Pro-Choice Abortion Argument PDF

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Professor HonigsbergPro-Choice Abortion Argument Although many women in the United States have an abortion every year, the topic is still widely debated between people who are pro-choice and people who are pro-life. In this paper, I will take the pro-choice stance by talking about how abortion shoul...

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Professor Honigsberg Pro-Choice Abortion Argument Although many women in the United States have an abortion every year, the topic is still widely debated between people who are pro-choice and people who are pro-life. In this paper, I will take the pro-choice stance by talking about how abortion should be entirely up to the woman who is carrying the baby and no one else. I think that anyone who prevents a woman from or forces a woman to have an abortion is violating her patient autonomy as well as her inherent right to body sovereignty. I will explain my position by talking about the concepts of ontological rights, patient autonomy, and equality between females and males in that they are made of the same material and come from the same source. One reason why abortion should be allowed for any woman who wants one is because of the negative effects it may have on the unwanted child if it is carried to term. Ruth DixonMueller in the book Abortion & Common Sense talks about a fascinating study done in Prague between 1961 and 1963 on mothers who were twice denied permission to get an abortion. The government rejected these women because they deemed their reasons behind wanting to terminate their pregnancies as insufficient, thus displaying egotism as they showed that they only cared about being in control rather than listening to the needs of their female citizens and respecting their ontological right to body sovereignty. The babies the government forced these women to keep ended up being neglected, with investigators finding that they “were breastfed for shorter periods or not nursed at all,” and that they “were more likely than the accepted children to have serious physical illnesses, to be maladjusted as preschoolers, to be described as difficult by their mothers, to be rejected by friends and teachers and to perform poorly in school.” These difficulties only increased for the children as they aged, and the study found that

by the time they were in their twenties, they “had fewer friends, were more dissatisfied with their jobs and life in general, and had more personal and social problems.” 1 This study clearly produced eye-opening results, and strongly proves why women should not be denied abortions if they want one. The woman who is carrying the child knows more than anyone else if she will be able to handle the emotional, financial, and physiological strain that comes with raising a child, and if she deems that she will not be able to, then the government should not get in the way of that. Otherwise, the mother might show the baby a “lack of interest and concern that results in the psychological deprivation of the child,” 2 which will likely lead to the child having a very low quality of life, one that they may deem as being worse than having no life at all. This case of the government forcing the women to keep their babies against their will is also a violation of their inherent rights, as built into them for being human, and granted by God. Since these women were all human adults that were fully capable of making their own choices, it was ethically wrong for the government to deny them of their rights. The philosopher Kant would agree with this because he said that, “every person by virtue of his or her humanity has an inherent dignity. All persons, as rational creatures, are entitled to respect, not only from others but from themselves as well” (Degrazia 18). So clearly, the government should respect the inherent rights women have in doing what they will with their bodies, and when they do not respect these rights, it causes harm to both the mother and the child. Human rights are rights for a reason. Another reason why a woman should absolutely be able to have an abortion if she so chooses is that women who have abortions report feeling a new sense of control over their lives, as well as an enhanced self-image and greater self-esteem. Patricia Lunneborg writes that one

1 Dixon-Mueller, Ruth. Abortion & Common Sense. Xlibris Corporation, 2002, pp. 127-128. 2 Dixon-Mueller, Ruth. Abortion & Common Sense. Xlibris Corporation, 2002, p. 128.

woman she interviewed “learned a certain kind of self-reliance” because it was the first thing that happened to her that she “had to go through completely alone” and the “first time that she really had to stand up for herself.” 3 Another woman that she interviewed expressed similar sentiments, saying that having an abortion made her realize that “I was controlling my future and not letting other people control it for me,” and that it made her see that she was highly “capable of making other decisions.” 4 Clearly, many women report feeling empowered after having their abortions in that they gain a new sense of control and self-worth, and are exercising their inherent rights to body sovereignty, which they are born with because they are human and because “God, the supreme lawmaker, enacted human rights.” 5 This is contrary to what the media would like us to believe, as they perpetuate the myth that most women wind up regretting their decisions to abort their babies for their whole life. Ruth Dixon-Mueller goes into a great explanation as to why this myth is so popular, saying that the cases the now-infamous and widely discredited studies from the 1950s and 1960s highlighted were picked because “they revealed interesting psychological disturbances” that were not seen in most women, and that the methods the interviewers used at the time were faulty in that they only asked women what their feelings were immediately after the operation, phrased their questions in vague terms, or presented “a disease-oriented bias toward describing negative symptoms” 6 while refusing to acknowledge any of the positive symptoms. So clearly, these studies were faulty and therefore prevented true patient autonomy with their manipulative methods. The researchers were pretending to be utilitarian by acting like they cared for the well-being of the women, when in reality they were manipulating the women 3 Lunneborg, Patricia. Abortion: A Positive Decision. Bergin & Garvey, 1992, p. 93. 4 Lunneborg, Patricia. Abortion: A Positive Decision. Bergin & Garvey, 1992, p. 94. 5 Nickel, James. "Human Rights." The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2019 Edition). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rights-human/#ExisGrouHumaRigh.

6 Dixon-Mueller, Ruth. Abortion & Common Sense. Xlibris Corporation, 2002, p. 112.

into expressing their negative emotions about their abortions in order to prove a point. They did not give the patients informed consent as to what their true intentions were by performing the study, and did not phrase their questions in an objective way to get the most accurate results. These unethical studies that had so many violations ultimately failed to show the accepted research outcome of the ethical studies of today, which is that “very few women express feelings of guilt or self-reproach” 7 after getting their abortions, and actually feel a sense of power from their decisions instead. Along with feeling powerful and confident, many women who get abortions also report feeling relieved. Despite the popular myth that women who undergo abortions end up feeling guilty or traumatized, Patricia Lunneborg writes in her book Abortion: A Positive Decision that more often than not, women feel relief. She talks about one study done in northern California which asked women how they felt about their abortions, and found that at the top of “both the recalled and current lists was relief.” Although it found that in the time immediately after the abortion that this “relief was sometimes mixed with nervousness, guilt, and confusion,” in the months after, “those feelings had diminished” and turned into overall “relief and satisfaction.” 8 So clearly, women who have had abortions report not regretting them in the long run, proving once again that the government should trust a woman that says that she wants an abortion, because only she knows if she will not be able to handle a baby. Preventing a woman from having an abortion will only harm her and the baby in the long run, and deprive her of the ability to do what she wills as part of her inherent rights to body sovereingty. Rights like body sovereignty are built into us because we are human, and God made us humans to have rights. Kant would agree with this as his deontology, explained by DeGrazia, says that “each of us

7 Dixon-Mueller, Ruth. Abortion & Common Sense. Xlibris Corporation, 2002, p. 113. 8 Lunneborg, Patricia. Abortion: A Positive Decision. Bergin & Garvey, 1992, p. 92.

recognizes the rightful authority of other persons (as rational beings) to conduct their individual lives as they see fit” (DeGrazia, 19). With those rights, however, come responsibilities, or duties, to humanity. According to Kant's categorical imperative, it is our duty to “Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law” (DeGrazia, 19). This has often been compared to the Golden Rule, which says that people should only do to others what they would want to be done onto themselves, and shows how we as humans cannot overstep boundaries and infringe on the rights of other people, further proving how wrong it is for people to decide if other people get to have an abortion, especially since those same people would not want their own rights being infringed upon. So clearly, human beings have intrinsic rights like body sovereignty because they are human, proving my point that if a woman wants to have an abortion, she should be able to have one. Just as I have talked about how a woman should be able to terminate her pregnancy if she wants to, I also believe that a woman should not be forced to have an abortion if she does not want one. My case study focuses on this issue as the patient we interviewed was coerced, or forced, into getting an abortion by her family members because they believed that since she was only 18 and already had a child, she would not be able to handle another one. This is just as much of a violation of the patient’s ontological rights and autonomy as it would be to prevent her from having an abortion, because in both cases they are going against what the woman wants to do with her own body. We know that women have these ontological rights such as body sovereignty and autonomy because they are human beings, and that these rights are given to us by God. This case is also going against the idea that women and men are equal, which we know is true in part because of Aristotle’s material and efficient causes. The material cause says that all humans are equal because they are made of the same material, and the efficient cause says that

all humans are equal because they come from the same source. My case study violates this idea because my case subject told us that she was forced to drop out of her high school and move to a pregnancy school when she became pregnant, but her boyfriend was allowed to remain at school. This case is obviously completely unfair and violates ethics in so many ways, but it just goes to show how important it is for women to be able to make their own decisions about their own bodies, the way men are able to. Additionally, many women who are denied abortions from the government end up getting abortions illegally, from places that are not hygienic and could cause these women a lot of harm. Conservatives, the same people who are so adamant about not making it more difficult to buy guns because those same people ‘will just get a gun illegally!’ are the ones screaming from the rooftops that it should be more difficult for women to have abortions, even though they know it will cause more women to get abortions unsafely and illegally. There are many horrifying tales from the 1950s and 1960s of the “tens of thousands of women every year [who] needed emergency medical attention because of illegal abortion.” 9 One patient was described as “extremely pale, cold, and covered with beads of perspiration… [Her] vagina was filled with clots of blood” after taking a faulty abortion pill. Another woman was described as “taking ergotrate, then castor oil, then squatting in scalding hot water, then drinking Everclear oil” and when these tactics failed her, “she hammered at her stomach with a meat pulverizer before going to an illegal abortionist.” 10 Other women having been “injected with lye” would rush into the hospital in need of medical help. Clearly, these cases are all very terrifying and show how detrimental illegal abortion was to women all over the country. While women today would probably not do things like hammer their stomachs if they were not allowed to get an abortion, 9 Reagen, Leslie. When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States. London, University of California Press, pp. 210-211. 10 Reagen, Leslie. When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States. London, University of California Press, p. 209.

they would still go to abortionists who might be unsterilized, or try to induce abortion on their own despite having little proper medical knowledge. This would cause a large increase in maternal mortality, as it did in New York City in the 1960s, when “abortion-related deaths accounted for nearly half, or 42.1 percent, of total maternal morality.” 11 All of this just proves that the government should not try to be tyrannical by overstepping a woman’s inherent right to choose what she wants to do with her own body, the right being built into her due to the fact that she is a person, and “all people are born with rights” which are given by “God, the supreme lawmaker.”12 This tyranny on the part of the government only causes more harm than good for women under the guise of pretending to be utilitarian. Women are going to continue getting abortions whether it is legal or not, so if the government were truly utilitarian, it would recognize this and stop having the egotistic debates it does about why there should be limits on abortion. In conclusion, abortion is a fundamental right that women have as the ones who are carrying the babies, and the government should not try to overstep that right, for if they do, it may cause the unwanted child psychological deprivation from the mother as well as make them be born into the unfortunate social, political, or economic circumstances their mothers wanted to protect them from. Depriving women of the right to get an abortion will also cause more of them to get illegal abortions, which are often dangerous and can lead to them getting severely hurt. However, not denying women their body sovereignty will allow them to feel in control of their lives, as well as relief that they do not have to raise a child they never wanted to. It is fundamental that this respect for women’s rights occurs, and this idea is supported by a host of

11 Reagen, Leslie. When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States. London, University of California Press, p. 214. 12 Nickel, James. "Human Rights." The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2019 Edition). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rightshuman/#ExisGrouHumaRigh.

well-respected philosophers, including Kant, Judith Jarvis Thomson, and Aristotle, making the argument for pro-choice policies all the more strong.

Works Cited Boonin, David. A Defense of Abortion. Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 146.

Cottingham, John. Western Philosophy. Blackwell Publishing, 2008, pp. 592-593. DeGrazia, David. Biomedical Ethics. McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2010, pp. 18-19. Dixon-Mueller, Ruth. Abortion & Common Sense. Xlibris Corporation, 2002, pp. 112-128. Gordon, John-Stewart. “Abortion.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://www.iep.utm.edu/abortion/. Lunneborg, Patricia. Abortion: A Positive Decision. Bergin & Garvey, 1992, pp. 92-94. Nickel, James. "Human Rights." The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2019 Edition). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rights-human/#ExisGrouHumaRigh. Reagen, Leslie. When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States. London, University of California Press, pp. 209-214....