America's Abortion Debate

Abortion is one of the most controversial issues in the United States today. According to oxford dictionary, abortion is the deliberate termination of a human pregnancy, most often performed during the first 28 weeks. The two factions involved in this controversy are poles apart in their views on abortion: where as the pro-choice movement contends that a woman’s right to abortion is absolute, the pro-life movement asserts that a fetus’s right to life is indisputable. The argument has become very pronounced since the U.S Supreme Court ruling in the year 1973 in Roe V. Wade, which legalized abortion. According to the ruling, a woman’s right to abortion outweighed the rights of a nonviable fetus and prohibited the State interference. In addition to the fact that pro-choicers have always praised Roe for recognizing that a woman’s right to control her body is more important than a fetus’s right to life, this idea is also supported by different organizations such as Alan Guttmatcher Institute (AGI) whose mission is “to protect the reproductive choices of all women and men in the United States and throughout the world.” (Par 1) While some people believe that abortion is immoral others argue that it is a woman’s right to have full control of her body.

A typical pro-life believer argues that fetuses posses a characteristic such as a genetic code that is both necessary and sufficient for being human. This idea is mostly propagated by the principle of the Roman Catholic Church “In 1995 Pope John Paul II officially condemned abortion in his “Evangelium Vitae,” calling it a villainous crime that kills an innocent human being” (Knapp Pg 16) and supported by many fundamentalist protestants groups, though not by majority of Catholics an...

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...ciples, the pro-choice position is certainly not obviously wrong. Consequently, when abortion advocates try to make the argument more or less probable, they call for pro-life citizens to completely cease from bringing the legitimate idea of freedom to life for the purpose of protecting the unborn from harm, these abortion-choice supporters are by so doing encouraging their fellow pro-choice citizens to silently and politely remain firm that the unborn are not fully fledged members of the human community therefore are not entitled to protection by the state. To the opponent of abortion, this request hardly seems tolerant or liberating.

Works Cited

Francis J. Beckwith Defending Life: A Moral and Legal Case Against Abortion Choice. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Lynette Knapp: The Abortion Controversy San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2001