If you look at the constitution, it says people have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If you have an abortion, you are taking those rights from what would be a child. If you kill him/her, you take away his/her right to life. By aborting the baby, you take away his/her liberty. And, how can it pursue happiness if it isn’t alive to do so?
Pro-life supporters, on the other hand, believe that the unborn child has the right to life, and that abortion unlawfully takes away that right. If we take away the woman’s right to chose, will we begin limiting her other rights also? Or, if we keep abortion legal, are we devaluing human life? There is no easy answer to these questions. Both sides present strong, logical arguments.
Abortion Abortion is a very debatable topic in the United States and there is no clear answer if it’s permissible or not. Abortion can be defined as, the deliberate termination of a human pregnancy at any stage of the pregnancy. Many people believe that abortion should be outlawed, others believe it should be an option, and last view being a mix between both. The mixed view population believe that in cases of rape the mother can have an option to abort or not, or if the fetus reaches a certain age it is not permissible to abort it. Thomson stakes her claim by focusing on three circumstances where she believes abortions to be permissible.
This is a strong point that causes much debate, but one concept that has to be taken into account here is viability. Viability is the ability for a fetus to live outside the mother’s womb. Studies have been done to show that there are no signs of viability in the first twenty-eight weeks of a pregnancy (Turpin). Can it really be considered murder if the child would not be able to live on their own as their own person? If anything, abortion should not be completely illegal but could only if performed after these first twenty-eight weeks of the pregnancy.
In contrast, those on the Pro Choice side believe that abortion should be legal. They feel that individuals should have the right to choose what happens with their body. In addition, they argue that abortion is not murder due to the baby not being fully developed. I agree with Pro Life activists because they think that abortion should be considered murder. They consider a baby a human as soon as conception occurs.
Partial-birth abortions, abortions in the third trimester, and the recent “day-after” or RU-486 pill now add a new aspect to the issue. Partial-birth abortions and abortions in the third trimester are exceedingly controversial. In these procedures it doesn’t involve the expulsion of an embryo, but it involves the actual termination of a fetus from a womb. It has been outlawed in the United States a result of numerous outraged pro-life advocates and some pro-choice who found it to be utterly inhumane. The RU-486 is said to be no more controversial than any other aspect of an abortion.
There is no other place to find completely undifferentiated cells than in an undeveloped human. Unfortunately, a developing human needs those cells and the process of removing them kills the unborn child. This results in an abortion being performed whenever stem cells are obtained. This has caused a protest from pro-life activists. The moral argument is that scientists are killing fetuses to improve the medical condition of living patients.
Thomson creates three hypothetical analogies that further explain why an abortion is permissible for each case. For the sake of argument, Thomson’s initial premise for all cases is that a fetus is a person. The debate with Thomson’s claim is whether or not her hypothetical analogies work to conclude that abortions are permissible in certain cases. Thomson argues abortions are permissible in rape cases by using a hypothetical situation where an individual has been kidnapped against their will and awakens medically attached to a famous violinist, allowing him to survive only through the use of your kidneys. If you detached yourself from the violinist, he will certainly die; therefore, to continue the analogy, you have to lie there for the nine months it will take to rehabilitate his kidneys.
So why do we not protect them the same way we protect ourselves? A Human Life Amendment added to the constitution to prohibit and outlaw abortion procedures is the most efficient way to correct this problem. Abortion is a cruel procedure that contradicts fetal laws, that viciously takes away and denies a fetus of personhood and life, and is dangerous to the mother and can become very costly. If a pregnant woman was to get murdered, she, and most likely
The unborn child deserves the rights that are given to all living humans. The problem with today’s laws on abortion is that they make it too easy for a woman to get an abortion. The law is crazy to me because if you look at some murder cases, the unborn child is considered a person. If someone murders a pregnant woman, they will most likely be charged with two murders as we have seen in the Manson family murders. It shouldn’t matter how far along the pregnancy is for someone to tell if the baby is a “human”.