Abortion, The Active Termination Of A Pregnancy

Before women had rights to decide whether they could keep their baby, some states didn’t allow abortion, therefore requiring women to give birth to their child. In today’s current issues, abortion is still a controversial subject with millions of people supporting it or not supporting it. Every woman has the right to make changes to her own physical body, and those rights should not be taken away, according to the constitution. In the very famous case in 1973, “Roe v. Wade”, the United States Supreme Court legalized abortion throughout the first trimester of pregnancy. In the article, “Roe’s Pro-Life Legacy”, it is explained how after this movement, the right to abortion, lives have changed and led to lower abortion rates (Sheilds 2013.)

Abortion has been a complex social issue in the United States ever since restrictive abortion laws began to appear in the 1820s. By 1965, abortions had been outlawed in the U.S., although they continued illegally; about one million abortions per year were estimated to have occurred in the 1960s. (Krannich 366) Ultimately, in the 1973 Supreme Court case of Roe v. Wade, it was ruled that women had the right to privacy and could make an individual choice on whether or not to have an abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy. (Yishai 213)

Dr. Henry Morgentaler and two other doctors set up a private clinic in Toronto to perform abortions on women. According to the law at that time women were required to obtain a certificate from a therapeutic abortion committee that would Asses whether they qualified for an abortion. Morgentaler and his colleagues made public statements question the wisdom of these abortion laws in Canada. They believed that women should have the sole decision on having abortion. The three appellants where charged on the grounds of conspiracy amongst each other between November 1982 and July 1983 with the intent to perform an abortion on women contrary to s.423 (1) (d) and s.251 (1) of the criminal code . This was an appeal from the court of appeal for Ontario.

Abortion, the termination of pregnancy before the fetus is capable of independent life, has been practiced since ancient times. With records dating to 1550 BC, it’s no question that abortion techniques have been used throughout the ages as an effective form of birth control. Pregnancies were terminated through a number of methods, including the use of herbs, sharpened instruments, the application of abdominal pressure, and other techniques. In the 19th century, the English Parliament and the American state legislatures prohibited induced abortion to protect women from surgical procedures that were deemed unsafe. However, in 1973, abortion was legalized as a result of the U.S. Supreme Court rule in Roe v. Wade. This ruling made it possible

To prove that the Charter protects some rights but not all, a court case that involved Dr Henry Morgentaler and the Supreme Court of Canada was successful after trials. Before this case, women were only allowed to have an abortion after proper certification of approval from a hospital's Therapeutic Abortion Committee. Three doctors including Morgentaler set up an abortion clinic that allowed women to have an abortion without a certification of approval. He was later charged with illegal abortion under section 251 of the Criminal Code. Morgentaler argued that women had full right on deciding whether or not they wanted an abortion. This law was struck down as unconstitutional as it violated a woman’s right according to section 7 on the Charter.

Abortions were widely used in the early eighteen hundreds and kept secret due public scrutineer. Not only were they considered against the law in some places but were risky due to high risk of infection from unsterile equipment used to perform the actions.” Without today’s current technology, maternal and infant mortality rates during childbirth were extraordinarily high. “(National abortion Federation, 2016) as time contained states changed and modified their laws to accommodate political agendas, these opposed to legal abortion had begun to fight absent any stated funded abortion clines. Then there was Roe v. Wade this was the first major Supreme Court battle based on abortion laws and ethics. Roe v. Wade decision of the courts said that they “considered the constitutionality of a Texas statute made it a crime to obtain an abortion except when it was necessary to save the life of the mother”. (Harris, 2014) There was another Supreme Court case that changed the views of the courts based on how they judge the frame work of decision on the trimester model. The ethics involved in this are not just solely left to the mother of the potential life but in the network of people

The Queen vs. Davis case concerns the murder trial of Arthur Paul Davis and Alice Davis that occurred in 1875. In it, they were tried and convicted of murder for conducting an abortion; the killing of a fetus and subsequently causing death of the victims, Catherine Laing and Jane Vaughn Gilmour. This essay will examine the historical context of the case, what the trial reveals about the nature of women’s lives in Toronto during the 1870s as subordinate women who are deemed as caretakers and how women managed to end unwanted pregnancies. During the late 19th century ending an unwanted pregnancy was an illegal offence because it was considered unethical to kill a fetus. Women were not able to access safer alternatives such as

In Eastern Montreal, Morgentaler worked in medicine as a doctor and he would get a lot of requests for abortions from women. At first he would send them to other doctors in hospitals where it was legal but after those doctors stopped performing abortions, he had nowhere

It was argued that anti-abortion laws were “the product of a Victorian social concern to discourage illicit sexual conduct” (543). Another reason abortion was previously prohibited was because “the procedure was a hazardous one for the woman” (544). The court pointed out that this was no longer valid or relevant in this day of age. They explained that abortion was now “relatively safe”, and that “mortality rates for women undergoing early abortions, where the procedure is legal, appear to be as low as or lower than the rates of normal childbirth” (544). When abortion is prohibited, women seeking abortions sometimes tend to undergo illegal abortions, which are extremely unsafe. Therefore, the court said, “the state has a legitimate interest in seeing that abortion, like any other medical procedure, is performed under circumstances that insure maximum safety for the patient” (544). When abortion was illegal, the mortality rate for women having abortions was significantly higher than when it was made

In the 19th century, after tremendous progress in surgical processes, abortions were then conducted by surgeons on a wide scale, while medical abortions are used concurrently. However, as abortion technology prospers, legal restrictions came with it. In 1803, a English statute abolished the previously-legal first trimester abortions. The act “condemned the willful, malicious, and unlawful use of any medical substance when used with the intent to induce abortion” (Stern, 1968). In 1821, Connecticut enabled the first statute in the United States regulating abortions. Within 10 years, states like Illinois, Ohio, New York, Alabama, and others enabled abortion restriction statutes, and by 1968, 50 of the 51 jurisdictions in the United States have prohibited abortion except in the case women’s life is endangered (Ibid., at 3). In 1965, Britain, however, legalized abortion for “medical conditions of the mother, for socio-economic reasons, for eugenic considerations, and for pregnancies which resulted from rape or incestuous intercourse”, which is still law today (Ibid, at 4). In Canada, abortion has been legalized since 1969 through Bill C-150 if “a committee of three physicians determined that the pregnancy was a threat to the woman's life or health” (Norman, 2012). In 1988, Canadian Supreme Court struck down bill C-150’s provision requiring committee approval to receive an abortion in its decision R v Morgentaler, legalizing abortion across Canada for any reasons (Ibid.).

The topic of aborting an innocent fetus has been overwhelmingly controversial in the United States. The two sides to this ongoing debate is pro-life advocates and pro-choice advocates. Abortion is the ending of a pregnancy by removing a fetus or embryo before it can survive outside the uterus; whether it is an unplanned or unwanted pregnancy. Abortions are most often performed during the first twenty-eight weeks of pregnancy and can be performed as a medical or surgical procedure. Medical abortions include two types of abortion pills; while the surgical procedures include vacuum aspiration and dilation and evacuation. Ultimately, I am one of the many “pro-lifers”, and I strongly agree that abortion should be illegal because it negatively affects our people. Women across the nation are becoming impregnated and following a short amount of judgement time, turn to abortion to solve their problems but in the end hurt themselves with this decision. Abortions should be illegal because it is immoral and unconstitutional, causes severe mental and physical issues, and negatively impacts the economy. “During the ancient Roman times it has been supposed that abortion and the destruction of unwanted children was permissible, but as our civilization has aged, it seems that such acts were no longer acceptable by rational human beings, so that in 1948, Canada along with most other nations in the world signed a declaration of the United Nations promising every human being the right to life”

Before 1988, abortion in Canada was illegal in all providences however due to the relatively new Charter of Rights and Freedoms Canadian doctors were able to challenge the law. According to section 7, the Charter “guarantees the life, liberty and personal security of all Canadians. It also demands that governments respect the basic principles of justice whenever it intrudes on those rights.”(Section 7, Charter of Rights and Freedoms). Thus the law banning abortion was a violation of the rights guaranteed in the Charter, and as one of the prevailing justices in the case stated: "The right to liberty...guarantees a degree of personal autonomy over important decisions intimately affecting his or her private life. ... The decision whether or not to terminate a pregnancy is essentially a moral decision and in a free and democratic society, the conscience of the individual must be paramount to that of the state." The Charter further protects the right of choice, moral decisions, and freedom of personal

The Morgentaler case is a landmark abortion case in 1988 in which the Supreme Court of Canada held that the abortion provision in the Criminal Code was unconstitutional, as it violated a woman’s right under s. 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom to security of a person. After this case and ruling, there have been no criminal laws which regulate abortion in Canada.

Such as in 1988, the Supreme Court declared the old abortion section of the Criminal Code to be unconstitutional, following the trial of Dr. Henry Morgentaler (uOttawa, n.d.). Considering the government represents Canada, such an event is to be distinguished as a benefit to the country, rather than solely for the individual.

After opening an abortion clinic illegally, Morgentaler went through twenty years of legal battles including an eighteen month jail sentence. In 1982 Canada enacted the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, bringing new hope to abortion rights activist, Henry Morgentaler.