Abortion

Abortion: Pro-Choice or Pro-Life?
Iyona Pickett
SOC120: Introduction to Ethics & Social Responsibility
Prof. William Cubberley
May 2, 2011

Abortion has been a very sensitive and emotional topic for decades. Abortion is defined as the early termination of pregnancy before birth and results in the death of an embryo or a fetus. According to statistics, there are over forty two million abortions performed each year. Women get abortions for many reasons such as for rape, teen pregnancy and health reasons. Young women between 15 and 19 account for at least 5 million abortions every year with an estimated 1 million of them in the United States. For any pregnant woman, making a decision to have an abortion is painful both physically and emotionally. There are only certain circumstances that I feel an abortion should be legalized and that would include rape, incest pregnancies, and health related reasons.

Each side in the abortion controversy has adopted a term they apply that summarizes its moral identity. The anti-abortion side is “pro-life”. They recognize the difficulties for the woman with an unwanted pregnancy and offer many ways to help pregnant women. Michelle Meyer of San Antonio, a teacher who opposes abortion, would help her pregnant students by finding places for them to live while waiting for their pregnancies to come to term (Jocoby 156). However, these anti-abortion partisans do not prepare to accept abortion because they believe that it is the killing of human life. The fetus is a person, a human being, and having abortion is ending a person’s life and a murder.

People who are for abortion argue they are for abortion because they believe that it prevents babies from the disaster of life itself if they are to be born into this world without enough love and care. Some abortions eventually could prove more harmful to women over the long term than bearing an unwanted child, but this is only a small disadvantage of legal abortion. Legal abortion...