FREE ESSAY ON ABORTION

ABORTION

Almost half of American women have terminated at least one pregnancy, and millions more
Americans of both sexes have helped them, as partners, parents, health-care workers,
counselors, friends. Collectively, it would seem, Americans have quite a bit of knowledge
and experience of abortion. Yet the debate over legal abortion is curiously abstract: we
might be discussing brain transplants. 
Farfetched analogies abound: abortion is like the Holocaust, or slavery; denial of
abortion is like forcing a person to spend nine months intravenously hooked up to a
medically endangered stranger who happens to be a famous violinist. It sometimes seems
that the further abortion is removed from the actual lives and circumstances of real
girls and women, the more interesting it becomes to talk about.
Opponents often argue as if the widespread use of abortion were a modern innovation, the
consequence of some aspect of contemporary life of which they disapprove (feminism,
promiscuity, consumerism, Godlessness, permissiveness, individualism), and as if making
it illegal would make it go away. What if none of this is true?
Historical advertisements: The Granger Collection, New York. 
When Abortion Was a Crime, Leslie J. Reagan demonstrates that abortion has been a common
procedure -- part of life -- in America since the eighteenth century, both during the
slightly more than half of our history as a nation when it has been legal and during the
slightly less than half when it was not. 
The first statutes regulating abortion, passed in the 1820s and 1830s, were actually
poison-control laws: the sale of commercial abortifacients was banned, but abortion per
se was not. The laws made little difference. By the 1840s the abortion business --
including the sale of illegal drugs, which were widely advertised in the popular press --
was booming. 
In one of the many curious twists that mark the history of abortion, the campaign to
criminalize it was waged by the same professional group that, a century later, would play
an important role in legalization: physicians. The American Medical Association's crusade
against abortion was partly a professional move, to establish the supremacy of regular
physicians over midwives and homeopaths. 
The physician and anti-abortion leader Horatio R. Storer asked in 1868. This is a
question our women must answer; upon their loins depends the future destiny of the
nation. (It should be mentioned that the nineteenth-century women's movement also opposed
abortion, having pinned its hopes on voluntary motherhood -- the right of wives to
control the frequency and timing of sex with their husbands.)
Nonetheless, having achieved their legal goal, many doctors -- including prominent
members of the AMA -- went right on providing abortions. 
women were often able to make doctors listen to their needs and even lower their fees.
And because, in the era before the widespread use of hospitals, women chose the doctors
who would attend their whole families through many lucrative illnesses, medical men had
self-interest as well as compassion for a motive. 
Thus in an 1888 expose undercover reporters for the Chicago Times obtained an abortion
referral from no less a personage than the head of the Chicago Medical Society. 
Unless a woman died, doctors were rarely arrested and even more rarely convicted. Even
midwives -- whom doctors continued to try to drive out of business by portraying them,
unfairly, as dangerous abortion quacks -- practiced largely unmolested. 
What was the point, then, of making abortion a crime? Reagan argues that its main effect
was to expose and humiliate women caught in raids on abortion clinics or brought to the
hospital with abortion complications, and thereby send a message to all women about the
possible consequences of flouting official gender norms.
Publicity -- the forced disclosure of sexual secrets before the authorities -- was itself
the punishment. Reagan's discussion of dying declarations makes particularly chilling
reading: because the words of the dying are legally admissible in court, women on their
deathbeds were informed by police or doctors of their imminent demise and harassed until
they admitted to their abortions and named the people connected with them -- including,
if the woman was unwed, the man responsible for the pregnancy
Unsurprisingly, the Depression, during which women stood to lose their jobs if they
married or had a child, saw a big surge in the abortion rate. 
Well-connected white women with private health insurance were sometimes able to obtain
therapeutic abortions, a never-defined category that remained legal throughout the epoch
of illegal abortion. 
Even for the privileged, though, access to safe abortion narrowed throughout the fifties,
as doctors, fearful of being prosecuted in a repressive political climate for
interpreting therapeutic abortion too broadly, set up hospital committees to rule on
abortion requests. Some committees were more compassionate than others.
Moderate reforms had already been tried: twelve states permitted abortion in instances of
rape, incest, danger to physical or mental health, or fetal defect, but since most women,
as always, sought abortions for economic, social, or personal reasons, illegal abortion
continued to thrive 
Legalizing abortion was a public-health triumph that for pregnant women ranked with the
advent of antisepsis and antibiotics. 
Anti-abortion zealots have committed arson, assault, and murder in their campaign against
abortion clinics. 
Similarly, the general lack of enthusiasm for prosecuting those who perform abortions and
the almost total failure to prosecute and jail women for having them suggest that
whatever Americans may consider abortion to be, it isn't baby killing, a crime our courts
have always punished quite severely.
it seems absurd to suggest that the overburdened mothers, desperate young girls, and
precariously employed working women who populate these pages risked public humiliation,
injury, and death for mere convenience, much less out of secular humanism or a Lockean
notion of property rights in their bodies. It's even more preposterous -- not to mention
insulting -- to see them as standing in relation to their fetuses as a slaveowner to a
slave or a Nazi to a Jew.
Reagan suggests that the abortion debate is really an ideological struggle over the
position of women. How much right should they have to consult their own needs, interests,
and well-being with respect to childbearing or anything else? 
Arguments
Abortion as philosophical puzzle and moral conundrum is all very well, but what about
abortion as a real-life social practice?
Since the abortion debate is, theoretically at least, aimed at shaping social policy,
isn't it important to look at abortion empirically and historically? 
Historical advertisements: The Granger Collection, New York.
Copyright ? 1997 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; May 1997; Abortion in American History; Volume 279, No. 5; pages
111-115.
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/97may/abortion.htm
May 11th, 2000
A fetus is not a person and not the subject of an indictment for manslaughter, Boston's
Superior Court Judge James P. McGuire told the jury.
I will continue to do abortions. They are a woman's right, he said after his conviction,
Women since they've been on this earth have been making that choice, whether they want to
carry that baby or not....The only humane thing we can do is make sure that when they
make that choice they have the opportunity to make it under the best conditions
possible.
Copyright ? 1975 by Seth Mydans. All rights reserved. 
http://www.theatantic/politics/abortion/myda.htm
May 11th, 2000
At the same time, there begins to appear on the part of some an alarming readiness to
subordinate rights of freedom of choice in the area of human reproduction to governmental
coercion.
Notwithstanding all this, we continue to maintain strict antiabortion laws on the books
of at least four fifths of our states, denying freedom of choice to women and physicians
and compelling the unwilling to bear the unwanted. 
Since, however, abortions are still so difficult to obtain, we force the birth of
millions more unwanted children every year. 
to cut down on population growth we should make abortion easy and safe while we continue
to develop other and more satisfactory methods of family limitation.
There is no perfect contraceptive. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration reports that the
intrauterine devices, one of the most effective contraceptives available today, have a
failure rate of 1.5 to 3%. This means that if all married women in the United States
could and did use these contraceptives, there would still be about 350,000 to 700,000
unwanted pregnancies a year among married women alone. Even sterilization is not a 100%
effective method of contraception; some operations fail. Therefore, in order to insure a
complete and thorough birth control program, abortion must be made available as a legal
right to all women who request it.
The situation is today reversed; abortion under modern hospital conditions is safer than
childbirth. 
Though the population experts have not yet aligned themselves on the side of abortion-law
reform, something is beginning to happen. Seven states--Arkansas, California, Colorado,
Georgia, Maryland, New Mexico, and North Carolina--have amended their laws to permit
abortion not only to save life but also to protect the health, mental and physical, of
the mother, in cases of rape and incest, and to avert the birth of defective offspring 
The 8000 to 10,000 in-hospital abortions contrast, of course, with the estimated one
million performed outside hospitals annually. Probably not much more than one half of
these are performed by doctors; the rest by the kindly neighbor, the close friend, or the
woman herself. Generally speaking, the laws do not distinguish in their prohibitions of
abortions between doctors and nondoctors. Moreover, the out-of-hospital abortions
performed by doctors are obtained by the same group which accounts for the bulk of the
in-hospital abortions: the middle- and upper-income white woman who can afford the
hundreds or thousands charged for expert medical service outside the law. And these are
the same women who can afford to go to Japan, Sweden, England, or one of the Iron Curtain
countries where abortions are legal and where they typically cost something between $10
and $25.
But most of the old laws on abortion remain unchanged on the statute books. In a few
states, like Connecticut or Missouri, the law says that the abortion may be performed to
save the life of the child as well as that of the mother, although no one is sure what
this means. As a matter of fact, no one knows what the laws which permit abortion to save
the life of the mother mean. 
In order that a physician may best serve his patients he is expected to exalt the
standards of his profession and to extend its sphere of usefulness.
Copyright ? 1969 by Harriet Pilpel. All rights reserved. 
http://www.theatantic/politics/abortion/pilp.htm
Published FridayMarch 31, 2000
White House Seeks to Join Carhart Case
Washington (AP) - The Clinton administration is asking the Supreme Court to let it join a
Nebraska doctor's fight against a state abortion law.
Justice Department lawyers asked the nation's highest court this week to let them
participate when the Nebraska case is argued before the justices the week of April 24.
They said the law violates some women's constitutional right to end their pregnancies.
The court's decision in the case may determine the fate of 30 states' bans on the
late-term procedure opponents call partial-birth abortion and which is known medically as
intact dilation and extraction.
President Clinton twice has vetoed a federal ban enacted by Congress.
The court has not yet said whether it will let the administration participate in the
argument, but in a friend-of-the-court brief made public Thursday government lawyers
called the Nebraska law unconstitutional for three reasons.
The brief says the law challenged by Bellevue doctor LeRoy Carhart is written so broadly
that it could be enforced against more than one abortion procedure and is too vague to
let doctors know just what abortion techniques are outlawed.
Even if the law is limited to a single procedure, the brief says, it unduly burdens a
woman's right to abortion because it fails to provide an exception to preserve the
pregnant woman's health. The only exception to Nebraska's ban is if the outlawed
procedure is necessary to save a woman's life.
The statute therefore prohibits the . . . method even when a physician concludes that
that method is best suited to preserve the health of a particular woman, the brief says.
The ban therefore forces at least some pregnant women to forgo a safer abortion method
for one that would compromise their health.
The surgical procedure involves partly extracting a fetus, legs first, then cutting the
skull and draining it to allow full removal from the uterus.
Abortion-rights advocates say the court's decision could broadly safeguard or
dramatically erode abortion rights, depending on what state legislatures can consider
when regulating abortions.
A federal appeals court struck down the Nebraska law along with Iowa and Arkansas laws.
But nearly identical laws in Illinois and Wisconsin were up-held by another federal
appeals court.
Copyright 2000 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
http://www.abortionclinics.org/nebraska.htm
Jan. 22, 1998, marked the 25th anniversary of the landmark decision Roe v. Wade. The U.S.
Supreme Court ruling, of course, gave women the legal right to have an abortion. 
Poll results: 8,885 people voted 1. Should abortion be legal? 77% yes22% no 1% don't know
2. Will Roe v. Wade be overturned in your lifetime? 13% yes 69% no 18% don't know 3. Have
you or has anyone you know had an abortion? 86% yes 10% no 4% don't know 
Poll date: Jan. 18, 1998 
Copyright ? 1995-2000 Women.com Networks. All rights reserved. 
http://www.womanswire.com/backtalk/roewade.html
Abortion Coverage Leaves Women out of the Picture
By Tiffany Devitt 
For example, the Supreme Court decision that enabled states to require women under the
age of 18 to get parental consent before getting an abortion was widely covered. However,
while more than 1 million teenagers become pregnant each year, and thousands of them are
affected by state legislation requiring parental consent, reporters almost never sought
their reaction, covering the legal change without consulting anyone in the group that it
impacts. 
This graphic depicts the abortion debate as two hands tugging at a rag doll-- suggesting
that the debate is about an unborn child rather than about women's rights 
http://www.fair.org/extra/best-of-extra/abortion-coverage.html
Bibliography
http://www.womanswire.com/backtalk/roewade.html
http://www.abortionclinics.org/nebraska.htm
http://www.womanswire.com/backtalk/roewade.html
http://www.fair.org/extra/best-of-extra/abortion-coverage.html