Ethical Issues Surrounding Abortion
Notwithstanding the laws being passed in various states against a woman's right to chose to terminate her pregnancy, the position of this paper is that Roe v. Wade is the law of the land and a woman has the ethical and moral right to decide to have an abortion. There are many positions for and against Roe v. Wade, and there are many ethical issues that may be (and in many cases are) embraced on both sides of the issue. But the law of the land vis-a-vis a woman's right to the privacy -- regarding her own values -- when it comes to terminating a pregnancy has been determined by the High Court. As a nurse committed to fairness and ethics in healthcare issues, while I respect the rights of others to practice their own values in opposition to Roe v. Wade, I am in support of a woman's absolute right to chose what should happen to her body.
Statistical Introduction
There were approximately 1.21 million abortions performed in the U.S. 2008, according to combined data from the Centers for Disease Control, the Guttmacher Institute (provided by Abort73.com) and those are the latest statistics that can be verified. This was a drop from about 1.29 million abortions in 2002. The Kaiser Family Foundation reports that there were 1.21 million abortions performed in 2005, down from 1.61 million in 1990. Kaiser also reports that about 49% of pregnancies in the U.S. were "unintended" and of the unintended abortions, 42% resulted in abortions. There are two kinds of abortions, surgical abortions and medical abortions.
The Kaiser Family Foundation explains that 87% of all abortions are surgical, which relates to the use of "vacuum aspiration, dilation and curettage" (D&C), and "dilation and evacuation" (D&E). In most cases, surgical abortion is not performed until the pregnant woman is in her sixth week of gestation. The "medical abortion" is performed through the drug known as "RU-486" (mifepristone) that was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2000. The RU-486 can be administered any time following confirmation of pregnancy, and in 2005, about 13% of all abortions were done using RU-486, the Kaiser statistics reflect.
A 2012 report from Medline Plus (a component of the National Institutes of Health) shows that abortion rates among teenagers in the U.S. fell to "record lows in 2008" due to the increased use of contraceptives. About 750,000 women in the U.S. under the age of 20 years became pregnant in 2008 and 98% of those women were between 15 and 29; that is the lowest rate of teen pregnancies since 1972, writer James B. Kelleher (Medline) explains. As to the abortion rate for teenage girls, in 2008 it dropped to the lowest rate since 1972: 17.8 per 1,000 teenage girls and women received abortions in 2008. Those stats were down 59% from 1988 when 43.5 teenage women per 1,000 received abortions (Kelleher, 2012).
That having been said, African-American and Latino had pregnancy and abortion rates "two to four times higher than their white peers," according to the Guttmacher Institute (referenced by Kelleher), which is a nonprofit sexual health research organization. The speculation is that African-American and Latino females in their teenage years do not have the same access to contraceptives as Caucasian teenage females (Kelleher).
Ethical Issues and Abortion
Abortion became a legal option for women in the United States in 1972 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that under the U.S. Constitution, women have the right to privacy which protects "the right to choose whether to continue a pregnancy to term or to have a save and legal abortion" (Planned Parenthood). In the peer-reviewed journal, Nursing Standard, the authors provide arguments for and against abortion. The anti-abortion position by Jones and Chaloner (using deductive reasoning) is as follows:
Premise A: the fetus is an innocent human being; Premise B: it is "morally wrong to kill an innocent human being"; Conclusion: hence it is morally wrong to kill a fetus.
The pro-abortion position presented by the authors is as follows:
Premise A: the fetus has no "moral status"; Premise B: it is not morally wrong to destroy something that has no moral status; Conclusion: it is not morally wrong to destroy a fetus.
Given these two opposing premises, it then seems logical to zero in on the "accuracy of the premises" (Jones, et al.,...
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