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Abortion Ethics Essay

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The argument of abortion has been raging since the Supreme Court case, Roe vs. Wade, in 1973. This court case has divided the country into two factions: pro-choice and pro-life. Pro-life advocates argue that abortions are murder and extreme levels of child abuse. While pro-choice advocates believe abortions are a justifiable means to end pregnancies. The pro-choice argument is that the fetus is not yet a human being and its rights should not override that of the mother’s. An importance on what defines a human is very important. Is a human the result of sperm fertilizing an egg? At this point of fertilization the human is composed of a single cell with a unique DNA structure. Killing this unique cell would be wrong, however does this …show more content…

Even if a fetus is defined as a human being because it has a potential life, if the fetus does not yet aspire to live. It is impossible to argue that the fetus values its future yet, so why should it have a right to it? It could be argued that as the child could not possibly survive independently of the mother, at least before approximately four months into the pregnancy, it is not yet an independent human being, but an attachment of the mother, therefore she should be allowed to terminate it, if this is what she wants to do to herself, as opposed to when the child is physically independent of the mother, when any potentially life ending action against it would be inflicted upon the child directly, not its mother (Kellough 35). Based on the view that the fetus is already a small baby, some extreme anti-abortionists would maintain that abortion is impermissible even to save the mothers life. The rationale behind this view would be that the child is innocent, and killing the child would be active, on the other hand, letting the mother die would be passive. This introduces two new concepts, the first being the mother’s rights in competition to those of the fetus and the second being the question of innocence and how we would define this (Langley). The majority of abortions, however, are not performed in the interests of saving the mothers life, but to deter inconvenience and difficulty on either her part, or

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