Abortion: Pro-Choice Arguments

This report examines the pro-choice arguments supporting a woman's right to abortion. These arguments include women's rights to privacy, due process rights under the Fourteenth Amendment, rights of speech and association, and so forth. Issues considered in the report also include the morality of abortion law and the primary disagreements of the pro-choice and pro-life movements and their supporters. The report asserts that the pro-choice arguments upholding the morality and the legality of women's abortion rights have affirmed by numerous lower and Supreme Court decisions since the ruling establishing abortion rights in 1973's decision in Roe v. Wade. Though the Court has addressed the question of whose rights (those of the pregnant woman or those of the unborn fetus) should predominate, the forces on both sides of the issue continue to seek greater clarification of these rights from the Court.

Every year some 45 million pregnancies, out of a total of 175 million, are terminated by an abortion (Brown, 1999). Nearly one-half of these abortions are medically unsafe, resulting in the deaths of nearly 80,000 women a year and a much larger number suffering injury, infection, and trauma. Both the legality of abortion and the availability of medically safe abortions are public health issues. As Brown (1999) noted, criminalizing abortion or reducing the access of certain groups of women (i.e., poor, welfare-depend

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an in the context of the controversy regarding partial-birth abortions. Partial-birth abortions are those abortions taking place at a late point in the pregnancy which require that the fetus be killed as it is being withdrawn from the woman's body by forceps (Black, 2001). The Pro-Life movement holds that there is nothing tolerable or moral in this particular procedure. The Court has held that partial-birth abortions can be used if necessary to save the life of a pregnant woman. Otherwise, such abortions do fall within the range of interests ascribed to the States and characterized as compelling. The Court in the case of Stenberg v. Carhart struck down a Nebraska statute banning partial-birth abortions and affirmed that a woman's right to choose includes the right to choose a medical procedure that will not endanger her life or health. The medical profession has been increasingly challenged to determine when a fetus becomes a person and therefore legally takes on the rights that are guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. Weyrauch (2002) states that the medical profession has not as yet proven willing to undertake this task. Hall (1992) also pointed out that in many of its decisions the Supreme Court has described itself as

Category: Philosophy - A