A Defense of Abortion

Ever since the 1973 Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade, affirming the constitutional right of women to an abortion for at least the first six months of pregnancy, the social and political culture in the United States has in effect been at war, both in the courts and on the streets. Throughout that period, advocates for and against the right of abortion have been engaged in debate on the issue of the morality of abortion versus women's right to elect to have an abortion. They are the anti-choice and pro-choice advocates.

Historically, the position of anti-choice advocates has been moral: abortion is murder; murder is wrong; abortion is wrong. The basis for this argument is a definition of the fetus in the womb as a person. And everybody knows that to murder a person is wrong and illegal. From this definition and argument, the argument quickly moves to dispose of the right of choice: everybody knows that persons have rights; everybody knows that to violate those rights is wrong and illegal; everybody knows that murder is illegal. Now this person (in the form of a fetus but a person an

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h houses of Congress but vetoed by President Clinton. This bill "would have outlawed a particularly gruesome procedure customarily performed late in pregnancy" (Joyce 8). The anti-choice view was that to allow such abortions would have provided a screen for abortion-on-demand. The pro-choice view was that the law would have banned late-term abortions "not according to the stage at which they occur, or the medical circumstances of the woman, but according to the particular abortion method chosen by the doctor" (Rubin 28). In other words, the focus of debate obscured two facts: first, such abortions are rare, and, second, there are many different "circumstances in which late-term abortions occur [and various methods of late-term abortions]. When context is added, a black and white issue becomes gray" (Rubin 29). From the anti-choice perspective, to ignore context and focus on surgical praxis is to disempower choice advocacy on moral grounds. That is, questions of fetal personhood are absorbed, assumed, and finessed by a powerful image of late-term abortion. Having been assumed with respect to one method, fetal personhood can be assumed with respect to others as well. Rubin quotes a choice advocate's view that the Partial Birth law
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Approximate Word count = 2566
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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