SHOULD ABORTION BE ABOLISHED?

Two Sides Debate When Life Begins and Female Autonomy

When does life begin, and who has the right to determine when that life begins? Those are the two pivotal questions that both sides of the abortion debate grapple with. Throughout history, the right to life has been protected for moral, ethical, religious and even practical reasons by all civilizations. Because women are the childbearing sex, logic would seem to dictate that they have the final say in whether or not to give birth, despite the fact that the father is the trigger in that pregnancy. Whether or not you agree that women (or couples) do not have the right to terminate that pregnancy, the simple fact is that abortion as an option will not disappear, even if it is legally outlawed. You cannot outlaw human nature and the natural birthing process. In the final analysis, abortion is merely a medical procedure. Here’s why:

The Facts About Abortion

Abortion has been practiced since its development by the Egyptians as far back as 1550 BCE, but its legality and availability have been threatened continuously by forces that would take away women's fundamental rights. Laws that prohibit absolutely the practice of abortion are a relatively recent development and have always been enacted by men.

Abortion was an accepted practice in ancient Greece and Rome. Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BCE) wrote that “when couples have children in excess, let abortion be procured before sense and life have begun.” In the latter days of the Roman Empire, abortion was not considered homicide but rather a crime against a husband who would be deprived of a potential child.

In the early Roman Catholic church, abortion was permitted for male fetuses in the first 40 days of pregnancy and for female fetuses in the first 80-90 days. Not until 1588 did Pope Sixtus V declare all abortion murder, with excommunication as the punishment. Just three years later, a new pope found the absolute sanction unworkable and again allowed early abortions. Three hundred years would pass before the Catholic church under Pius IX again declared all abortion murder. This standard, declared in 1869, remains the official position of the church, reaffirmed by the current pope.

In 1920, the Soviet Union became the first modern state to formally legalize abortion. In the early period after the 1917 revolution, abortion was readily available in state-operated facilities. These facilities were closed and abortion made illegal when it became clear that the Soviet Union would have to defend itself against Nazi Germany. After World War II, women were encouraged to enter the labor force, and abortion once again became legal.

American states derived their initial abortion statutes from British common law, which stipulated that abortion was not considered a criminal act as long as it was performed before “quickening” (the first detectable movement of the fetus, which can occur between 13-25 weeks of pregnancy). Until at least the early-1800s, abortion procedures and methods were legal and openly advertised throughout the United States. Abortion was unregulated, however, and often not only unsafe, but potentially fatal.

In the mid-1800s, early pro-life advocate Dr. Horatio Robinson Storer (1830-1922) convinced the American Medical Association to join him in campaigning for the outlawing of abortion nationwide. By the early 1900s, most states had banned abortion. By 1965, all 50 states had outlawed abortion, with some exceptions varying by state. The reasons vary; some writers argue that the laws were not aimed at preserving the lives of unborn children but rather were intended to protect women from unsafe abortion procedures or to allow the medical profession to take over responsibility for women’s health from untrained practitioners. Others say that pro-life concerns were already prevalent and were a major influence behind the efforts to ban abortion.

Federal action on abortion didn’t occur until Roe v. Wade, which declared most state anti-abortion laws unconstitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court’s 7-2 decision, handed down in 1973, established rules based on a pregnancy trimester framework, banning legislative interference in the first trimester of pregnancy (0-12 weeks), allowing states to regulate abortion during the second trimester (weeks 13-28) “in ways that are reasonably related to maternal health,” and allowing a state to “regulate, and even proscribe” abortion during the third trimester (weeks 29-40) “in promoting its interest in the potentiality of human life,” unless an abortion is required to preserve the life or health of the mother. The decision also allowed states to prohibit abortions performed by anyone who is not a state-licensed physician.

Immediately following Roe v. Wade, pro-life proponents pushed for federal legislation that would restrict abortion and at times succeeded. The Hyde Amendment, passed in 1976, ended Medicaid funding for abortions. In 2003, the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act was enacted. It banned physicians from providing intact dilation and extraction (also called a “partial-birth” abortion outside of the medical profession), a lateterm (after 21 weeks gestation) method, which accounted for 0.17 percent of abortion procedures in 2000. The act defines a “partial-birth abortion” as “an abortion in which the provider deliberately and intentionally vaginally delivers a living fetus until … the entire fetal head is outside the body of the mother, or… any part of the fetal trunk past the navel is outside the body of the mother, for the purpose of performing an overt act that the person knows will kill the partially delivered living fetus.”

State restrictions on abortion access increased sharply after the 2010 midterm elections, in which Republicans gained at least 675 state legislative seats, the biggest gain made by any party in state legislatures since 1938. Between Roe v. Wade and Dec. 31, 2021, 1,338 new abortion restrictions were passed by states. About 44 percent of those were passed after 2011, and the most (108) were passed in 2021.

On June 24, 2022, the conservative-leaning U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey in a 6-3 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, eliminating the federal constitutional right to abortion. The decision immediately uprooted the lives of millions of women, mainly black and poor and notably in Southern and Midwestern states, who suddenly found themselves without access to an abortion, even if it was to save their lives or if the pregnancy resulted from rape or incest, even of a minor.

BAVUAL presents the following two sides to the abortion debate: