Abortion Should Be Legal

Abortion Should Be Legal

Abortion. Ed. Stephen Currie. Opposing Viewpoints Digests®. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2000

Should abortion be legal? The answer to that question depends on the values and goals of a society. If a society is in favor of unhealthy and unwanted children, governmental interference in private decisions, and putting women's lives at risk for ideology, then that society should ban abortion. But if a society believes in open dialogue, freedom to make personal decisions, and outstanding health care for every woman and child, then abortion must remain legal. As one pro-choice official puts it, Roe v. Wade "has obviously saved enormous numbers of lives, improved women's health, [and] made for stronger families."1

No Way to Stop It

Abortion is a fact. It has always been a fact since the earliest times women have known of methods to terminate a pregnancy. Even in societies in which abortion is illegal, women who know that bearing a child is not an option have sought out ways to abort. Before Roe v. Wade extended abortion rights to all American women during the first trimester of pregnancy, literally thousands of illegal abortions were performed every year across the nation. "It is a great mistake," writes commentator Anna Quindlen, "to believe that if abortion is illegal, it will be non-existent."2

Unfortunately, illegal abortion was an extremely dangerous procedure. Too often illegal "clinics" were run by people with no medical training and little or no concern for the health of the women they treated. Horror stories abounded: abortions performed on kitchen tables or in cars, women infected by unsterile tools, women killed by bungling, uncaring abortionists. The fate of a Brooklyn woman in 1963 was all too common. As a reporter described the case, "Someone attempting an amateur abortion had killed her by injecting a caustic solution into her womb."3 These stories and figures indicate that making abortion illegal does not keep women from aborting; it simply makes abortion more hazardous. To criminalize abortion will not save babies, even if we wished to argue that two-month-old fetuses can be considered babies. A Catholic priest sums up the problem succinctly: "If Roe v. Wade is undone," he says, "there will still be the same number of women who get abortions. The difference will be that women again will be dying."4 Given such realities, criminalizing abortion simply means sending women back to the unregulated butchers. It is surely better to legalize and to regulate.

Wanted Children

Few people suggest that abortion ought to be chosen without so much as a second thought. And indeed, few women do get an abortion simply because they "feel like it." No woman gets an abortion seven months into pregnancy because she is unable to dance, realizes that her due date will conflict with a concert she would like to attend, or dislikes the way she looks in maternity clothes. Nor do American women typically use abortion in place of other forms of birth control. As obstetrician Don Sloan puts it, "In our almost quarter-century of legalized abortion there are no signs that [substituting abortion for birth control] is a factor."5 Rather, women have good, thoughtful reasons for choosing abortions, reasons that deserve the protection of the law rather than its disapproval.

Consider one woman's response when asked if she aborted for "mere convenience." "Absolutely ridiculous!" she exploded. "I was already supporting five kids! You're out of your bloody mind! I was working full time and going to school.... I slept four hours a night, sometimes three."6 Reasons to terminate pregnancy vary from woman to woman. Always, however, they are significant reasons—important and legitimate. "That we cannot cope with another child," writes