Abortion as a Modern-Day Dilemma for the US Community

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Table of Contents

Abortion as a Women’s Rights Issue
Conclusion
References

Abortion is one of the contentious issues to which people rarely have a simple answer even when they lack the necessary knowledge to make a complex and substantiated position. Affecting people on a profoundly personal level, the idea of abortion has been affecting the discussion of women’s rights for decades due to the questionable aspects of the specified procedure. Despite the fact that abortion could be represented as a morally wrong choice to make, the fact that requiring one to do otherwise would mean compromising women’s bodily integrity suggests that the problem of abortion goes significantly deeper. Applying different ethical perspectives shows that abortion must be viewed as a fundamental right of women due to its direct implications for women’s’ physical autonomy.

Abortion as a Women’s Rights Issue

The right for having an abortion should be seen as a fundamental women’s’ right since it implies that a woman can have bodily autonomy. Indeed, when restricting the access to abortion services for women, one creates the setting where women’s reproduction rights are controlled by others, which contributes to the rise in gender inequality and the current situation with sex-based oppression. In the environment where creating a life requires two people, and where instances of assaults on women, occur, abortion must be seen as a necessary evil. In fact, to defend women’s rights to have abortions, one should not even go as far as connecting the instance of rape to the justification of abortion (Chae et al., 2017). In fact, the described strategy may have the direct opposite effect. Instead, providing pregnant women with a full range of options and allowing her to evaluate every possible avenue that she can take in order to exercise her right to bodily autonomy must be considered crucial.

Finally, one must consider the argument that the right to abortion also implies protecting the rights of children, namely, the right to be born into the families that want them and love them. Indeed, if abortions are prohibited statewide, and punishments are administered to women who select the procedure as opposed to giving birth, children will be born to families and environments where they will be unwanted and to the mothers who will not love them. As a result, these children will grow up in a very unhealthy environment that will be potentially dangerous for their mental health. Indeed, studies show that children that are born into a hostile setting where they were initially unwanted have difficulties at the early stages of childhood development (Rana et al., 2021). Thus, abortion as a procedure that allows getting rid of an unplanned pregnancy should contribute to the discussion of abortions the idea of women exercising their right, particularly, the right to decide whether a woman is ready and capable of accepting the responsibility to take care of a child and raise it.

Furthermore, since abortion implies an invasive procedure performed on a woman’s body, which is a description that is applicable to any surgical procedure performed exclusively on a female patient, the ability to choose it and consent to it must be recognized as a healthcare-related right of any woman based on the specifics and uniqueness of female physiology (Kanstrup et al., 2018). Since consenting to a surgical procedure remains one of the foundational principles of bodily autonomy, it is vital to provide women with the right for abortion as their fundamental right on the basis of their unique biology and the related needs.

As a rule, when arguing against abortion and insisting on removing it from the list of legally allowed medical procedures, the opponents of abortion rights address the issue of the sanctity of human life, referring to the life of the unborn child. However, the specified argument as an appeal to the ethical justification of abortion, or, to be more precise, the alleged lack thereof, appears to be morally empty since it does not entail focusing on the rights of the newly born infant (Beynon-Jones, 2017). The specified issue ties into the problem of failing to provide a child that was born as a result of a woman being refused an abortion with the emotional support and love that it needs in order to receive an opportunity for further development.

Therefore, the argument against abortion falls flat both from logical and ethical perspectives since it fails to accommodate the needs of both women and infants. Instead, the focus on prohibiting abortion seems to pursue the goals of meeting the preset ethical standards for the sake of the standards itself instead of considering the needs of those that these standards were created to protect and support (Nash, 2019). For this reason, the right for abortion must be seen as the integral part of a system of human rights, specifically, those that must be given solely to women based on the reality of their biological sex and the related needs.

For this reason, abortion should be considered an inalienable right of any woman on the basis of female physiology and related needs. It is often misconstrued that abortion is seen as the encroachment on the foundations of ethic and morality. However, the specified argument appears to be overly exaggerated and failing to see the point of the specified measure. Instead of viewing abortion as the epitome of evil, it should be regarded as the lesser evil and the option that is more reasonable compared to the alternative, namely, bringing a child into the world where it will be unwanted and, most likely, will not receive the support, resources, and emotional warmth that it needs (Chae et al., 2017). Consequently, while celebrating abortions does not seem to be appropriate, they must be deemed as a medical procedure and a surgery that serves as a means of managing an unwanted pregnancy as a condition that is unique to women.

Conclusion

Despite being a very contentious issue in the present-day world, abortion to this day represents one of the foundational rights for which multiple women have been fighting for the entirety of their lives. Namely, the disruption of bodily integrity and autonomy of women should be mentioned as one of the direct effects of the currently proposed legislation. Therefore, prohibiting abortions will cause even more dire outcomes since, being deprived of an opportunity to have an abortion in the sterile setting of an operation room, one will have to compromise and opt for having an abortion in the setting that has been repurposed to perform the specified type of operations (Fuentes & Jerman, 2019). As a result, the quality of the intervention and the efficacy of services will drop. For this reason, the concept of abortion must be supported as one of the principal rights of women everywhere since it implies the right to physical autonomy.

References

Beynon-Jones, S. M. (2017). Untroubling abortion: A discourse analysis of women’s accounts. Feminism & Psychology, 27(2), 225-242.

Chae, S., Desai, S., Crowell, M., & Sedgh, G. (2017). Reasons why women have induced abortions: a synthesis of findings from 14 countries. Contraception, 96(4), 233-241.

Fuentes, L., & Jerman, J. (2019). Distance traveled to obtain clinical abortion care in the United States and reasons for clinic choice. Journal of Women’s Health, 28(12), 1623-1631.

Kanstrup, C., Mäkelä, M., & Hauskov Graungaard, A. (2018). Women’s reasons for choosing abortion method: a systematic literature review. Scandinavian Journal of Public Health, 46(8), 835-845.

Nash, E. (2019). Abortion rights in peril: What clinicians need to know. New England Journal of Medicine, 381(6), 497-499.

Rana, M. J., Cleland, J., Sekher, T. V., & Padmadas, S. S. (2021). Disentangling the effects of reproductive behaviours and fertility preferences on child growth in India. Population Studies, 75(1), 37-50.

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Abortion as a Modern-Day Dilemma for the US Community

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