ent is accepted, it follows that abortion poses no serious ethical problem. For most in the pro-life camp, however, the embryo is a human being. When this argument is accepted, the dispatch of a fetus becomes more problematical in an ethical context.
The Supreme Court was unable to determine which view of conception was the correct view in the Roe vs. Wade abortion in 1973, stating that no consensus on the question had developed among those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology (Hoyt, 1994, pp. 4-6). As a consequence, the Supreme Court decided the issue on other groundsùan individual's right of privacy. The Roe vs. Wade decision by the Supreme Court, thus, tended to remove the issue of abortion from the philosophical arena to the political arena.
As a rational philosophical consideration of the issue of abortion gives way to a shrill political debate, the pro-choice camp contends that abortion opponents simply want poor women to suffer (Hoyt, 1994, pp. 4-6). To this contention, the pro-life camp retorts that supporters of a woman's right to an abortion are attempting to simply legitimize a technological quick fix for an inconvenient problem, whether personal or societal.
Two "core values" of procreative liberty are protected in the legal system in the United States (Steinbock, 1996, pp. 67-74). The core value of the right to avoid reproduction is protected through the right to use contraception and to obtain an abortion, while the core value of the right to reproduce is protected through a right to marry and a right to fou
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