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Essay on Abortion
| Date: |
05-25-02 4:40pm |
| Subject: |
Social Issues |
| Word Count: |
2165 |
| Page Count: |
8.66 |
Abortion
Almost half of American women have terminated at least one pregnancy, and
millions more Americans of both sexes have helped them, as partners, parents,
health-care workers, counselors, friends. Collectively, it would seem, Americans
have quite a bit of knowledge and experience of abortion. Yet the debate over
legal abortion is curiously abstract: we might be discussing brain transplants.
Farfetched analogies abound: abortion is like the Holocaust, or slavery; denial
of abortion is like forcing a person to spend nine months intravenously hooked
up to a medically endangered stranger who happens to be a famous violinist. It
sometimes seems that the further abortion is removed from the actual lives and
circumstances of real girls and women, the more interesting it becomes to talk
about. Opponents often argue as if the widespread use of abortion were a modern
innovation, the consequence of some aspect of contemporary life of which they
disapprove (feminism, promiscuity, consumerism, Godlessness, permissiveness,
individualism), and as if making it illegal would make it go away. What if none
of this is true? Historical advertisements: The Granger Collection, New York.
When Abortion Was a Crime, Leslie J. Reagan demonstrates that abortion has been
a common procedure -- "part of life" -- in America since the
eighteenth century, both during the slightly more than half of our history as a
nation when it has been legal and during the slightly less than half when it was
not. The first statutes regulating abortion, passed in the 1820s and 1830s, were
actually poison-control laws: the sale of commercial abortifacients was banned,
but abortion per se was not. The laws made little difference. By the 1840s the
abortion business -- including the sale of illegal drugs, which were widely
advertised in the popular press -- was booming. In one of the many curious
twists that mark the history of abortion, the campaign to criminalize it was
waged by the same professional group that, a century later, would play an
important role in legalization: physicians. The American Medical Association's
crusade against abortion was partly a professional move, to establish the
supremacy of "regular" physicians over midwives and homeopaths. The
physician and anti-abortion leader Horatio R. Storer asked in 1868. "This
is a question our women must answer; upon their loins depends the future destiny
of the nation." (It should be mentioned that the nineteenth-century women's
movement also opposed abortion, having pinned its hopes on "voluntary
motherhood" -- the right of wives to control the frequency and timing of
sex with their husbands.) Nonetheless, having achieved their legal goal, many
doctors -- including prominent members of the AMA -- went right on providing
abortions. women were often able to make doctors listen to their needs and even
lower their fees. And because, in the era before the widespread use of
hospitals, women chose the doctors who would attend their whole families through
many lucrative illnesses, medical men had self-interest as well as compassion
for a motive. Thus in an 1888 exposй undercover reporters for the Chicago
Times obtained an abortion referral from no less a personage than the head of
the Chicago Medical Society. Unless a woman died, doctors were rarely arrested
and even more rarely convicted. Even midwives -- whom doctors continued to try
to drive out of business by portraying them, unfairly, as dangerous abortion
quacks -- practiced largely unmolested. What was the point, then, of making
abortion a crime? Reagan argues that its main effect was to expose and humiliate
women caught in raids on abortion clinics or brought to the hospital with
abortion complications, and thereby send a message to all women about the
possible consequences of flouting official gender norms. Publicity -- the forced
disclosure of sexual secrets before the authorities -- was itself the
punishment. Reagan's discussion of "dying declarations" makes
particularly chilling reading: because the words of the dying are legally
admissible in court, women on their deathbeds were informed by police or doctors
of their imminent demise and harassed until they admitted to their abortions and
named the people connected with them -- including, if the woman was unwed, the
man responsible for the pregnancy Unsurprisingly, the Depression, during which
women stood to lose their jobs if they married or had a child, saw a big surge
in the abortion rate. Well-connected white women with private health insurance
were sometimes able to obtain "therapeutic" abortions, a never-defined
category that remained legal throughout the epoch of illegal abortion. Even for
the privileged, though, access to safe abortion narrowed throughout the fifties,
as doctors, fearful of being prosecuted in a repressive political climate for
interpreting "therapeutic abortion" too broadly, set up hospital
committees to rule on abortion requests. Some committees were more compassionate
than others. Moderate reforms had already been tried: twelve states permitted
abortion in instances of rape, incest, danger to physical or mental health, or
fetal defect, but since most women, as always, sought abortions for economic,
social, or personal reasons, illegal abortion continued to thrive Legalizing
abortion was a public-health triumph that for pregnant women ranked with the
advent of antisepsis and antibiotics. Anti-abortion zealots have committed
arson, assault, and murder in their campaign against abortion clinics.
Similarly, the general lack of enthusiasm for prosecuting those who perform
abortions and the almost total failure to prosecute and jail women for having
them suggest that whatever Americans may consider abortion to be, it isn't baby
killing, a crime our courts have always punished quite severely. it seems absurd
to suggest that the overburdened mothers, desperate young girls, and
precariously employed working women who populate these pages risked public
humiliation, injury, and death for mere "convenience," much less out
of "secular humanism" or a Lockean notion of property rights in their
bodies. It's even more preposterous -- not to mention insulting -- to see them
as standing in relation to their fetuses as a slaveowner to a slave or a Nazi to
a Jew. Reagan suggests that the abortion debate is really an ideological
struggle over the position of women. How much right should they have to consult
their own needs, interests, and well-being with respect to childbearing or
anything else? Arguments Abortion as philosophical puzzle and moral conundrum is
all very well, but what about abortion as a real-life social practice? Since the
abortion debate is, theoretically at least, aimed at shaping social policy,
isn't it important to look at abortion empirically and historically? Historical
advertisements: The Granger Collection, New York. Copyright © 1997 by The
Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved. The Atlantic Monthly; May 1997;
Abortion in American History; Volume 279, No. 5; pages 111-115. http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/97may/abortion.htm
May 11th, 2000 "A fetus is not a person and not the subject of an
indictment for manslaughter," Boston's Superior Court Judge James P.
McGuire told the jury. "I will continue to do abortions. They are a woman's
right," he said after his conviction, "Women since they've been on
this earth have been making that choice, whether they want to carry that baby or
not....The only humane thing we can do is make sure that when they make that
choice they have the opportunity to make it under the best conditions
possible." Copyright © 1975 by Seth Mydans. All rights reserved. http://www.theatantic/politics/abortion/myda.htm
May 11th, 2000 At the same time, there begins to appear on the part of some an
alarming readiness to subordinate rights of freedom of choice in the area of
human reproduction to governmental coercion. Notwithstanding all this, we
continue to maintain strict antiabortion laws on the books of at least four
fifths of our states, denying freedom of choice to women and physicians and
compelling the "unwilling to bear the unwanted." Since, however,
abortions are still so difficult to obtain, we force the birth of millions more
unwanted children every year. to cut down on population growth we should make
abortion easy and safe while we continue to develop other and more satisfactory
methods of family limitation. "There is no perfect contraceptive. The U.S.
Food and Drug Administration reports that the intrauterine devices, one of the
most effective contraceptives available today, have a failure rate of 1.5 to 3%.
This means that if all married women in the United States could and did use
these contraceptives, there would still be about 350,000 to 700,000 unwanted
pregnancies a year among married women alone. Even sterilization is not a 100%
effective method of contraception; some operations fail. Therefore, in order to
insure a complete and thorough birth control program, abortion must be made
available as a legal right to all women who request it." The situation is
today reversed; abortion under modern hospital conditions is safer than
childbirth. Though the population experts have not yet aligned themselves on the
side of abortion-law reform, something is beginning to happen. Seven
states--Arkansas, California, Colorado, Georgia, Maryland, New Mexico, and North
Carolina--have amended their laws to permit abortion not only to save life but
also to protect the health, mental and physical, of the mother, in cases of rape
and incest, and to avert the birth of defective offspring The 8000 to 10,000
in-hospital abortions contrast, of course, with the estimated one million
performed outside hospitals annually. Probably not much more than one half of
these are performed by doctors; the rest by the "kindly neighbor," the
"close friend," or the woman herself. Generally speaking, the laws do
not distinguish in their prohibitions of abortions between doctors and
nondoctors. Moreover, the out-of-hospital abortions performed by doctors are
obtained by the same group which accounts for the bulk of the in-hospital
abortions: the middle- and upper-income white woman who can afford the hundreds
or thousands charged for expert medical service outside the law. And these are
the same women who can afford to go to Japan, Sweden, England, or one of the
Iron Curtain countries where abortions are legal and where they typically cost
something between $10 and $25. But most of the old laws on abortion remain
unchanged on the statute books. In a few states, like Connecticut or Missouri,
the law says that the abortion may be performed to save the life of the child as
well as that of the mother, although no one is sure what this means. As a matter
of fact, no one knows what the laws which permit abortion to save the life of
the mother mean. "In order that a physician may best serve his patients he
is expected to exalt the standards of his profession and to extend its sphere of
usefulness." Copyright © 1969 by Harriet Pilpel. All rights reserved.
http://www.theatantic/politics/abortion/pilp.htm Published FridayMarch 31, 2000
White House Seeks to Join Carhart Case Washington (AP) - The Clinton
administration is asking the Supreme Court to let it join a Nebraska doctor's
fight against a state abortion law. Justice Department lawyers asked the
nation's highest court this week to let them participate when the Nebraska case
is argued before the justices the week of April 24. They said the law violates
some women's constitutional right to end their pregnancies. The court's decision
in the case may determine the fate of 30 states' bans on the late-term procedure
opponents call "partial-birth" abortion and which is known medically
as intact dilation and extraction. President Clinton twice has vetoed a federal
ban enacted by Congress. The court has not yet said whether it will let the
administration participate in the argument, but in a friend-of-the-court brief
made public Thursday government lawyers called the Nebraska law
"unconstitutional for three reasons." The brief says the law
challenged by Bellevue doctor LeRoy Carhart is written so broadly that it could
be enforced against more than one abortion procedure and is too vague to let
doctors know just what abortion techniques are outlawed. Even if the law is
limited to a single procedure, the brief says, it unduly burdens a woman's right
to abortion because "it fails to provide an exception to preserve the
pregnant woman's health. The only exception to Nebraska's ban is if the outlawed
procedure is necessary to save a woman's life." "The statute therefore
prohibits the . . . method even when a physician concludes that that method is
best suited to preserve the health of a particular woman," the brief says.
"The ban therefore forces at least some pregnant women to forgo a safer
abortion method for one that would compromise their health." The surgical
procedure involves partly extracting a fetus, legs first, then cutting the skull
and draining it to allow full removal from the uterus. Abortion-rights advocates
say the court's decision could broadly safeguard or dramatically erode abortion
rights, depending on what state legislatures can consider when regulating
abortions. A federal appeals court struck down the Nebraska law along with Iowa
and Arkansas laws. But nearly identical laws in Illinois and Wisconsin were
up-held by another federal appeals court. Copyright 2000 Associated Press. All
rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or
redistributed. http://www.abortionclinics.org/nebraska.htm Jan. 22, 1998, marked
the 25th anniversary of the landmark decision Roe v. Wade. The U.S. Supreme
Court ruling, of course, gave women the legal right to have an abortion. Poll
results: 8,885 people voted 1. Should abortion be legal? 77% yes22% no 1% don't
know 2. Will Roe v. Wade be overturned in your lifetime? 13% yes 69% no 18%
don't know 3. Have you or has anyone you know had an abortion? 86% yes 10% no 4%
don't know Poll date: Jan. 18, 1998 Copyright © 1995-2000 Women.com Networks.
All rights reserved. http://www.womanswire.com/backtalk/roewade.html Abortion
Coverage Leaves Women out of the Picture By Tiffany Devitt For example, the
Supreme Court decision that enabled states to require women under the age of 18
to get parental consent before getting an abortion was widely covered. However,
while more than 1 million teenagers become pregnant each year, and thousands of
them are affected by state legislation requiring parental consent, reporters
almost never sought their reaction, covering the legal change without consulting
anyone in the group that it impacts. This graphic depicts the abortion debate as
two hands tugging at a rag doll-- suggesting that the debate is about an
"unborn child" rather than about women's rights.
Bibliography
http://www.womanswire.com/backtalk/roewade.html http://www.abortionclinics.org/nebraska.htm
http://www.womanswire.com/backtalk/roewade.html http://www.fair.org/extra/best-of-extra/abortion-coverage.html
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