"There have been approximately 36.5 million abortions in the twenty-five years since the U.S. Supreme Court legalized unrestricted abortion on January 22, 1973" (AGI 1). These figures, collated by the Allan Guttmacher Institute, a research arm of the Planned Parenthood Association, also states that these figures may well be under-reported by as much as 7 percent.
There is no more divisive social subject in America than abortion. Despite the Supreme Court's Roe vs. Wade decision to "legalize" the woman's right to choose an abortion, as more and more conservative Christians join the mainstream, there are not merely vocal but also physical antagonisms on the subject. Doctors have been killed, clinics firebombed, and confrontations between the two "sides" have seldom ended peacefully. The purpose of this essay is to provide some reasons, and documentation, why the idea of "pro-choice", or the woman's "freedom to choose" what to do with her body is morally perverted and wrong.
All of us have feelings about abortion, including the doctors who perform them, or refuse to do so, as well as the psychiatrists who often need to counsel and treat women for whom abortion is a mental as well as moral conflict. As one psychiatrist writes: "àwe often treat female patients who have had an abortion and feel upset. guilty or uneasy about the choice they made. The decision to have an abortion is not an easy one, and the procedure itself leaves patients with a host of unresolved issues" (Benedek 985).
In looking back in history, it is interesting to note that even Catholics accepted abortion. "Pope Gregory XIV, who ruled at the end of the sixteenth century, extended the (abortion) period to 116 daysàNor was acceptance limited to Catholics. Protestant denominations have traditionally held more or less the same opinion" (Currie 11). Of course, these opinions changed by the eighteenth century. "By the mid-Nineteenth century, abo...