Do Women Have the Right to Abortion?
The debate on the subject of abortion has been dragging on for centuries. It has been a divisive discussion around the world as political swings keep hauling on. In some countries, the practice of abortion is straightly illicit by statute, meaning the law in those countries forbids it. Yet, in other countries, that decision of whether or not to abort is considered to be a fundamental right of the woman that no extent of authority can overstep. These opposite postures have divided societies and triggered people to identify as either “pro-life” (against abortion) or “pro-choice” (for abortion).
To that end, this article is designed to provide a critical analysis of the wrangling over legal abortion by looking at the historical roots of the practice of abortion in the U.S context. In addition to that, I will also be reviewing the landmark documentary “Reversing Roe”, by Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg. In the end, I will draw on a personal position, which I will sustain by evidence gathered from the research data as well as from a lens of self-judgment based on my own classroom experience.
Abortion had been a legal practice in most parts of the world before the 19th century. In the United States, both state and federal laws protected the right to abortion before the “quickening” stage of conception, which is considered to be the fourth month of pregnancy. In the 1820s and 1830s, abortion was performed in colonial homes using medicinal herbs. Moving forward, this method shifted from the use of herbs to the administration of surgical operations. As a result of that, abortion became more of a booming business during this period than a mere medical service delivery. Women who could not afford the cost of abortion through surgery took on poison as a cheaper alternative. As a result, many lives were destroyed in the process. This led Congress to pass a “poison-control” abortion law to ban the use of poison in aborting a pregnancy. Yet, the law only put a kibosh on poison use and not on the practice of abortion itself. (The Atlantic).
The first movement calling for the abolition of abortion in the United States, or at least for federal regulation of the practice, was led by medical doctors. Although their main goal was to chuck out the competition posed to their profession by non-medical personnel – who were illegally providing abortion services to women at a cheaper rate – this group claimed to be fighting for women’s right to safe abortion. To this end, Congress subsequently passed another anti-abortion law that quelled illegal abortion practices across the U.S. and deemed it legal (i.e. acceptable) only if the operation was performed by a “licensed physician”. (BBC - Homepage). But like the "poison control" law in the 1800s, women who could not afford to terminate through “licensed” doctors also chose to use extreme methods, such as poison, to abort their pregnancies. Thus, in the 1950s and 1960s, the number of deaths to illegal abortion in the United States increased from 200,000 to 1.2 million per year. (CNN - Breaking News, Latest News and Videos).
As the row over abortion drags on in the U.S., so does the political drift that brings political leaders to power. This means that the specific position (pro-life or pro-choice) a politician takes on the issue of abortion determines if he/she will succeed in getting a public office job, especially the presidency. With that being said, Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg present the landmark documentary titled Reversing Roe. The film portrays the reality of how the issue of legal abortion has eventually taken on a political bend in the U.S., through an evaluation of a critical Supreme Court case called “Roe v. Wade” This was a historical lawsuit involving Norma McCorvey (goes by “Jane Roe” in the litigation) and the State of Texas in 1969.
Jane Roe was the plaintiff in Roe v. Wade. She was pregnant with her third child and wanted to terminate the pregnancy. However, abortion was prohibited under her local state’s [Texas] law, permissible only in extreme situations such as where the life of the mother was in a jeopardy and abortion was the only way forward. Thus, Roe hired lawyers Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee to file a lawsuit on her behalf against Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade, representing the State of Texas. The case was first heard in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, where a three-judge panel ruled in favor of Jane Roe. But Wade [Texas] decided to take the case one step further to the U.S. Supreme Court. (Reversing Roe).
At The Supreme Court, a 7–2 decision ruling was issued in Roe v. Wade in 1973. The ruling provided that the "Due Process Clause" of the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees a pregnant woman’s right to abortion. However, the “three trimesters” model of gestation was also reflected in the ruling. It states that during the first trimester, a state cannot ban abortion. In the second trimester, a state may ban abortion on "reasonable health regulations", while in the third trimester abortion could be completely prohibited by the state. These counts influenced the Supreme Court’s ruling that abortion is a "fundamental” right, which means the Court would use the “strict scrutiny standard" of revision to review potential cases.
The Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade immediately sparked mixed reactions from the American public. Based on your political ideology, you are either pro-life (against abortion) or pro-choice (for abortion). On the other hand, Linda Greenhouse (a Supreme Court writer for the New York Times) noted in the documentary that “abortion was not a partisan issue at that time…it was a medical problem…it was a social problem”.
The abortion debate in America has taken on a political trend since the Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade. Democrats identify as pro-choice advocates while Republicans as pro-life advocates. The pro-choice advocates favor the practice of abortion on grounds that the decision of whether or not to bear a child should be up to the woman and her doctor, not the government. In fact, pro-choice advocates believe that the human fetus is not a living being, meaning it does not have a right to life. On the other hand, the pro-lifers come from a devout position that abortion is morally wrong because it involves the killing of the human fetus, which they is an “unborn baby” that deserves to live. Hence, this group argue that the practice of abortion should be completely outlawed. These opposite views are in fact pinpointed in the documentary. One scenario shows the Republican Governor from California, Ronald Reagan, signing a bill in 1967 to criminalize abortion, another of President George H. W. Bush amending abortion laws to decriminalize its practices.
Based on these counts, let me be clear before being resolved to take on a particular position: women are just as humans as men. By this statement, I mean that we cannot treat women any differently we treat their male counterparts. Like men, women deserve not only equal protection under the law, but also enjoyment of the same rights and privileges granted to every human being under the law. But in the context of abortion, I am afraid to think that either gender has a right to it. It seems to me that pro-choice advocates are simply defending what seems to be a form of “voluntary killing”. I think they are essentially arguing that abortion should be permissible on grounds that “women deserve to have “autonomy” over their own body. Even if I must accept this premise, its final conclusion would still be wrong because just because you must have “autonomy” over your body does not mean you should take away another life illegally. I say “another life” because I believe that the human fetus is a living being, and if all living being has a right to life, so does the fetus!
Don’t get me wrong: I agree that abortion may be permissible; but only in extreme situations such as rape, or where the life of the pregnant woman is at risk and abortion is the only solution. In fact, I consider this to be a commonsense thing, because in the end, what distinguishes human beings from other animals is our free-will and ability to make independent decisions for ourselves (but again it is worth noting that this “independent decision” cannot infer with the right of another being). In a rape instance, for example, one’s natural free-will to decide for oneself (which in that case would be to have sex) did not exist. Since one party was coerced and unfairly taken advantage of in this scenario, the victim cannot be blamed for the outcome [pregnancy] of an involuntary action. Thus, the “right” to terminate or abort the pregnancy would be morally judicious, if at all.
But for the purpose of this paper, I will limit my argument to abortion under “normal situations” (i.e. where the woman voluntarily decides to have sex and conceives by virtue of her own decision). In this case, I argue herein that the right to decide does not justify the act of abortion. Here are my premises:
- Under normal situations, sex is consensual. This means that before sexual intercourse takes place, two people/things have to mutually consent to it. If this is true, then party x voluntarily agreed to have intercourse with party y without coercion. Therefore, party x’s right to decide for her body (which in this case would be the decision to have sex) was voluntarily exercised without any obstruction. Thus, terminating the pregnancy – which is the product of x times y (i.e. the result after the two parties mutually agreed and had sex) – is an act of "voluntary killing", not a right. And if voluntary killing is considered to be a crime – a felony tort – under the by law, then women cannot claim a right to it.
- The law of Spontaneous Generation was an obsolete belief that argues that living things arise from nonliving things. However, the theory was eventually trashed by the Italian physician and naturalist Francesco Redi, in an experiment in which he showed that maggots arose from meat only if flies laid eggs in the meat. Tying this theory to the pro-choice’s claim that “the fetus is not a living thing” (which in reality is a living thing because it arises from a living sperm), it would mean that until the fetus develops into a full-grown person, or at least some sort of recognizable being, it does not contain life. This argument would be absurd since the fetus develops out of the process of fertilization, (the process through which a living sperm fertilizes a female’s egg to produce a fetus).
If we believe that the sperm is a living cell, then we can double down from that very argument to conclude that its resultant fetus is also a living thing (as proven by Francesco Redi, only a living thing may produce another living thing). If this theory is accurate, then the fetus is a living thing, and all living things share the right to life. Therefore, killing the human fetus is morally wrong and should be proscribed.
To sum up, it is no doubt that abortion really is a triggering topic that has the potential to affect our psyche. Still, we must be fearless to admit that while having sexual intercourse might merely be for pleasure, it can also be a silent consent to pregnancy. Otherwise, you must use contraception to demonstrate your unpreparedness for what may arise from it. Granted that sometimes our decision to have sex does not amount to our willingness to conceive, it is by nature that conception is the product of sexual intercourse - (as demonstrated in this paper using the variables x and y), and by not using contraception one demonstrates his/her unconscious preparedness for the end result. Therefore abortion is not just unethical, it is also an act of voluntary killing, and if killing another person voluntarily is against the law, then it has to be barred.