Abortion Diana Brown Summary

Diana Brown, a representative at the International Humanist and Ethical Union at the United Nations in Geneva, argues the main reasons why abortion should be legal and unrestricted. She asserts that abortion should be legal because if it is unavailable, women will resort to harmful methods of termination of an undesired pregnancy. Furthermore, the rights of the mother should supercede the rights of a fetus as it is in question whether or not a fetus is viable. Fetuses show no signs of awareness to their surroundings until the second trimester and therefore their rights should not take precedence over a woman’s. Brown ascertains that making abortions illegal does not save babies, but rather it kills mothers. Eighty thousand women die every year after participating in unsafe methods of terminating a pregnancy. Rather than removing the practice of abortion, society should be narrowing its efforts into removing the causes of abortion and teaching about protected sex and contraceptive methods.

She claims that half of the abortions performed each year are medically unsafe, and result in about eighty thousand mothers dying. She inserts these statistics in order to appeal to the logic of the reader that abortions need to remain legal in order to prevent mothers from trying unsafe methods to terminate their pregnancy. She also refers to a baby as a “fetus” to demonstrate that the child’s rights should not supercede the mother’s because it is merely a “fetus.” The term fetus carries a different connotation than the terms baby or child. Using this scientific diction dehumanizes the baby that is being aborted, and it looks at the medical procedure through a more objective