Pros and Cons of Abortion

However, before we examine the rationale behind and consequences of the two sides, it is important for us to look at exactly what the Supreme Court said in the Roe v. Wade decision. The court ruled that a woman's right to privacy, as a part of the Fourteenth Amendment, extended to her right to decide whether or not to have an abortion: this ruling made all of the state laws prohibiting abortion unconstitutional. However, the court did not endorse "abortion on demand" as some say. It specified different restrictions as permissible at different times during the course of a pregnancy.

In the first trimester (generally agreed to be the first 13 weeks of gestation), the states are barred from making regulations about abortions except to mandate that they be performed by a licensed physician. In the second trimester, a state may regulate

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again since there is such a high risk of human life being lost. It would be immoral of her, in this outlook, to continue to try to bear a child since many lives would be lost in the process. Indeed, if abortion of an embryo is murder, would this woman not be guilty of involuntary manslaughter? Taking this one step further, respected anthropologist Margaret Mead notes, "After the unborn come the unconceived. Have they any rights? Those who oppose contraception implicitly act as if the unconceived already exist." In other words, it would seem reasonable that if we stipulate that every fertilized ovum is a person, then every sex act which does not ultimately result in birth could be considered the murder of a possible person. Indeed, the Roman Catholic church has long taken the position that sex without the possibility of pregnancy is both unnatural and sinful. In this respect, at least, the Catholic position is completely coherent. The secular conservative argument is very similar to the theological one. It states that a newborn infant is a human being with a right to life and that, working backwards from birth to conception, there is no point at which one can definitively say that the fetus became a human being, ther
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Approximate Word count = 2905
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)

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