David C. Reardon's The After Effects Of Abortion

Abortion really today has been a very controversial issue in today’s society. An interesting claim within it is that abortion can be done safely through the use of medical abortion and although medical abortions can be safe and trustworthy as experts might say, there still are risks that women will have to face and eventually take after abortion. Major types of risks can be pelvic infections, blood clots in the uterus or maybe a torn cervix. These are just few out of many health problems caused from abortion.

Women may have an abortion for a variety of reasons, but in general they choose abortion because a pregnancy at that time is in some way wrong for them. “Abortion is the removal of a fetus from the uterus before it is mature enough to live on its own” (Kuechler 1996). When this happens spontaneously we call it a miscarriage. Induced abortion is brought about deliberately by a medical procedure that ends pregnancy. Legal abortion, carried out by trained medical practitioners, is one of the most common and safest surgical procedures. “About 1.5 million American women choose to have induced abortions each year. Less than 1% of all abortion patients experience a major complication associated with the procedure” (Kuechler 1996).

In the paper titled “A Defense of Abortion” Judith Thomson uses several premises to bring the readers to the conclusion that Abortion is not morally wrong. After reading her paper I have concluded, that abortion is in fact morally wrong, excluding extenuating circumstances. In this paper I will show that abortion is morally wrong by way of the following argument:

Abortion, for the vast majority of people is not a subject that is easy to talk about. According to the World Health Organization, out of the 211 million pregnancies, 46 million end up in abortion and 18 million of those abortions are done in what WHO considers unsafe conditions (World Health Report, 2007). Unsafe conditions are defined by WHO as, “ abortions performed by people lacking the necessary skills or in an environment lacking the minimal medical standards, or both” (World Health Report, 2007). The maternal death rate for women who have unsafe abortions is 350 out of 100,000, and there are other complications that are not fatal but can lead to disease or disability (World Health Report, 2007).

Fetal pain is very difficult to prove or disprove because of its subjective nature. Some argue that the fetus cannot feel pain until the 24th week of gestation because connections from the periphery to the cortex are not available until then (Derbyshire, 2015). By contrast, others say fetal pain is possible before 24 weeks on the basis that the fetus has a mechanism to detect noxious events and will respond to noxious events by withdrawing and grimacing (Derbyshire, 2015). The American Medical Association go even further that those two assumptions and state that pain perception in preterm neonates probably does not exist before 29 or 30 weeks (Arora & Salazar, 2014). Although no definitive conclusion is reached, fetal pain is a big factor that influences the abortion debate. As of 2016, there are 12 states that actively ban abortion after 20 weeks citing fetal pain (Fantz, 2016). They include Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota,

The probability of a woman's death is 1/11,000 in abortions after 21 weeks. A mother is not only taking the life of an innocent child, but she is putting herself at risk. For instance, “Dangers and risks of...” Martin Mcatee discusses complications that third-term abortions also come with. There is a high risk of infection to the mother due to surgical instruments being introduced into the mother's uterus, and possible dead tissue of the fetus parts being left behind. Dead tissue left behind after the abortion can enter the mother's bloodstream and result in sepsis, a deadly blood disease. Therefore, abortions can harm both the mother and the fetus, and should not be an option for the

In §2, I will introduce Judith Jarvis Thomson's argument that abortion is all right even when the fetus is considered a person. In §3, I will object to her argument about the matter. In §4, I will give an explanation of a response Thomson could have concerning my objection to her argument. In §5, I will explain how my objection succeeds by having support from another stance.

There are many complications associated with abortions some of which are known and others unknown. There was a study done in japan about 60 years ago that reached throughout the

Most people don’t realize this is murder because they haven’t seen the baby yet and haven’t realized it was alive. The opposite side may say that the baby isn’t a “human” until it's out of the womb, so it’s not considered murder.A baby’s life starts in the first 2 weeks, in these weeks the genetics are formed. (“Abortion”). Between 2 and 9 weeks, 90% of the body is already formed and the heart starts to beat. The brain, internal organs, eyes, nerves, and muscle movement in arm formed as well. Once they are 10 weeks old, their heart pumps blood, their facial expressions form and the body is sensitive. In 12 to 16 weeks, the legs and arms can move together, nervous system forms and eye movements are made. When it reaches 18 weeks, it develops pain sensory, and cerebral cortex. In 20 weeks, the baby can now sleep, wake and hear noises like normal babies. After 24 weeks, it develops tastes, and now has a 80% survival rate if it is born now. (“Abortion”). This is considered murder because the baby can do everything a human can do, it's just still in the womb. Over 90% of abortion clinics let you have abortions up to 13 weeks where the eye movement takes place. (Bailey 7) Abortion clinics offer abortions after 20

In his paper “Why Abortion Is Immoral”, Don Marquis argues that abortion is almost always morally wrong, regardless of the circumstances. He set forward a non-religious argument against abortion in what he believes is an ethically important similarity between killing adults and killing fetuses. Marquis’s argument against abortion is considered one of the most refined and comprehensive philosophy papers ever written. Analyst have come up with many objections to Marquis’s arguments, all of which he has successfully responded too. In this paper, I have some new considerations that will prove that Marquis fails to provide adequate support for his thesis.

First, an abortion is more dangerous than childbirth. Women do not realize how dangerous is abortion. According to the Guttmacher institute (AGI) 47000 women die from complications of unsafe abortion each year. Also some researchers said that women who does abortion they will face 2.3 times higher risk of having cervical cancer, compared to women with on history of abortion. This increased cancer rates post-aborted women may be linked to the unnatural disruption of the hormonal changes which accompany pregnancy and untreated cervical damages or to increased stress and the negative impact of stress on the immune system. In addition, the women experience the loss of their fertility or increase in miscarriages after abortion. For example, my elder sister has tow daughter, and she was pregnant again but she could

Another major issue regarding abortion is if a fetus feels pain. A study by Stuart G. W. Derbyshire examines the development of the fetus to decode when pain is acknowledged. Pain is “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage” (Derbyshire, 2006, The Content of Pain). Working with this definition, one can derive that an understanding of the senses and emotions should be present at some cognitive level to feel pain. Therefore, pain becomes a learned response instead of a natural one because the association between the senses and the reaction is not yet learned. “This is likely to strike anyone as strange because it is simply not how we intuitively believe pain to be… Not only has the biological development not yet occurred to support pain experience, but the environment after birth, so necessary to the development of pain

Abortion can be a difficult issue when the solution relies on one’s morals. Our society consists of people that support the woman’s right to choice to others that belief eliminating a fetus makes for a sinful act, and all other opinions in between. Judith Jarvis Thomson, compares this act to the life of a violinist. I agree with Thomson’s “big picture,” abortion should ultimately be the choice of the body holding the fetus. Though, while analysing this argument I found gaps making for a weak conclusion.

Many women that choose to have an abortion do not realize that it is a dangerous surgery with serious side effects. These side effects are both physical and psychological. Having an abortion is unnatural and interrupts this function of the human body. “The women’s body naturally resists the abortion, causing physical and emotional problems” (“Who does Abortion Affect?”). Almost all of the women who had abortions feel that they have made the wrong decision. The women are not informed about the side effects of abortion. Many women that had abortions said their doctors gave “little or no information about the potential health risks

Being a mother is one of the best gifts from a life. A mother gives her children unconditional love without expecting anything in return. Being a mother means more than having given birth to a child. It is an invisible connection between mother and child; it is a blessing, a relationship that never ends and the love that never dies. However, for some women, motherhood might be challenging in ways they did not expect, forcing them to choose between having an abortion and keeping the child. The debate over abortion is an ardent and polarizing issue as there are those who believe that all humans including those unborn should have a right to life, and on the other side of the spectrum are those who believe it should a woman's right to choose whether she wants an abortion or not. This topic relates to Gwendolyn Brooks's poem, "The Mother", where the author describes the painful thoughts, heartbreak, and awful feelings that a woman experiences after having an abortion. Brooks lays out a helpful framework for understanding the difficult situation of facing unplanned pregnancy. In "The Mother", a woman recollects her inner conflicts as she laments over the guilt of having had an abortion and the future she never gave her would be child. Brooks's poem provides insight into the research which reveals how abortion affects women morally, psychologically, and religiously.