Abortions Are Immoral
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The subject of abortion may well be the most intense and polarizing ethical and philosophical issue of the our times because, in Laurence Tribe's words, it is a clash of absolutes (Tribe 1992). There is, in practical terms, no room for compromise. While one may speak of the importance of weighing the rights of the mother and the rights of the fetus, in practical terms a woman cannot both carry a fetus to term and have an abortion. Other important social issues allow for a range of compromises: Welfare reform, for example, exists in a dozen shades of gray. But abortion is an either/or proposition - or at least it is for the most part. What small area of gray there is will be discussed below. However, while there is some room for compromise, this paper in general argues that abortion is morally wrong. There is, as Tribe argues, no practical middle path between the choice of carrying a pregnancy to term and ending it through abortion. It should be noted, however, that there is in fact a spectrum of opinion: Between pro-life and pro-choice positions lies a continuum of ethical and political positions. Very few people argue that a fertilized egg always has primacy, even if a woman will definitely die as the result of a pregnancy. And very few argue that abortion should simply be used as a regular form of birth control. This paper takes the position that abortion is wrong because a fetus has as much right to life as any other human being.
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in general believe the fetus is only a "potential" human being either until it is actually born or at least until it is viable, i.e. until it could live independently outside the mother's womb, something that occurs sometime during the last trimester of pregnancy (www.plannedparenthood.org). Until this time, proponents of legalized abortion argue, the fetus has no legal rights. Rather all legal rights belong to the woman carrying the fetus, who can decide whether or not to bring the pregnancy to full term (Tribe, 1992, p. 34).
However, this argument is untenable for those who believe that human life begins at the moment an egg is fertilized. It is at this moment that all of the genetic material (and so all of the "instructions") needed for a human being to develop are present. All those things that will make this individual unique are already present in the fertilized egg. To say that the embryo, or fetus, is not really a person because it is not yet completely developed is no different from saying that a five-year-old child is not really a person because it too is not yet a completely developed person. The doctor who discovered Down Syndrome phrased it this way:
"I have learned from my earliest medical education that human lif
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Approximate Word count = 1940
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)
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