservative religious figures has led to regular attempts to undermine permissive abortion laws. Poland has had the worst of it. In 1993, a liberal law was replaced by a very restrictive law that removed “difficult living conditions” as a legal ground for abortion, leaving only three grounds: serious threat to the life or health of the pregnant woman, as attested by two physicians; cases of rape or incest if confirmed by a prosecutor; and cases in which antenatal tests, confirmed by two physicians, demonstrated that the fetus was seriously and irreversibly damaged. 38 This law, in spite of an attempt to ban all abortions in 2016, remains in place due to months of national action by women’s groups, including a national women’s strike on October 3, 2016. However, in November 2016, the government approved a regulation offering pregnant women carrying a seriously disabled or unviable fetus a one-time payment of €1,000 to carry the pregnancy to term, even if the baby would be born dead or die soon after delivery. The package includes access to hospice and medical care, psychological counselling, baptism or a blessing and burial, and a person who will act as an “assistant to the family” and coordinate the support. The purported aim was to reduce the number of legal abortions on grounds of fetal anomaly. 39 This horrendous proposal, nasty anti-abortion propaganda, and systematic pressure on hospitals in Poland to stop doing abortions on medical grounds exemplify the right-wing extremism of the anti-abortion movement today, whose epicenter is in the United States and whose war on women sometimes feels relentless. 40

But this is not stopping women from having abortions.

Keeping laws and policies that benefit women in clear sight

Cuba was the first country in Latin America and the Caribbean to reform its abortion law in favor of women, with a law that remains unique. Since 1965, abortion has been available on request up to the tenth week of pregnancy through the national health system. The Penal Code, adopted in 1979, says that an abortion is considered illegal only if it is without the consent of the pregnant woman, is unsafe, or is provided for profit. 41

In Japan, the law allowing abortion, enacted in 1948, was initially based on eugenics but was a liberal law in practice. Under this law, abortion became the primary mode of birth control in the country. The law was reformed in 1996 to omit all references to eugenics. Abortion is now permitted to protect health, which includes socioeconomic reasons, and in cases of sexual offenses. Abortion was and remains the main form of fertility control. The great majority of abortions fall under the health protection indication. Nearly all abortions are in the first trimester. 42

In recent years in some countries, laws to legalize abortion are found in public health statutes, court decisions, and policies and regulations on sexual and reproductive health care, rather than as part of the criminal law. Uruguay’s 2012 law is an example of public health legislation that sets out procedures and health care standards for the provision of abortion services. 43

In December 2014, the parliament of Luxembourg voted to remove abortion from the Penal Code up to 12 weeks of pregnancy and said that the woman no longer had to show she was “in distress” due to her pregnancy. Regulations on who can provide abortions were also revised. 44 In France, in 2014, 2015, and 2016, the 1975 Veil Law was reformed to increase access to abortion and reduce barriers. Women no longer have to be in a “state of distress” in France either, but need only request an abortion. The required seven-day “reflection period” between the request for an abortion and the abortion itself was also dropped. Most recently, midwives are now permitted to provide medical abortion, and the costs for all abortions are now reimbursed. 45

Sweden’s law is among the most liberal, though abortion is not entirely decriminalized. The Swedish law was amended in 1938, 1946, 1963, 1975, 1995, 2007, and 2008. Abortion is available on request up to 18 weeks. After that, permission from the National Board of Health and Welfare is required and may not be granted if the fetus is viable. Appeal is not permitted. Regulations govern who provides abortions and where. Any person not authorized to practice medicine who performs an abortion on another person can be fined or imprisoned for up to a year. Abortion is subsidized by the government; 95% of abortions take place before 12 weeks, and almost none after 18 weeks. Most are medical abortions. 46

In Australia, each state and the Capital Territory have a different law, ranging from very liberal to very restrictive; several are in the process of change. 47 In the United States in 1973, the Supreme Court held that criminalizing abortion violated a woman’s right to privacy and said that abortion should be a decision between a woman and her doctor. However, the court also held that US states have an interest in ensuring the safety and well-being of pregnant women, as well as the potential of human life. This opened a door to restrictions that become greater as pregnancy progresses, opening a Pandora’s box for states to impose restrictions that are tying up state and federal courts to this day:

• first trimester: a state cannot regulate abortion beyond requiring that the procedure be performed by a licensed doctor in medically safe conditions;
• second trimester: a state may regulate abortion if the regulations are reasonably related to the health of the pregnant woman; and
• third trimester: the state’s interest in protecting the potential human life outweighs the woman’s right to privacy, and the state may prohibit abortions unless abortion is necessary to save her life or health. 48

It is impossible not to think that no law is the best law when it comes to abortion, which brings us back to Canada, where abortion has not been restricted since 1988 and is available on request with no stipulations as to who must provide it or where. 49 Although abortion is not easily accessible in remote areas, and Canada was exceedingly slow to approve mifepristone, 50 opposition to abortion has never developed a foothold. The benefits for women of having no law are crystal clear. 51

Legalization or decriminalization: Closing the circle

Although recent calls for the decriminalization of abortion by human rights bodies, politicians, and some feminist groups aim to decriminalize only certain grounds and conditions related to abortion, these are far better than nothing. Thus, in Chile, El Salvador, Honduras, and Peru, where abortion is severely legally restricted, calls to “decriminalize abortion” include only three to four grounds—to protect the life and health of the woman, in cases of severe or fatal fetal anomalies, and as a result of rape or sexual abuse. While the great majority of abortions are not for these reasons, they are the only grounds that stand a chance of achieving majority approval through law reform in settings where “everything” is simply not in the cards.

In Africa, the Maputo Protocol is legally binding on the 49 states that have ratified it. The 2016 call by the ACHPR for the decriminalization of abortion across Africa is based on the Maputo Protocol, which calls for safe abortion to be authorized by states “in cases of sexual assault, rape, incest, and where the continued pregnancy endangers the mental and physical health of the mother or the life of the mother or the fetus.” 52 However, in January 2017, at the African Leaders’ Summit on Safe and Legal Abortion, the ACHPR went further, calling for safe, legal abortion as a human right, which by any definition surely exceeds the Maputo Protocol’s boundaries. 53

At bottom, the extent of decriminalization aimed for is a choice between the ideal and the practicable, and reflects the extent to which abortion is seen as a bona fide form of health care—not just by advocates for the right to safe abortion but also by politicians, health professionals, the media, and the public. The fact that abortion is still legally restricted in almost all countries is not just a historical legacy but indicative of the continuing ambivalence and negativity about abortion in most societies, no matter how old or where the law originally came from.

Some abortion rights supporters seem to have an underlying fear that without leaving something in the criminal law, “bad things” may start to happen. Canada proves this is not the case. Granted, not everywhere is Canada. But there are general criminal laws that allow the punishment of wrongdoing—such as forcing a woman to have an abortion against her will, giving her medical abortion pills without her knowledge, or causing injury or death through a dangerous procedure. These are laws against grievous bodily harm, assault, or manslaughter, which can be applied without the need for a criminal statute on abortion.

Changing the law to benefit women

Successfully changing the law on abortion is the work of years. Advocates do not get a lot of chances to change the law and need to decide what they want to end up with before campaigning for it, with the confidence that whatever they propose has a chance of being implemented. Another chance may not come again soon.

Allies are crucial. Most important are parliamentarians, health professionals, legal experts, women’s groups and organizations, human rights groups, family planning supporters—and above all, women themselves. Achieving a critical mass of support among all these groups is key to successful law reform, as is defeating the opposition, which can have an influence beyond its numbers.

Those unable to contemplate no law at all must confront the fact that each legal ground for abortion may be interpreted liberally or narrowly, and thereby implemented differently in different settings, or may not be implemented at all. The challenge is to define which abortions should remain criminal and what the punishment should be. Even if only some grounds would be considered acceptable, the question of who decides and on what basis remains when reforming existing law.

Wording becomes critical to supporting good practice. For example, grounds which are based on risk are particularly tricky. The definition of “risk” is itself complex, and the extent of risk may be hedged with uncertainty. Risk to the woman’s life, health, or mental health and risk of serious fetal anomaly have been subjected to challenge and disagreement among professionals. As Christian Fiala, head of the Gynmed Ambulatorium in Austria, has noted, “There is only one way to be sure a woman’s life is at risk, that is—after she dies.” 54

Reed Boland explores the importance of wording in depth with regard to the health ground for abortion:

The wording of [the health] indication varies greatly from country to country, particularly given the range of languages and legal traditions involved. Sometimes … there must be a risk to health. Great Britain’s law, for example … allows abortion where “continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk, greater than if the pregnancy were terminated, of injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman …” Sometimes … there must be a danger to health. Burkina Faso’s Penal Code permits abortions when “continuation of the pregnancy … endangers the health of the woman …” And in some countries there must only be medical or health reasons. In Vanuatu, there must be “good medical reasons”, in Djibouti “therapeutic reasons”, and in Pakistan a requirement of “necessary treatment”. These concepts are not necessarily the same. 55

Legislating on second-trimester abortions presents particular difficulties. Many laws say little or nothing about second-trimester abortions, which has a proscriptive effect. Second-trimester abortions constitute an estimated 10–15% of abortions globally, but as many as 25% in India and South Africa due to poor access to services. When they are unsafe, they account for a large proportion of hospital admissions for treatment of complications and are responsible for a disproportionate number of deaths. Hence, the law should protect second-trimester abortions assiduously. Yet social disapproval of these abortions can run high, and laws tend to be increasingly restrictive as pregnancy progresses, even laws that are liberal with regard to the first trimester. The mistaken belief that second-trimester abortions can be legislated away persists, despite the facts. 56

Restrictive abortion laws are being broken on a daily basis by millions of women and numerous abortion providers. Even in countries where the law is less restrictive, research shows that the letter of the law is being stretched in all sorts of ways to accommodate women’s needs. Yet opposition and a stubborn unwillingness to act continue to hamper efforts to meet women’s need for abortion without restrictions.

Conclusions

It should be clear that the plethora of convoluted laws and restrictions on abortion do not make any legal or public health sense. What makes abortion safe is simple and irrefutable—when it is available on the woman’s request and universally affordable and accessible. From this perspective, few existing laws are fit for purpose but merely repeat every possible permutation of the self-same restrictions.

The aim of this paper was not to provide answers or roadmaps, because in every country prevailing conditions must be taken into account. The aim was to motivate transformative thinking about whether any criminal law on abortion is necessary. Treating abortion as essential health care is a major step forward, and where the national setting insists on some sort of law, advocates could draft the simplest, most supportive law possible, placing first-trimester abortion care at the primary and community level, ensuring second-trimester services, involving mid-level providers, increasing women’s awareness of services and the law, aiming for universal access, integrating WHO-approved methods, and addressing social attitudes to reduce opposition. Space did not permit me to raise the issues of cost and public versus private services, but they are two major aspects that deserve priority consideration.

If it were up to me, all criminal sanctions against abortion would be revoked, making abortion available at the request of the only person who counts—the one who is pregnant. And as with all pregnancy care, abortion would be free at the point of care and universally accessible from very early on in pregnancy.

Canada has proved that no criminal law is feasible and acceptable. Sweden has proved that abortions after 18 weeks can effectively disappear with very good services, and WHO has shown that first-trimester abortions can be provided safely and effectively at the primary and community level by trained mid-level providers and provision of medical abortion pills by trained pharmacy workers. Finally, web- and phone-based telemedicine services are showing that clinic-based services are not required to provide medical abortion pills safely and effectively.

But to achieve these goals, or something close to them, it takes a strong and active national coalition, a critical mass of support, and—with luck and knowing what the goalposts are—less than 100 years of campaigning to make change happen on the ground.

Acknowledgments

This paper began as a presentation on the decriminalization of abortion at the FIAPAC Conference in Lisbon on October 13, 2016. I would like to thank the following individuals for information presented there that enriched this paper: Angela Dawson (information on Australia), Hamida Nkata (information on Tanzania), S. Sinan Ozalp (information on Turkey), Emily McLean (information on Ethiopia), Amanda Cleeve (information on Uganda), Joyce Arthur (information on Canada), and Amanda Huber (information on Laos). Much of the recent country-based information here was gleaned during my editing of the International Campaign for Women’s Right to Safe Abortion newsletter. 57 Many thanks to Sally Sheldon and Kinga Jelinska for helpful comments on a previous draft. Any errors are my own.