Abortion is a polarizing topic in which there are a lot of people accepting it, as well as many who are against it and consider it absolutely immoral and unacceptable. A large number of women face this problem and abortions should be legalized because women must have the right to have a say on what happens or doesn’t with their bodies. This is their fundamental right and if it is illegal then women’s choices are being disrespected. Not ignoring the fact that a potential life is being killed sometimes there can be situations when there is no other solution to the issue. Therefore for me it should be legal, but you’re still killing a person.
In the current world we live in most parents have reason behind the abortion, some women are just not ready to be responsible for another living being or maybe they want to focus on their career which is reasonable enough. The debate on abortion is mostly focused on fetus’s value and the woman’s value to choose. As explained in Scott’s article people are either pro-life or pro-choice when they are concerned about abortion. What pro-life people believe is that once conceived, he or she is granted the right to have a life and they are not likely to care if the fetus has feelings or not. They see the abortion as an immoral thing because for them it’s a murder of a human life. Pro-choice people side with the freedom of choice, allowing a woman to be in control of her body. Preventing all of the undesirable pregnancies is what being a pro-choice means.
There are frequent arguments made against allowing abortion that argue about the right to life and how fetuses are persons and are entitled the right to live. Quite a few arguments are made on whether fetuses are legit persons or not. Most people who want to make an argument about why abortion should be legal will say that fetuses don’t have a personhood and that they become a person whenever they can survive outside the womb. People who are against abortion must say that fetuses are persons, otherwise there is not much reason behind being against it. But what if we regard fetuses as actual individuals? This is what Thomson claims and focuses in her article that if we accept fetuses have some identity we can still justify an abortion (47-66). She agrees that fetuses are persons but doesn’t necessarily agree that they have a right to life or that removing the fetus is a bad thing to do. This is supported by her with the example of the “growing child”. In this example we are asked to imagine ourselves stuck in a very tiny house with an expanding child where we are already pushed towards the wall and in a few minutes we’d be crushed to death if we do nothing, but the child will survive. Are we not supposed to save our lives here because we are being threatened by this child? According to Thomson we have the right to do so “I think, rather, that there are drastic limits to the right of self-defense. If someone threatens you with death unless you torture someone else to death, I think you have not the right, even to save your life, to do so”. It can be understood from this that when a woman decides to have an abortion, it’s done out of self-defense. Sure, it’s a very noble and selfless deed to give birth to a child, knowing that you’d die. Not many women would do it but they should at least have a choice. Another interesting situation of abortion is whenever the woman’s life is not endangered at all. In this case we consider the fact that each woman has a right to her body and when the fetus is a part of her body than that woman should have available the choice to get rid of it. There is another example “people-sееds drift about in the air like pollen...”. These hypothetical seeds are spread by the wind and when they fall they get bigger. The case here is that these “people-seeds” grow in people’s homes and get there from the windows. The outcome of this “seed” is a human being which can grow up and have a normal life like the rest of us. And just like seeds require some attention in order to survive, so do people seeds. Let’s say we don’t want any of these human seeds in our house. The best way to avoid them is by preventing them from entering by barricading the windows. Considering you have done this but somehow the seeds still manage to enter your house. What happens then? Thomson says that it does not acquire the right to stay and grow in your house “Surely not--despite the fact that you voluntarily opened your windows”. The main conclusion from these examples from Thomson show us that agreeing to sex does not conclude that you agree to be pregnant.
A lot of counterarguments can be made on why abortion shouldn’t be legal. The basic argument for the reason it should be illegal is that the woman doesn’t have an opinion on it simply because the fetus is a separate human being. There are some extreme opinions who think a girl aged fourtееn, after being raped shouldn’t have the opportunity to have an abortion and their argument towards that is that they will ask what are 8-9 months compared to someone’s whole life. The main thing that people against abortion believe is that every fetus is a valuable life and should have the chance to experience a future like ours, all things that make our lives interesting and enjoyable (Marquis 190-191). What Marquis tries to do is instead of us being controversial whether a fetus has a personhood, we should be more concerned on what makes killing a bad thing. His suggestion on the issue of what makes murder immoral is that it prevents someone’s potential future, which can be valuable – everyone deserves to experience what other’s already have. The thing we have to ask ourselves here is do we really consider As a counter argument to Marquis’s about the future value of a person I argue that future value is not something that can be viewed as either good or bad, it’s not a case where it is absolutely needed to preserve. There are other problems I see with Marquis’s arguments. His claim that life begins after conception, my problem with that is that we can never be actually certain with rеproduction because we can’t be sure if a human being is to emerge from a fertilized egg as there are cases where the embryo tеars itself. Further reasons as to why abortion may be wrong are that sometimes there can be complications when an abortion is performed. Such complication can be an injury done to the uterus or some infection developed when performed under low-skilled doctors. Having taken this under consideration sometimes there can be a risk of not being able to become pregnant again. Some people might argue that ultimately the abortion problem is not about the woman’s rights to her body but the importance of the individual’s right to life.
There are also a few things that are not mentioned in some of these articles. For example let’s say a woman doesn’t want to have this baby but she is not allowed to do an abortion. A newborn baby shouldn’t come into the world unwanted by its parents. Furthermore, nowadays the population is increasing very fast, it’s estimated that by 2050 the world population will increase to nine and a half billion and not having the choice to have an abortion might be a problem. Also making it illegal might make women who don’t want the pregnancy to go look for illegal doctors who might end up putting them at risk. Something that can be very important is having more choices on abortions so that you can do it as soon as possible so you don’t risk your health in doing a late abortion.
As a conclusion, abortion still remains a matter of intense debate. I personally stand for abortion being legal. I believe that a fetus becomes a person whenever it can live independently away from the body of a woman. If abortions are illegal that won’t stop women from looking for a solution. Raising a child can be a difficult task, requiring a lot of effort and if someone is not ready for it then there should be an option to end unwanted pregnancies.
