Pro Life And Pro Choice

The controversy surrounding abortion has been long debated since the Roe v Wade case (1973) as pro-life advocates and pro-choice advocates go neck to neck on whether the process should be banned or remain legal. According to APA (American Psychological Association), abortion is the “medical or surgical termination of a pregnancy and is one of the oldest, most common and most controversial medical procedures”. To be Pro-Life means to be against the termination of a fetus; one who is not in favor of the practice. Pro-life advocates believe a woman should continue the pregnancy and deliver the baby no matter the circumstance. Pro-choice represents those who believe the woman deserves a choice to carry the baby or have an abortion. Although the 1973 Roe vs Wade case legalized abortion, abortion is still currently a much heated debate in America as the surgical procedure is possibly on the verge of becoming illegalized. However, abortion should definitely remain legal for various reasons such as individual freedom, victim protection, life opportunities, failed contraception, and it is not fair for the government to make such crucial decisions for a woman’s life.

After coming to the United States, the first controversial issue that caught my attention was personhood and abortion. Most of the people that I had conversations with were concerned about this issue and were against the personhood legislation in Oklahoma which prohibits abortion and birth control. Mostly the women viewed the whole issue as an infringement upon their rights. Likewise, the men were concerned about the rights of their loved ones. Though they are the choice of a woman and are private, the issue is still morally challenging for everyone as it involves emotion, culture and spiritual beliefs. Therefore, it is an issue that appeals to people’s emotion apart from their political and religious stands, as it involves lives and motherhood. It affects people emotionally and physically, too. Most importantly, no woman wants to be called a murderer simply because she chooses to terminate a pregnancy. Most supporters of personhood legislation assert that personhood begins at fertilization, while most pro-choice people claim that personhood does not begin at fertilization and it is the choice of a woman to decide whether or not she wants to continue her pregnancy or use methods of birth control. However, I believe that once a fetus has become receptive to senses and pain, it should not be aborted. Therefore, the entire debate about personhood is when the life of a person begins or at what stage in the human life

While parts of both may be true, both cannot stand side by side as completely true when discussing abortion. As they stand today, fetus rights and female rights are incompatible in arena of abortion. Even the “other side” agrees that the two cannot stand shoulder to shoulder. In a chapter entitled “Abortion Does Not Violate Human Rights”, Christian Beenfeldt quotes Brian McKinely when claiming that female rights have a higher precedence than fetus rights: “It’s actually quite simple. You cannot have two entities with equal rights occupying one body. One will automatically have veto power over the other.” So one question remains, which more important, fetus rights or female rights? The winner of this question can be decided by one simple factor: is the fetus to be considered a true, living human being at the point of conception, or does true human life not begin until after birth? A clarification should be made here, however. In this paper it will be assumed that everyone involved in this debate considers a newborn child to be a human being. That is, at the moment of birth, a child either becomes a human being or continues to be a human being; regardless of the fetus’s life state before birth, it will be assumed that all agree that birth “confirms”, so to speak, the life and human existence of the newborn.

Out of all modern social controversies, perhaps the most heated controversy is that of abortion. In today’s society you are either a Pro-life or a Pro-choice, there is not a middle ground. Pro-life are individuals who believe abortion is immoral and should be stop for the wellbeing of women and unborn babies. In contrast, the Pro-choice individuals do not necessarily promote abortion, they just believe women should be the ones to make decisions over their bodies and health. Although the two main sides of the abortion debate have concerns for human life, pro-life activists worries more about the fetus and morals, a clear difference from the pro-choice that worries more for the women and their rights. Based on the points I explored, the pro-choice arguments are stronger than pro-life arguments. Most of both groups arguments comes from peer-reviewed researches from well-known sources to support each individual concept. Effects on women,socio-politics, and fetus are some of the main point of conflicts between the pro-life and pro-choice advocates.

The debate about the legality of abortion involves debating the legal status of the fetus. If the fetus is a person, anti-choice activists argue, then abortion is murder and should be illegal. Even if the fetus is a person, though, abortion may have justified as necessary to women’s body self-govern but that wouldn’t mean that abortion is automatically ethical. Perhaps the state can’t force women to carry pregnancies to term, but it could argue that it is the most ethical choice.

human from usually two months after conception to birth. It defines an embryo as a human or

The ethics of abortion have long been an issue in the world of both politics and philosophy. Abortion has surfaced many questions regarding the classification of a newly fertilized embryo and whether or not it should be considered a human being. John Noonan, in his paper, “How to Argue About Abortion,” claims that the fetus is in fact a person, from the point of conception to birth, with the right to life. Noonan argues that the main problem with recognizing fetuses as human beings is the inability of some to expand their general view of what it means to be a person (1.

When an embryo should be considered an actual human has a variety of answers, “some have sought to reject that the early human embryo is a human being, according to one view, the cells that comprise the early embryo are a bundle of homogeneous cells that exist in the same membrane but do not form a human organism because the cells do not function in a coordinated way to regulate and preserve a single life”.(Siegel)

In both cases, resorting to other grounds solves, or rather, dissolves, the contradiction by eliminating the need to make the determinations which create the contradiction — specifically whether or not the fetus is a person and whether or not the woman has the right to control her own body. These determinations are simply unnecessary; one

The debate over abortion comes down to one essential issue — the moral status of the unborn

Physicians, biologists, and other scientists agree that conception marks the beginning of the life of a human being—a being that is alive and is a member of the human species. There is overwhelming agreement on this point in countless medical, biological, and scientific writings.

Following that, one must determine whether the fetus’ environment really determines whether or not it is a human. One may say, the fetus is clearly not human until it is born. To that, I would ask, does location really change a human’s personhood? Afterall, humans live in all different locations. A fetus is not human merely because it is inside of the mother.

Inbuilt in the nature of the personhood theory, therefore, is to restrict any other human interest or value in grounding human rights. This raises the question, why is personhood any more determinant than any other concept or human interest. This question becomes all the more pertinent when the personhood account is applied to human rights recognised in contemporary human rights culture.

“it is said that to draw a line, to choose a point in this development and say ‘before this point the thing is not a person, after this point it is a person’ is to make an arbitrary choice… It is concluded that the fetus is a person from the moment of conception. But this conclusion does not follow. Similar things might be said about the development of an acorn into an oak tree, and it does not follow that acorns are oak trees” (Thompson 1971).

In order to be considered a legal person, there are physical and conceptual requirements. The physical requirement to be a legal person is to be ‘born alive’. In R v Poulton (1832) 5 C & P 329 at 330, it is said that the fetus becomes a legal person when ‘the whole body is brought into the world.’ Conceptually, a legal person must be ‘…an enclosed, bounded and sovereign being…’ and a ‘…rational person…’ who can ‘…exercise autonomy over his own person…’ In other words; they must be capable of self-government. It is difficult to define legal personhood narrowly due to its interpretation being dependent on context and purpose but this is generally a universally accepted definition.