Abortion: The Debate in the United States

ABORTION: THE DEBATE IN THE UNITED STATES

Health care professionals in the 1990s are confronted with an array of issues that contain moral dimensions. Among the most controversial of these issues is abortion.

Among health care professionals also, disparate opinion exists with respect to the abortion issue. There are pro-life health care professionals and pro-choice health care professionals, as there are pro-life and pro-choice proponents in the general population. There are also health care professional health care professionals who are ambivalent towards this volatile issue. The health care professional, however, has a primary responsibility to serve her or his patients. The personal values of individual health care professionals, however, both should and do influence the approach to the discharge of an individual's professional responsibility.

Research has found that a decision to abort or not to abort is difficult for a woman, regardless of the circumstances and the nature of the decision. Research also has found that many women experience difficulty in verbally expressing their feeling with respect to a decision concerning an abortion. Health care professionals, therefore, cannot ignore a situation simply because a woman has difficulty in articulating her needs (de Costa Nunez, 1995, pp. 24-32).

The role of the health care provider in cases of abortion, however, is especially difficult for many individual health care professionals. While some individual healt

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of the fetus. Conversely, the failure by a health care professional to provide care to the patient in such a case might cause harm to befall the patient. This issue is less troubling for the health care professional that does not view the fetus as a person imbued with all the rights of a sentient being than for the anti-abortion health care professional who perceives the fetus as a person just as a pregnant woman is a person. For such a health care professional, the choice in some cases may come down to who to kill. Fidelity requires a health care professional to both keep promises made to others and to protect the trust placed by others in her or him (Milner, 1993, p. 23). This requirement may be interpreted to mean that a health care professional is bound to honor formal expressions of patient autonomy, such as the request by a patient to have an abortion procedure performed. Further, other health care professionals involved in the performance of such a patient-requested procedure rely on the professionalism of all other health care professionals involved in the delivery of care to such a patient to perform the health care services required by the patient. A health care professional that cannot in good conscience be true

Category: Philosophy - A