Why Abortion Should Remain Legal: A Rights-Based Argument
This argumentative essay makes the case that abortion should be legal and accessible. It argues that criminalizing abortion does not prevent women from seeking the procedure but instead drives them toward dangerous, illegal alternatives that cause serious injury and death. The essay frames abortion as essential healthcare, noting that childbirth carries significantly higher mortality risk than a legal induced abortion. It defends personal autonomy as a foundational right, critiques the logical inconsistency of rape-and-incest exceptions in anti-abortion law, and rejects the two most common arguments against abortion access — the adoption argument and the religious argument — as unsupported by evidence. The essay concludes that safe, legal abortion access is a critical human right.
- Introduction: Defines abortion and previews key arguments
- Criminalization Does Not Prevent Abortion: Illegal abortions persist and cause serious harm
- Abortion as Essential Healthcare: Abortion is safer than childbirth and protects health
- Personal Autonomy and Bodily Integrity: Forced pregnancy violates bodily autonomy rights
- The Problem With Rape and Incest Exceptions: Exceptions reveal misogyny and logical inconsistency
- Addressing Common Arguments Against Abortion: Adoption and religious arguments lack evidentiary support
- Conclusion: Restates the case for legal abortion access
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What makes this paper effective
- The essay moves systematically through multiple independent arguments for legal abortion, giving the position cumulative force rather than relying on a single claim.
- It anticipates and directly rebuts the most common counter-arguments — adoption and religion — rather than ignoring them, which strengthens its credibility.
- The rape-and-incest exception analysis is particularly sharp: instead of simply sympathizing with victims, the author turns the exception itself into evidence of logical inconsistency in the anti-abortion position.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper uses refutation as a structural device. Rather than simply presenting affirmative evidence, each section dismantles a corresponding objection — criminalizing abortion will stop it, childbirth is safer, forced pregnancy is different from forced organ donation — showing how a strong argumentative essay integrates counterargument throughout rather than relegating it to a single paragraph.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens with a clear definition and thesis, then advances four affirmative arguments (criminalization is ineffective; abortion is healthcare; personal autonomy matters; rape/incest exceptions are logically incoherent) before pivoting to two direct rebuttals (adoption and religion). The conclusion restates each pillar in reverse order, creating a bookend structure that reinforces the thesis without simply repeating it word for word.
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 gestation. It is a highly 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 that pro-choice advocates are anti-life is simply not supported by the facts.
Abortion should remain legal where it is legal and be made legal in places where 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. Abortion is an issue of personal autonomy and a woman's right to determine what she does with her body. Anti-abortion laws that include 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: Abortion is a human right, and failure to provide safe and affordable access to abortion not only fails to accomplish the goal of protecting life, but actually increases the danger to living people.
Criminalization Does Not Prevent Abortion
Many people who are anti-choice want to pretend that criminalizing abortions ends the demand for them. 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 poor record keeping, the stigma surrounding abortion, and the fact that many women did not seek medical treatment because of the criminal nature of the procedure, it is impossible to determine with any accuracy how many women died in the United States as a result of illegal abortion before that decision. However, in 1930 alone, over 2,700 women in the United States had abortion listed as their cause of death (Galea, 2019).
The global picture is even grimmer. Each year, around 7 million women are treated for complications from 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 affect their health as well as the health of their families and communities.
Abortion as Essential Healthcare
For that reason alone, abortion could be considered essential healthcare — but there are additional reasons that abortion is a must-have resource if society wants to protect maternal health. Despite advances in maternal medicine, childbirth remains risky. Women face significant risk during pregnancy and childbirth, and this risk is exacerbated for women of color and those in economically disadvantaged communities. As research published in Obstetrics & Gynecology found, "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. Access to abortion is necessary to help save their lives or to protect their health.
These numbers do not even account for the impact that carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term can have on a mother's mental health. In some instances, abortion access may be critical to her mental well-being as well.
Conclusion
No one wants to have an abortion. There is no rational person who wants to find herself in the position of carrying an unwanted pregnancy or of being forced to consider terminating a wanted pregnancy because of risks to her life or health. However, these conditions exist, and as long as they do, abortion access is a critical human right.
The arguments against abortion do not withstand scrutiny. There are not enough adoptive homes to accommodate all unwanted children. Religious arguments are not supported by careful textual and historical analysis of any of the major faith traditions. The recognition that abortion exceptions should be made for rape and incest victims itself acknowledges that pregnancy is far more than a casual inconvenience. Personal autonomy and essential healthcare should be accessible for all women, not only those who have been victimized. When abortion access is restricted, the result is not fewer abortions — it is simply fewer women accessing safe and legal ones.
References
Galea, Sandro. "What Will Happen to Women's Health if Abortion Is Banned?" Boston University School of Public Health. BU.edu. 31 May 2019. https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2019/what-will-happen-to-womens-health-if-abortion-is-banned/. Accessed 5 March 2021.
Raymond, E. G., and Grimes, D. A. "The Comparative Safety of Legal Induced Abortion and Childbirth in the United States." Obstetrics & Gynecology, vol. 119, no. 2, pt. 1, Feb. 2012, pp. 215–19. doi: 10.1097/AOG.0b013e31823fe923. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22270271/. Accessed 5 March 2021.
Safe Abortion: Technical and Policy Guidance for Health Systems. 2nd ed. World Health Organization, 2012. Chapter 4, "Legal and Policy Considerations." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK138197/. Accessed 5 March 2021.
Smith, Saphora. "China Forcefully Harvests Organs from Detainees, Tribunal Concludes." NBC News. 18 June 2019. Accessed 5 March 2021.
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