Abortion Essay

Grace Karney
Abortion
Only one person should be able to dictate whether a woman will or will not have a child, and that person is the woman herself. A woman should be the only one to decide what happens to her body. Abortion is an extremely personal decision between a woman, her family, and her doctor; there is no place for politicians or government to get in the way. The Republican Party rejected Roe v. Wade ruling and wants to outlaw abortions. They do not make any exceptions for the life or health of woman which is why their "partial birth abortion" bans have repeatedly been ruled unconstitutional by the Republican-controlled Supreme Court. Choice is a fundamental, constitutional right. It is a woman’s right to decide whether or not she wants to abort a baby, therefore it should be legal. It is too invasive for the government to attempt to dictate this. The ability for a woman to have control over her own body is necessary to civil rights. If you take away her reproductive choice then the government is basically forcing a woman to continue on with a pregnancy. How much is too much? How intrusive are we going to let our government become? Certain issues of morality are a personal decision, like abortion, which means they need to be decided and implemented by the individual.
Women have been having abortions, both legal and illegal, for thousands of years now. The regulation of abortion began in the nineteenth century along with most of the laws concerning women’s health, but restrictive abortion laws were enacted in the mid- nineteenth century as a result of organized lobbying by the medical profession. The medical profession used changing social and demographic forces, specifically the decreasing birth rate among native-born wh...

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...n reform, of abortion laws, advocating legal abortion as a component of “the basic human right to limit one’s own reproduction.” Its primary concern was overpopulation, and abortion was advocated, along with contraception and sterilization, as a “means of birth control” that would help bring down the birthrate. Sensitive to the concerns of feminists about its potential coercion of women, however, ZPG stressed the voluntary nature of its demands for abortion, sterilization, and contraception, and expressed its support for women’s rights from the start.
The right to control one’s own body was at the heart of the feminist health movement and was interpreted by feminists to mean possessing knowledge about how their bodies functioned, having the power to make informed decisions about their bodies, and being treated with dignity and respect by the medical establishment.