Abortion.
The very word strikes many people as ‘taboo’, and even offensive. In the United States, abortions are slowly being made more difficult to get due to laws being changed to purposefully shut down female health clinics, or to make the entire process of getting to a doctor for such a treatment a drawn-out affair. Why, in a society which prides itself on ‘freedom’, do politicians feel that they should have the final say in what a woman can and cannot do with her own body?
The main argument against a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy boils down to religion. These religious individuals who are against the termination of a pregnancy see the fetus as a life and to end it purposefully is murder, which is explicitly forbidden according to the Bible. There have been laws proposed which seek “to legally define life as starting at conception,” (Huffington Post), which will mark the doctors who perform abortions legally murderers. The pro-choice party, or those who think that women should have control over their own bodies, do not see the fetus as a separate entity as it depends on the health of the mother (Women Issues).
Why do women seek to end their pregnancies? According to the CDC, 85% of women who got abortions in 2010 were unmarried or single women, with many differing reasons to choose to not have a child. Among those reasons were that the potential parent did not have the proper economic status that would allow them to raise a child in good condition, while others felt that they did not want to be single parents. 1% of the total number of women who ended their pregnancies were survivors of rape. Surprisingly, as religion is mostly against this procedure, more that half of the 760,000 abortions performed last year were on those who identified themselves as Catholic or Protestant (AGI).
Whether life begins at the moment of conception or later on in the development of the baby, abortion should be a woman’s own choice, as it involves her body and will have an impact on the rest of her life.
sources: http://christianteens.com, www.huffingtonpost.com, http://www.abort73.com/abortion_facts/us_abortion_statistics/,
http://womensissues.about.com/od/reproductiverights/a/AbortionArgumen.htm, http://www.agiweb.org/
Isabel, thanks for tackling this controversial topic. I appreciate the empirical evidence that you offer to enhance the credibility of your argument. For the most part, you write well, but there are some sentences that are less than precise. Please review them:
ReplyDeleteYou write, "see the fetus as a life and to end it purposefully is murder..." This is an example of faulty parallelism. You should have written "and to end it purposefully AS murder." You need to retain the parallel structure.
You write, "it depends on the health of the mother (Women Issues)." What is the antecedent of "it" in this sentence. Always be careful about how you use the pronoun "it."
You write, "many differing reasons to choose to not have a child." What does "to choose" add to this? You really mean simply "many different reasons to have an abortion," right?
Finally, you write, "the potential parent did not have the proper economic status that would allow them." In this sentence, you mix a singular antecedent, "parent," with a plural pronoun "them.