Abortion Rights: Mother, Doctor, or Government?
Over forty million people worldwide choose to have an abortion, over one million of which are in the United States. Now the question is, should the decision for abortion be up to mothers, the doctors, or the government? People who are anti-choice think that abortion should be outlawed completely. People who are pro-choice believe that it’s the mother’s decision on what to do with hers her child’s life. And some people feel it should be up to the doctor if the pregnancy may cause health risks to the mother.
Abortions have been performed for thousands of years, even before the Roe vs. Wade when abortion was legalized.
The Roe vs. Wade case would change abortion laws making abortion legal in the United States during the first trimester of pregnancy. After the first trimester abortion may only be performed if health risks are involved to the mother. Before this case hit the Supreme Court floors abortion was illegal in most states. This case was decided primarily on the ninth amendment.
The ninth amendment reads, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people”. The ninth amendment is on modern day issues such as abortion, the right to die, and gay rights. The ninth amendment, like the rest of the Bill of Rights, is to limit the power of the federal government, not the state government. The ninth amendment is sometimes called the forgotten amendment. An amendment that is almost equally forgotten is the fourteenth amendment.
The fourteenth amendment states, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws”. What does this mean? You are responsible to make decisions for yourself and you have the right to life, liberty and property as a citizen of the United States of America. The right to abortion is in the word liberty.
Some facts about abortion that you may not have known before from abortionno.org are:
· The number of abortions performed per year worldwide is approximately 42 Million
· The number of abortions performed worldwide per day is approximately 115,000
· 83% of all abortions are performed in developing countries.
· 17% occur in developed countries.
· 1.37 Million abortions occur in the United States as of 1996.
· Approximately 3,700 are preformed each day in the United States.
· 52% of women having abortions in the United States are under the age of twenty-five.
· Women aged 20-24 obtain 32% of all abortions.
· Teenagers obtain 20% of abortions.
· Girls under 15 accounts for 1.2% of abortions.
· White women obtain 60% of all abortions.
· Black women are more than three times more likely as white women to have an abortion.
· Hispanic women are about two times as likely as white women to have an abortion.
· About 64% of all abortions are performed on never married women.
· Married women account for approximately18% of all abortions.
· Divorced women obtain estimated 9% of all abortions.
· Women identifying themselves as Protestants obtain about 37% of all abortions in the U.S..
· Catholic women account for 31%
· Jewish women account for 1%.
· Women with no religious affiliation obtain 23% of all abortions.
· Women with family incomes less than $15,000 obtain 28% of all abortions.
· Women with family incomes between $15,000 and $29,999 obtain 19% of all abortions.
· Women with family incomes between $30,000 and $59,999 obtain 38% of all abortions.
· Women with family incomes over $60,000 obtain 13% of all abortions performed.
· 1% of all abortions occur because of rape or incest.
· 6% of abortions occur because of potential health problems regarding either the mother or child.
· 93% of all abortions occur for social reasons.
· 52% of all abortions occur before the 9th week of pregnancy.
· 25% of all abortions happen between the 9th and 10th week.
· 12% of all abortions happen between the 11th and 12th week.
· 6% of all abortions happen between the 13th and 15th week.
· 4% of all abortions happen between the 16th & 20th week.
· 1% of all abortions happen after the 20th week of pregnancy.
· An estimated 43% of all women will have at least 1 abortion by the time they are 45 years old.
· 47% of all abortions are performed on women who have had at least one previous abortion.
Abortion has been an argument for thousands of years now. It’s legal now but there is still debate. But who should be responsible for abortion: the mother, the doctors, or the government? One percent of all abortions occur because of rape or incest. Six percent of abortions occur because of potential health problems regarding either the mother or child. And 93% of all abortions occur for social reasons. If it were up to mothers, as it is now, the facts above would remain the same. If it were up to the doctors only six percent of the abortions that occur today would happen. And if it were up to the government very few abortions would occur.
From the article below from newyorktimes.com, titled “The Issue of Abortion Returns to Center Stage in U.S. Politics”: written by Luisita L. Torregrosa, you can see that abortion is a subject that has been heavily debated on worldwide for many years.
“Abortion, a topic that provokes little political debate in Europe, has re-emerged as a burning hot issue in United States politics, stirring up the bitter and sometimes violent discussion that has been raging for decades between anti-abortion forces and supporters of abortion rights.
Caught up in the debate between conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats are women and their reproductive systems.
This time it’s newly installed Republicans in Congress, winners of the 2010 midterm elections on the shoulders of energized grass-roots Tea Party activists, who are lending fresh impetus to the anti-abortion campaign during the arguments over the size, shape and content of the United States’ budget.
With no intention to consider raising taxes to increase revenue, the Republicans are determined to cut back social programs linked to Democratic Party policies, in education, energy and health care. Few of those programs are as odious to conservative hard-liners as Planned Parenthood, which they see as an abortion machine being fed by the federal Treasury.
Seizing an opportunity to appeal to their base, conservative Republicans marked Planned Parenthood for extinction during the budget debates. They won the vote in the House of Representatives last week but lost on Saturday in the Democrat run Senate.
In the run up to the votes in Congress, prominent Republicans lost no opportunity to demonize Planned Parenthood. Representative Michele Bachmann, the Minnesota Republican who is a likely presidential aspirant, described Planned Parenthood as “the LensCrafters of big abortion,” referring to the international retailer of prescription eyewear.
Planned Parenthood is not all that big. It receives about $363 million in federal government grants, according to its 2008 - 2009 reports. Not a cent of federal aid can be legally used for abortions, which make up only 3 percent of the organization’s services, which also include prescribing contraceptives and offering birth control advice, cancer screenings like mammograms and tests for sexually transmitted diseases.
Of course, the debate was not entirely about money, or even about the Republican drive to trim or overhaul major social programs to reduce the budget and the deficit.
The argument was also one of ideology, values and divisive, ingrained biases and principles that seemed dormant in the past few years, when the conservative focus was trained on fiscal and economic issues.
But with the Tea Party movement setting the direction, the abortion issue seems sure to resurface in the coming battle over the nation’s $14.2 trillion debt limit, which some Republicans oppose raising. It will also surface during negotiations on a $4 trillion debt-reduction package that are likely to figure prominently the rest of this year and into the 2012 presidential campaign.
So why all the anti Planned Parenthood fiery? Since abortion services make up a small fraction of its services, no federal funds are used for abortions, and 65 percent of Americans support continued federal funding for the organization, according to a CNN poll, why are conservatives up in arms about it?
“The fact is that 95 percent of the contraceptives on the market kill the baby in the womb,” Jim Sedlak of the American Life League told the New York Times columnist Gail Collins in a column last week. In other words, some in the anti-abortion camp regard birth control as a form of abortion. In their eyes, Planned Parenthood is in the abortion business.
One of the Senate’s most senior Republican members, Jon Kyl of Arizona, in a fit of anti-abortion fever, said on the Senate floor: “You don’t have to go to Planned Parenthood to get your cholesterol or your blood pressure checked. If you want an abortion, you go to Planned Parenthood, and that’s well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does.” He later retracted the statement.
On “Fox & Friends,” the Fox network’s morning show, a panelist trying to play down the importance of Planned Parenthood suggested that the majority of its services — counseling, breast exams and Pap smears — could be found at Walgreens, a national drugstore chain.
“Did you know you could get Pap smears at Walgreens?” joked Stephen Colbert on his late-night comedy show.
In New York, where Planned Parenthood was founded by Margaret Sanger in 1916, the abortion rate is among the highest in the United States: 40 percent of all pregnancies against 20 percent nationwide, according to New York City’s health department.
The statistics, and what they imply, serve to fuel both sides of the debate, prompting Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York to call for efforts to reduce the number of abortions in the city, which has averaged 90,000 a year. On the other side, feminist groups stand firm against any curbs on the city’s abortion-rights law, the most lenient in the United States.
But in the end, statistics, jokes and protests aside, it is the highly personal and emotional content of the abortion debate, not the theory or the numbers or the science, that fires it up and makes it such a potent and painful issue.”
From the article above you can see that there will always be dispute on the subject of abortion. People don’t only have a political opinion in what they believe is “right” but also a personal opinion. Religion plays a factor in what people believe when it comes to abortion, as does many other factors.
A timeline of reproductive rights from prochoice.org are:
“1821: Connecticut passes the first law in the United States barring abortions.
1860: Twenty states have laws limiting abortion.
1965: Griswold v. Connecticut Supreme Court decision strikes down a state law that prohibited giving married people information, instruction, or medical advice on contraception.
1967: Colorado is the first state to liberalize its abortion laws.
1970: Alaska, Hawaii, New York, and Washington liberalize abortion laws, making abortion available at the request of a woman and her doctor.
1972: Eisenstadt v. Baird Supreme Court decision establishes the right of unmarried people to use contraceptives.
1973: Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision strikes down state laws that made abortion illegal.
1976: Congress adopts the first Hyde Amendment barring the use of federal Medicaid funds to provide abortions to low-income women.
1977: A revised Hyde Amendment is passed allowing states to deny Medicaid funding except in cases of rape, incest, or "severe and long-lasting" damage to the woman's physical health.
1991: Rust v. Sullivan upholds the constitutionality of the 1988 "gag rule" which prohibits doctors and counselors at clinics, which receive federal funding from providing their patients, with information about and referrals for abortion.
1992: Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey reaffirms the "core" holdings of Roe that women have a right to abortion before fetal viability, but allows states to restrict abortion access so long as these restrictions do not impose an "undue burden" on women seeking abortions.
1994: Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act is passed by Congress with a large majority in response to the murder of Dr. David Gunn. The FACE Act forbids the use of "force, threat of force or physical obstruction" to prevent someone from providing or receiving reproductive health services. The law also provides for both criminal and civil penalties for those who break the law.
2000: Stenberg v. Carhart (Carhart I) rules that the Nebraska statute banning so-called "partial-birth abortion" is unconstitutional for two independent reasons: the statute lacks the necessary exception for preserving the health of the woman, and the definition of the targeted procedures is so broad as to prohibit abortions in the second trimester, thereby being an "undue burden" on women. This effectively invalidates 29 of 31 similar statewide bans.
2000: Food and Drug Administration approves mifepristone (RU-486) as an option in abortion care for very early pregnancy.
2003: A federal ban on abortion procedures is passed by Congress and signed into law by President Bush. The National Abortion Federation immediately challenges the law in court and is successful in blocking enforcement of the law for its members.
2004: NAF wins lawsuit against federal abortion ban. Justice Department appeals rulings by three trial courts against ban.”
You can see how the laws have changed through out the past almost two hundred years. It went from completely illegal to legal with doctor’s consent to completely legal even with out doctor consent. At one point in time they wouldn’t even give married couples information on pregnancy prevention. But as you can see, laws change.
In conclusion, who do you think should have the final decision on abortion: The mother, the doctor, or the government? If the government or doctors had control of when abortion could occur the abortion rate would drop greatly. Over forty million abortions a year world wide, that’s too many! Although abortion seems as if it will always be a debate among us.
