Why Abortion Should Be Legal

Abstract

Abortion is one of the most controversial topics around the globe, and a hot topic for debate in both the political and personal arenas.  In this argumentative essay, the author will present the case for why abortion should be legal.  The essay will address compelling reasons for keeping abortion legal.  These reasons include the fact that criminalizing abortion does not prevent abortions, the role of abortions in health care, the right to personal autonomy, and the fact that there is no rational basis for differentiating between right to abortions based on how conception occurred.  In addition, the essay will respond to the most common arguments in favor of criminalizing abortion, which focus on the idea of abortion being immoral. 

Abortion Should be Legal Essay Titles

1.  My Body, My Choice: The Critical Role of Personal Autonomy in the Abortion Rights Debate

2.  It’s Not a Baby: Society Already Recognizes a Difference Between Miscarriages and Stillbirths, So Why Do Anti-Choice Activists Insist Aborted Fetuses Are Babies?

3.  The Illusory Biblical Case Against Abortion: Understanding the Context of Jeremiah 1:5

4.  Babies Should Not Be Punishment: Why “Do the Crime, Do the Time” Approaches to Abortion Rights are Harmful to Women and Children

5.  Safe, Accessible, and Rare: Why Access to Abortion Is Only Part of the Goal for Reproductive Health Activists

Abortion Should be Legal Essay Topics

1.  How current medical advances regarding fetal viability change the basic structure for abortion rights outlined in Roe v. Wade? 

2.  How social approaches to unintentional early pregnancy loss through miscarriage reflects a broader social ideal that these deaths do not represent the death of a child, and why those social constructs undermine the entire anti-abortion debate.

3.  Understanding the Bible’s actual stance on abortion, the specific context of Jeremiah 1:5, and the historical role of abortion in Judeo-Christian societies.

4.  The history of anti-abortion legislation in the Western world.

5.  The logical fallacies and potential dangers of creating rape and incest exceptions for abortion access contrasted with the cruelty of not allowing rape or incest victims to access abortions.

Abortion Should be Legal Outline

I. Introduction

A. Define abortion

B. Criminalizing abortion does not prevent abortions

C. Abortions are essential healthcare

D. Personal autonomy

E. The false difference in rape and incest exceptions

F. Exploring arguments against abortion

G. Thesis statement:  Abortion is a human right and failure to provide safe and affordable access to abortion not only fails to accomplish the goals of protecting life, but actually increases the danger to living people.

II. Criminalizing abortions does not prevent abortions

A.  People still access criminal abortions

B.  Unsafe abortions is a leading cause of maternal injury and death

III. Abortions are essential healthcare

A.  Abortions are lower-risk than carrying a full-term pregnancy

B.  Abortions may be required to save a woman’s life or health

C.  Abortions can protect a woman’s mental health

IV. Personal Autonomy

A.  In no other context does society demand someone sacrifice their body for another

B.  Access to medical care should be protected by privacy

C.  Most decision-makers about abortion access have been male and therefore never at risk of being forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term.

V.  Rape and Incest Exceptions

A. Cruelty of expecting rape or incest victims to carry their assailant’s child

B. No difference between a child conceived that way or through the mother’s own choices

C. Highlights the misogyny of the anti-choice position by suggesting that a baby is a punishment for bad actions.

VI. Arguments against Abortion

A.  Adoption

B.  Religion

VI. Conclusion

A.  Restate thesis

B.  Arguments against abortion

C.  Rape and incest exceptions

D.  Personal autonomy

E.  Essential healthcare

F.  Criminalization is ineffective 

Main Title: Abortion Should Be Legal, Even If Some People Think It Is Immoral

Hook Sentence: Not even self-labeling pro-life people think a fetus is the same thing as a baby; they do not treat people who have miscarried like they have experienced the death of a child, which reveals that something other than concern for the fetus is what motivates anti-choice legislation.    

Introduction

Abortion is a medical term that refers to the termination of a pregnancy.  While the term actually refers to both intentional and unintentional terminations, the abortion debate focuses on the intentional termination of a pregnancy, generally in the first 28 weeks of that pregnancy.  It is a very controversial issue, which is often grossly oversimplified as a debate pitting a mother’s right to autonomy against a baby’s right to life.  However, examining the nuance reveals that more than a mother’s autonomy is often at stake in the abortion access debate.  Likewise, the idea of that pro-choice advocates are also anti-life is simply not supported by the facts.  Abortion should remain legal where it is legal and be made legal in places it is not for a number of reasons.  Criminalizing abortion does not prevent women from attempting to access abortions.  Abortions are essential healthcare and can play a critical role in preserving maternal life, maternal physical health, and maternal mental health.  Abortions are an issue of personal autonomy and a woman’s right to determine what she does with her body.  Anti-abortion laws with rape and incest exceptions are illogical and treat conception as a punishment.  Finally, the two most commonly used arguments against abortion, the religious argument and the adoption argument, lack support. 

Thesis Statement

Abortion is a human right and failure to provide safe and affordable access to abortion not only fails to accomplish the goals of protecting life, but actually increases the danger to living people.

Body

Many people who are anti-choice want to pretend like criminalizing abortions ends the demand for abortion.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Prior to the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, which decriminalized abortion access in the United States, many women sought illegal abortions.  Due to the condition of record keeping, the stigma surrounding abortion, and the fact that many women did not seek medical treatment because of the criminal nature of the abortion, it is impossible to determine with any accuracy how many women died in the U.S. because of illegal abortion before that decision.  However, in 1930, over 2,700 women in the United States had abortion listed as their cause of death (Galea, 2019).  The global picture is even more grim; each year around 7 million women are treated for unsafe abortions around the globe (Galea, 2019).  While many of these women will not die as a result of these complications, they may experience lifelong harms that can impact their health as well as the health of their families and communities.

For that reason alone, abortion could be considered essential healthcare, but there are other reasons that abortion is a must-have resource if society wants to protect maternal health.  Despite advances in maternal health, childbirth remains risky.  Women remain at significant risk during pregnancy and childbirth, and this risk is exacerbated for women of color or in economically disadvantaged communities.   “Legal induced abortion is markedly safer than childbirth.  The risk of death associated with childbirth is approximately 14 times higher than that with abortion” (Raymond and Grimes, 2012).  Oftentimes, women who die during pregnancy and childbirth are identified as high-risk at some point during the pregnancy.  Abortions are necessary to help save their lives or to protect maternal health.  These numbers do not even consider the impact of carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term on a mother’s mental health; in some instances, abortion access may be critical to that, as well.

Some people may question why a mother’s mental health, or even her physical health and life, should be considered more important than a fetus’s health.  However, personal autonomy places a crucial role in the question of abortion. Is it appropriate to force one person to sacrifice their health, their body, and their autonomy for the sake of another person?  In the context of abortion, many people argue that it is.  However, society is horrified at that idea in other contexts, specifically the forced organ harvesting of prisoners in China (Smith, 2019).  How can forcing one group of people to donate their organs for the use of another be grossly moral and a human rights violation in one context, and yet be considered appropriate in another? What makes this position even more egregious is that the people who have shaped abortion policy have typically been male, which means that they will never face an unwanted pregnancy.

One of the ways that anti-choice activists have tried to counter the basic inhumanity of anti-abortion legislation is by carving out exceptions for victims of rape and incest.  These exceptions acknowledge that there is something sadistic in expecting a woman who has become pregnant as the result of sexual assault to carry that child and give birth to it, possibly trying herself for life to the assailant.  However, if abortion is about protecting the life of the unborn, the method of conception should not matter.  Instead, this exception highlights the underlying misogyny of anti-choice people; they view pregnancy as a punishment for sex and have a “do the crime, do the time,” mentality towards childbirth that is as fundamentally anti-child as it is anti-woman.

In fact, the two most commonly used arguments against legal abortion are easily defeated.  The first argument is the adoption argument and the idea that all aborted babies would easily find loving adoptive homes if only their mothers carried them to term.  In reality, the supply of loving adoptive homes is dwarfed by the number of unwanted pregnancies each year.  In addition, adoption does not change the fact that even healthy pregnancies can have lifelong effects on a woman’s body.  The religious issue is often summed up in Jeremiah 1:5, which provides “I knew you before I formed you in your mother’s womb.”  However, this biblical verse is taken completely out of context when used to argue against abortion.  God was specifically addressing the prophet and differentiating him from others in this statement; he later says that he set the prophet aside from others.  It was a specific statement about a specific man, not a global statement about all embryos and fetuses.