All women should have the right to do what is best for them when it comes to their body. According to the National Abortion Federation (Dudley, 2003), “Each year almost half of all pregnancies among American women are unintended. About half of these unplanned pregnancies, 1.3 million each year, are ended by abortions” (para 1). Some women who decided to abort the baby may not be in a mental place to provide for a baby.
Young adolescent girls between the ages of 15 and 19 make up 19% of all abortions; women between 20 and 24 make up 33%; about 25% are women age of 30 or older (Dudley, 2003). If you were a young single adolescent girl who had sex and became pregnant, you might feel that your best option would be to get an abortion because you’re not capable of caring for a child. Society may then make you feel less of a person; or worse, may call you a “murderer” because you decided abortion was the best option for you.
The Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, section 1 states:
All persons born or national laws in the United States are subject to jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
It is the woman’s right to make the decision to end her pregnancy if she chooses; it is not society's right to criticize her on the decision she made. Abortion is one of those issues where equal protection is difficult to understand, because men and women have different experiences when it comes to pregnancies. Choosing to end her pregnancy does not make her any less of a person than the next woman.
Also, when the statesmen were writing the Constitution and arguing for its passage, they all understood that privacy was a natural right. This was something that had been a topic in English philosophy and common law already for a century or more, and the fact that there was no part of the Bill or Rights that specifically mentioned privacy tells cannot be used to suggest that we privacy rights are not included. The Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the Constitution reserve unenumerated rights to the people and the states, and it seems likely that every single person at the Constitutional Convention understood that privacy was one of the unenumerated rights that citizens would posses. So, it makes sense that doctors and their patients should have privacy about reproductive decisions, and the government should not legislate matters that are private decisions between doctors and their patients. The government has a right to legislate against dangerous and harmful procedures, but abortion is usually safer than childbirth.
Please don’t believe the myth, that abortion is a form of birth control. “If abortion were used as a primary method of birth control a typical woman would have at least two or three pregnancy per year — 30 or more [abortions] during her lifetime” (Dudley, 2003, para 10). So, abortion ought to be an option that women and their doctors can consider. It can be a wise decision to have an abortion if a woman faces a risk of death if she carries a child to term, and it may be a humanitarian choice, even late in a pregnancy, if the baby has a problem that would give them only minutes or hours of life at birth, and those moments of life would be hellishly painful. We therefore ought to fund abortions so that all women, no matter their financial ability, can feel in charge of their own body. Society has no place interfering. If abortion is morally wrong, a woman can answer to God, but considering that 12% (in young women) to 75% (for women in their late 40s) of all pregnancies end in spontaneous abortion (miscarriages) anyway (Rice, 2018), God does not seem to be overly concerned with the well-being of blastulas and embryos.
Instead of shaming women for controlling their reproductive power, let’s fund and make sure that the women can get proper healthcare, contraceptive education, as sexual education as early as high school. Maybe that could be start a positive start to helping cut down a number of abortions.
References
Dudley, Susan. (2003). Abortion Facts. National Abortion Federation. http://prochoice.org/wp-content/uploads/women_who_have_abortions.pdf
Rice, W. R. (2018). The high abortion cost of human reproduction. bioRxiv (July 2018) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326485445_The_high_abortion_cost_of_human_reproduction
14 Amendment of the Constitution
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