why should abortion be made legal essay

The Importance of Women’s Choice: Exploring the Reasons Why Abortion Should Be Legal Essay

Abortion has been a highly debated topic for many years, with varying opinions on the subject. While some argue that abortion should be illegal, others believe that women have the right to make decisions about their own bodies and that abortion should be legal. This issue is particularly relevant in today’s society, and if you want to have a boost in this topic, read this essay, written by a custom essay writing service .

In this why should abortion be made legal essay, a few reasons why abortion should be legal, including women’s right to choose, safety and regulation, the reduction of unwanted pregnancies, preventing children from being born into unsafe environments, and reducing stigma and shame.

Examining Whether Abortion Should Be Legal

Abortion is a highly controversial and emotional topic that has been debated for decades. The argument over whether or not it should be legal continues to spark intense discussions in politics, religion, and society. On the one hand, opponents of abortion argue that it is morally wrong and violates the sanctity of life. On the other hand, proponents of abortion argue that women have the right to make their own choices about their bodies and that banning abortion puts women’s health and safety at risk.

Women’s Right to Choose

Firstly, women have the right to make their own choices about their bodies. This includes the right to choose whether or not to have a child. By making abortion illegal, we are denying women this basic human right. Women should have the ability to make choices about their own lives, including having an abortion if they so choose.

Safety and Regulation

Secondly, banning abortion does not stop it from happening. When abortion is illegal, it is often done in unsafe and unsanitary conditions, leading to health complications and even death. Legalizing abortion would help to ensure that it is done in a safe and regulated environment, reducing the risk of complications.

Reduction of Unwanted Pregnancies

Thirdly, legalizing abortion can reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies. This is because women who have access to safe and legal abortions are more likely to use contraception to prevent future unwanted pregnancies. Additionally, by providing access to education about contraception and family planning, we can help reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies and the need for abortion.

Preventing Children from Being Born into Unsafe Environments

Fourthly, legalizing abortion can help reduce the number of children born into poverty or abusive households. Women who are unable to care for a child may choose to have an abortion rather than bring a child into an environment that is not safe or stable. By allowing women to make this choice, we can help prevent children from being born into situations where they may not receive the care and support they need.

Reducing Stigma and Shame

Legalizing abortion can help reduce the stigma and shame surrounding the topic. Women who have had abortions often face discrimination and judgment from others, which can lead to feelings of shame and isolation. By legalizing abortion, we can help reduce this stigma and create a more supportive and accepting environment for women who have made this choice.

The debate around whether abortion should be legal continues to be a divisive issue. However, the reasons why abortion should be legal are compelling and numerous. By legalizing abortion, we can ensure that women have access to safe and regulated procedures, reducing the risk of complications and even death. Additionally, women should have the right to make choices about their own bodies, which includes the right to choose whether or not to have a child. Legalizing abortion can also help reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies and prevent children from being born into unsafe or unstable environments. Finally, reducing the stigma and shame surrounding the topic can create a more supportive and accepting environment for women who have made this choice.

Ultimately, it is important to prioritize women’s health, safety, and autonomy in deciding whether abortion should be legal. By doing so, we can ensure that women are empowered to make decisions about their own bodies and lives.

Tips On Writing Why Abortion Should Be Legalized Essay

The topic of abortion is a sensitive and often controversial issue that affects women’s rights and autonomy. If you’re interested in advocating for women’s reproductive rights and want to write an essay on why abortion should be legalized, there are some important tips to keep in mind.

Conduct thorough Research

Before writing your argumentative essay about abortion, it is important to conduct research on the topic of abortion. This will help you understand the different arguments for and against abortion, and help you develop a more informed perspective on the issue.

Develop a Clear Thesis Statement

Your thesis statement should clearly state your position on the issue of whether abortion should be legalized. This will guide the rest of your should abortion be legal or illegal essay and ensure that you are making a clear and compelling argument.

Use Credible Sources

When making your argument, it is important to use credible sources to support your claims. This may include academic journals, news articles, and other reputable sources of information.

Address Counterarguments

When making your argument, it is important to consider counterarguments and address them in your should abortion be legal essay. This will help strengthen your argument and demonstrate that you have considered multiple perspectives on the issue.

Use Clear and Concise Language

To effectively communicate your argument, it is essential to use clear and concise language. Avoid using overly technical language or jargon that may be difficult for readers to understand.

Use Evidence to Support Your Claims

Whenever possible, use evidence to support your claims. This may include statistics, studies, or personal stories that help illustrate the impact of legalizing abortion.

Conclude with a Strong Statement

Your conclusion should summarize your argument and leave readers with a strong statement that reinforces your position on the issue. This may include a call to action or a final thought that highlights the importance of legalizing abortion.

When writing opinion essays such as “why abortion should be legalized”, all the above tips can help you a lot. By empowering women with the right to make decisions about their own bodies and promoting access to safe and legal abortion, we can create a more inclusive and just society for all.

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Pro and Con: Abortion

To access extended pro and con arguments, sources, and discussion questions about whether abortion should be legal, go to ProCon.org .

The debate over whether abortion should be a legal option has long divided people around the world. Split into two groups, pro-choice and pro-life, the two sides frequently clash in protests.

A June 2, 2022 Gallup poll , 55% of Americans identified as “pro-choice,” the highest percentage since 1995. 39% identified as “pro-life,” and 5% were neither or unsure. For the first time in the history of the poll question (since 2001), 52% of Americans believe abortion is morally acceptable. 38% believed the procedure to be morally wrong, and 10% answered that it depended on the situation or they were unsure.

Surgical abortion (aka suction curettage or vacuum curettage) is the most common type of abortion procedure. It involves using a suction device to remove the contents of a pregnant woman’s uterus. Surgical abortion performed later in pregnancy (after 12-16 weeks) is called D&E (dilation and evacuation). The second most common abortion procedure, a medical abortion (aka an “abortion pill”), involves taking medications, usually mifepristone and misoprostol (aka RU-486), within the first seven to nine weeks of pregnancy to induce an abortion. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that 67% of abortions performed in 2014 were performed at or less than eight weeks’ gestation, and 91.5% were performed at or less than 13 weeks’ gestation. 77.3% were performed by surgical procedure, while 22.6% were medical abortions. An abortion can cost from $500 to over $1,000 depending on where it is performed and how long into the pregnancy it is.

• Abortion is a safe medical procedure that protects lives.
• Abortion bans endangers healthcare for those not seeking abortions.
• Abortion bans deny bodily autonomy, creating wide-ranging repercussions.
• Life begins at conception, making abortion murder.
• Legal abortion promotes a culture in which life is disposable.
• Increased access to birth control, health insurance, and sexual education would make abortion unnecessary.

This article was published on June 24, 2022, at Britannica’s ProCon.org , a nonpartisan issue-information source.

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Why Abortion Should Be Legal

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Published: Mar 20, 2024

Words: 476 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

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Reproductive rights, health and safety, right to choose.

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As the Supreme Court considers Roe v. Wade, a look at how abortion became legal

Nina Totenberg

The future of abortion, always a contentious issue, is up at the Supreme Court on Dec. 1. Arguments are planned challenging Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey , the court's major decisions over the last half-century that guarantee a woman's right to an abortion nationwide. J. Scott Applewhite/AP hide caption

The future of abortion, always a contentious issue, is up at the Supreme Court on Dec. 1. Arguments are planned challenging Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey , the court's major decisions over the last half-century that guarantee a woman's right to an abortion nationwide.

For nearly a half-century, abortion has been a constitutional right in the United States. But this week, the U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments in a Mississippi case that directly challenges Roe v. Wade and subsequent decisions.

Those rulings consistently declared that a woman has a constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy in the first two trimesters of pregnancy when a fetus is unable to survive outside the womb. But with that abortion right now in doubt, it's worth looking back at its history.

Abortion did not become illegal in most states until the mid to late 1800s. But by the 1960s, abortion, like childbirth, had become a safe procedure when performed by a doctor, and women were entering the workforce in ever larger numbers.

Still, being pregnant out of wedlock was seen as scandalous, and women increasingly sought out abortions, even though they were illegal. What's more, to be pregnant often meant that women's educations were stunted, as were their chances for getting a good job. Because of these phenomena, illegal abortion began to skyrocket and became a public health problem. Estimates of numbers each year ranged from 200,000 to over a million, a range that was so wide precisely because illegal procedures often went undocumented.

At the time, young women could see the perils for themselves. Anyone who lived in a college dormitory back then might well have seen one or more women carried out of the dorm hemorrhaging from a botched illegal abortion.

George Frampton clerked for Justice Harry Blackmun the year that his boss authored Roe v. Wade , and he remembers that until Roe , "those abortions had to be obtained undercover if you had a sympathetic doctor" and you were "wealthy enough." But most abortions were illegal and mainly took place "in backrooms by abortion quacks" using "crude tools" and "no hygiene."

By the early to mid-1960s, Frampton notes, thousands of women in large cities were arriving at hospitals, bleeding and often maimed.

One woman, in an interview with NPR, recalled "the excruciatingly painful [illegal] procedure," describing it as "the equivalent of having a hot poker stuck up your uterus and scraping the walls." She remembered that the attendant had to "hold her down on the table."

The result, says Frampton, was that by the mid-1960s, a reform movement had begun, aimed at decriminalizing abortion and treating it more like other medical procedures. Driving the reform movement were doctors, who were concerned about the effect that illegal abortions were having on women's health. Soon, the American Law Institute — a highly respected group of lawyers, judges and scholars — published a model abortion reform law supported by major medical groups, including the American Medical Association.

Many states then began to loosen their abortion restrictions. Four states legalized abortion, and a dozen or so adopted some form of the model law, which permitted abortion in cases of rape, incest and fetal abnormality, as well as to save the life or health of the mother.

By the early 1970s, when nearly half the states had adopted reform laws, there was a small backlash. Still, as Frampton observes, "it wasn't a big political or ideological issue at all."

In fact, the justices in 1973 were mainly establishment conservatives. Six were Republican appointees, including the court's only Catholic. And five were generally conservative, as defined at the time, including four appointed by President Richard Nixon. Ultimately, the court voted 7-to-2 that abortion is a private matter to be decided by a woman during the first two trimesters of her pregnancy.

That framework has remained in place ever since, with the court repeatedly upholding that standard. In 1992, it reiterated the framework yet again, though it said that states could enact some limited restrictions — for example, a 24-hour waiting period — as long as the restrictions didn't impose an "undue burden" on a woman's right to abortion.

Frampton says that the court established the viability framework because of the medical consensus that a fetus could not survive outside the womb until the last trimester. He explains that "the justices thought that this was going to dispose of the constitutional issues about abortion forever."

Although many had thought that fetal viability might change substantially, that has not happened. But in the years that followed, the backlash to the court's abortion decisions grew louder and louder, until the Republican Party, which had earlier supported Roe , officially abandoned it in 1984.

Looking at the politicization of the Supreme Court nomination and confirmation process in recent years, one can't help but wonder whether Roe played a part in that polarization. What does Frampton think?

"I'm afraid," he concedes, "that analysis is absolutely spot on. I think they [the justices] saw it as a very important landmark constitutional decision but had no idea that it would become so politicized and so much a subject of turmoil."

Just why is abortion such a controversial issue in the United States but not in so many other countries where abortion is now legal? Florida State University law professor Mary Ziegler, author of Abortion and the Law in America , points out that in many countries, the abortion question has been resolved through democratic means — in some countries by national referendum, in others by parliamentary votes and, in some, by the courts. In most of those countries, however, abortions, with some exceptions, must be performed earlier, by week 12, 15 or 18.

But — and it is a big but — in most of those countries, unlike in the U.S., national health insurance guarantees easy access to abortions.

Lastly, Ziegler observes, "there are a lot of people in the United States who have a stake in our polarized politics. ... It's a way to raise money. It's a way to get people out to the polls."

And it's striking, she adds, how little our politics resemble what most people say they want. Public opinion polls consistently show that large majorities of Americans support the right to abortion in all or most cases. A poll conducted last May by the Pew Research Center found 6 in 10 Americans say that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. And a Washington Post -ABC poll conducted last month found that Americans by a roughly 2-to-1 margin say the Supreme Court should uphold its landmark Roe v. Wade decision.

But an NPR poll conducted in 2019 shows just how complex — and even contradictory — opinions are about abortion. The poll found that 77% of Americans support Roe . But that figure dropped to 34% in the second trimester. Other polls had significantly higher support for second trimester abortions. A Reuters poll pegged the figure at 47% in 2021. And an Associated Press poll found that 49% of poll respondents supported legal abortion for anyone who wants one "for any reason," while 50% believed that this should not be the case. And 86% said they would support abortion at any time during a pregnancy to protect the life or health of the woman.

All this would seem to suggest that there is overwhelming support for abortion rights earlier in pregnancy, but less support later in pregnancy, and overwhelming support for abortions at any time to protect the life or, importantly, the health of the mother. That, however, is not where the abortion debate is in the 25 or so states that have enacted very strict anti-abortion laws, including outright bans, in hopes that the Supreme Court will overturn Roe .

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Why Abortion Should Be Legal – Essay Writing Tips & Tricks

Table of Contents

The topic of abortion legalization or criminalization has been topical in many countries recently. Even though technology and progress are fast-moving forward, pro-life advocates continue insisting on the fact that women do not possess the right to kill their embryos.

Thus, with the debate going on across multiple domains, you can receive an assignment to compose an essay on abortion at a Law, Medicine, or Politics course.

The key topics considering in essays on abortion today include:

• Whether the unborn fetuses can be considered human beings with the right to protection of their life by law.
• At which term of pregnancy a fetus can already be considered a living human being.
• What legal exceptions should be set in place to regulate women’s right to abortion.
• What countries have already established successful legal precedents to regulate the issue.
• Arguments of pro-and anti-abortion legislation advocates.
• Arguments of women for and against the right to conduct abortion.

Whether you’re for or against abortion in this debate, you can face a situation in which you’ll need to debate your point. That situation is a home assignment to write a why abortion should be made legal essay. And if you’re confused about this task and don’t know how to perform it quickly and easily, we’re here to help you out.

Why Abortion Should Be Legal: Our Thoughts

Here are some ideas for why abortion should be made legal essay that our writing experts share with students needing help. You can borrow any of these themes and examine them in more depth in your argumentative essay about abortion.

• Women’s right to have or not to have children is violated with laws regulating abortion. Such laws can cause serious socio-demographic problems as teenage girls often get pregnant because of their ignorance of birth control methods or lack of essential sexual education. Depriving them of a chance for abortion can ruin their life and health.
• Biological research suggests that a human fetus is not a living organism at the first couple of weeks of its development, which can be aborted. Besides, women typically commit abortion at the early stages of pregnancy, knowing that aborting a child at a later term is a psychologically traumatic experience equaling murder.
• Sometimes, pregnancy results from a crime; some women get pregnant because of a traumatic rape experience. Thus, they are totally reluctant to have a child from a rapist who committed violence against them and caused severe physical and psychological damage.
• In the process of pregnancy development, genetic screening can reveal serious genetic disorders or risks for the fetus. Parents who are not ready to bear the burden of caring for the disabled child should have the right to terminate such a pregnancy. It’s not a violation of disabled people’s rights (as the disabled community tends to claim); it’s natural for a parent to wish to avoid giving birth to a child if they know they will doom that person to suffering.
• In countries where abortion is illegal, shady medical practices of illegal abortions are flourishing. Women are ready to pay huge money and undergo medical manipulations in non-sterile environments to terminate their pregnancies, which is a serious legal and medical issue.
• Women have the right to decide what to do with their bodies. If a woman doesn’t want to be pregnant and give birth to an unwanted child, she shouldn’t be urged by the law to go through this life-changing experience. Parenting should be a wanted, planned act so that children grow up in happy, welcoming families. Giving birth to an unwanted child may later lead to instances of home violence or abuse.

Any of these topics are suitable for why abortion should be made legal essay. We’ve just touched upon the theme broadly, outlining various ethical, medical, and legal issues surrounding this subject. You can take any perspective that speaks to you and develop it in more depth to craft a well-grounded essay to impress your tutor.

Pros and Cons of Abortion You Should Consider

When talking about abortion in academic works, students commonly face the challenge of evaluating the pros and cons of legalization. It’s a typical problem every researcher faces when dealing with evergreen debatable subjects, like marijuana and euthanasia legalization, ban on the death penalty and abortion, animal testing, etc.

Here are the key points you should include in your essay to show your competence in this topic.

Pros of Legal Ban on Abortion

• Women’s disability rates resulting from improper abortions will reduce.
• The post-abortion infertility rates will go down.
• Unborn children’s rights will be protected.
• The unethical practice of killing unborn children will be strictly regulated.
• A ban on abortions is compliant with Christian ethics.
• Birth control and sex education will be emphasized.

Cons of Legal Ban on Abortion

• Illegal abortions are likely to flourish.
• Raped women will have to undergo the trauma of giving birth to an unwanted child.
• Parents of children with severe genetic disorders will have to give birth to disabled children.
• The rate of abandoned children will rise because of unwanted infants’ abandonment in the birth hospitals.
• Many more families will become unhappier because of the economic and psychological burden of rearing unwanted children.
• Women will fight for their rights and feel the oppression of being not the masters of their bodies.

Follow Argumentative Articles on Abortion as Examples

Whenever you talk about sensitive subjects like abortion, the key to sounding competent and non-opinionated is to back your claims with reliable evidence.

In terms of abortion, there are hundreds of valuable sources written by competent professionals backing each side of the debate. Thus, to make your essay look professional and informed, you should first formulate your topic concisely and then conduct a library search for reliable evidence.

We recommend using professional databases for such search so that your arguments look convincing. It’s easy to say that you think that abortion should be made legal because it will be fair for women to make the final decision in this regard. But that argument is not enough for the readers to take your side.

Thus, you can follow this algorithm:

• Choose a perspective for your analysis (ethical, religious, political, medical).
• Find a database with credible academic sources in this area (e.g., for medical research, we strongly recommend using Google Scholar, CINAHL, or PubMed, while sources from HeinOnline or LOC can inform legal papers on abortion).
• Sort the sources you find by relevance to your argument and strength of argumentation, using only those that fit your content and support your point.
• It’s also vital to credit the other side of the debate (otherwise, you will sound biased). So, make sure to find sources supporting the opposite position as well, appealing to their arguments and rebating them in the process of your analysis.

Steps to Writing an Abortion Essay

Now, let’s proceed to the actual process of writing on abortion. As a rule, an essay should consist of three major parts – an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. Once you get to the chosen topic, we advise completing a pre-writing exercise: making an outline for your essay. As soon as you have a couple of credible sources at hand and want to outline your significant argumentation points, use a simple outline template to do so.

OUTLINE INTRODUCTION – broad introduction of the subject. Setting the context. A thesis statement. BODY PARAGRAPH #1 – argument #1 (topic sentence). Supporting evidence. A transition to the next point. PARAGRAPH #2 – argument #2 (topic sentence). Supporting evidence. A transition to the next point. PARAGRAPH #3 – argument #3 (topic sentence). Supporting evidence. A transition to the concluding section. CONCLUSION – summary of your key points and a reference to the broader significance of the subject.

Main Difficulties When Discussing an Abortion Topic

You should keep in mind that abortion is a sensitive topic that touches the deepest strings of people’s hearts for various reasons. Some women debate the ban of abortion because of their unfortunate juvenile experiences with abortion leaving them infertile. Others want abortion to be legal because of women’s moral, ethical, and legal right to decide what to do with their bodies and lives.

Thus, whenever you write an abortion essay, make sure to choose words appropriately, use delicate, non-judgmental phrases, and not accuse anyone of right or wrong decisions regarding abortion.

Any Questions?

Having any troubles with your why abortion should be made legal essay? No panic, as our experts are always on standby to help you out. We can write a well-structured, interesting paper on this subject to cover your back and avoid delays in-home task submission.

So, if you have little time for home tasks or simply don’t want to dig into books this weekend, you can delegate the assignment to us. Talk to our managers today, and they’ll assign a competent legal or medical writer to handle an essay on abortion for you with ease.

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Tips for Creating Impressive Persuasive Speeches on Abortion

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Ramapo College of New Jersey Home Page » Academics » SSHS » Ramapo Journal of Law & Society » Thesis » Why Women Should Make the Abortion Decision: Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t

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Why Women Should Make the Abortion Decision: Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t

Related resources.

• Law and Society Major
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( PDF ) (DOC) (JPG) September 17, 2020

Christina San Filippo [1]

As a woman in today’s society, a woman who has had life-altering decisions about her body made for her throughout her entire life, I want to call attention to other women who are just trying to make their own decisions about their own bodies.

With this work, I recognize that within society there is a split between those who support a woman’s choice to have an abortion, and those who do not. I argue that both the decisions, to have an abortion, as well as to carry a pregnancy to term, have consequences. These consequences can be physical, sociological, and/or psychological. Therefore, the decision should be left to individual women to decide which consequences they are able to bear. For this reason, access to safe, medical care regarding reproduction and abortion should be available to all women, across all states.

Initially, I will establish the foundational background on the legalization of abortion. It will begin in the early 1800s, a time where abortion before “quickening” was legal for women in the United States. However, as women began to die from abortion inducing drugs, and Dr. Horatio Storer teamed with the American Medical Association to begin the “crusade on abortion,” disdain for the procedure grew. Throughout the mid-to-late 1800s, states began passing legislation to ban the drugs used for abortions and, eventually, the procedure itself. Contraception was also federally outlawed with the Comstock Law of 1873. Almost 100 years later both became legalized again with the major Supreme Court cases Griswold v. Connecticut, Eisenstadt v. Baird, and Roe v. Wade.

This legalization has not come without obstacles, however. The second section of this work delves into the state barriers put on abortion. Although legal federally, state constitutions still allow for each state to put laws in place that restrict access to abortion, including zoning laws, mandatory counseling, mandatory waiting periods, and minor consent or notification. All of these barriers within states were upheld by the Supreme Court in the case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey. In addition to these ongoing issues in states, the current President proposed a domestic gag rule, and reinstated a global gag rule, that limits funding to abortion providers. This section will further discuss the specific details of the state laws regarding access to abortion, and the status of the issue of abortion within the current federal administration.

Thereafter, the physical, sociological, and/or psychological effects of access, or lack thereof, to abortion may have one women is considered. Reasons for having an abortion vary from financial instability to unstable relationships. Upon receiving one, there is mixed research on whether women suffer future physical, sociological, and/or psychological effects. A sad reality is that even if a woman wants an abortion and feels she is capable of handling these possible consequences, she may be unable to get one. Whether the reason be barriers related to geographic location or financial situation, being forced to carry an unwanted child may also bear physical, sociological, and/or psychological effects.

Finally, the analysis concludes that both having an abortion and not being able to have an abortion can have negative effects on a woman. These effects can be either physical, psychological, and/or sociological. Women are capable of making their own decisions, and this should include access to abortion.  

I. History of Abortion and Contraception Legalization

Today, it is easy to take certain things for granted. As people living in America, the land of the free, we do not take a second glance at some of the things we are able to do. Two of these things are the ability to receive educated medical advice on reproductive health from physicians, and the ability to get a safe and legal abortion. However, this was not always the case. At certain points in history, all things regarding contraception and abortion were outlawed in the US. Though we usually think of women’s reproductive health as happening chronologically – first contraception and then abortion – the attention to women’s bodies happened in the opposite order. Historically, abortion began to be regulated before contraception.

Legal Abortion Before “Quickening”

Before and during most of the 1800s, certain abortions were legal, and not uncommon. A woman was only allowed to seek an abortion before “quickening,” which was when she could feel the fetus moving. Before this, it was believed that human life did not exist. Surprisingly, even the Catholic Church shared this view, believing that abortions before quickening were “prior to ensoulment” (Ravitz, 2016). In society, early pregnancies that ended were not even considered abortions, but were rather seen as pregnancies that “slipped away” (Reagan, 2008, p. 8). At this time, conception was seen as something that created an imbalance within the body, due to the fact that it interrupted a woman’s menstruation cycle (Reagan, 2008, p. 8). The way abortions usually worked was that women would take certain drugs to induce abortions. If these drugs failed, a woman could then visit a medical practitioner for an actual procedure to be rid of the fetus (Ravitz, 2016). Abortions before quickening were seen as a way to “bring the body back into balance by restoring the flow,” which meant the returning of the menstrual cycle (Reagan, 2008, p. 8). It was a practice done openly and honestly for pregnant women at this time.  

Abortion Outlawed: The Beginning of the End

Although abortions done before quickening were legal, they were not entirely a safe practice. The drugs that women took to induce the abortions often ended in the death of the woman, rather than just the termination of the fetus. Due to this, states began passing statutes that controlled the sale of “abortifacient drugs” as a “poison control measures designed to protect pregnant women” (Reagan, 2008, p. 10). Each of these laws sought to punish whoever administered the drug, rather than the woman who received it (Mohr, 1979, p. 43). In 1821, Connecticut passed a statute outlawing the use of abortion inducing drugs, believing they were a threat to life by causing death by poisoning. However, the law was only applicable if the woman had already experienced quickening. It is important to note that the law was not focused on the actual act of abortion and did not even mention surgical abortions; the focus was on the drugs used for abortions. After this statute was passed in Connecticut, more states began to follow. Missouri in 1825, and then Illinois in 1827, also passed legislation outlawing the use of abortion inducing drugs in an attempt to avoid deaths by poisoning. However, both of these states did not mention quickening, and made the use of these drugs illegal at any point during a woman’s pregnancy (Mohr, 1979, pp. 22–26).

Within the next few years, several states also began passing legislation regarding abortion. However, these statutes focused more on the act of abortion, rather than the drugs that caused them. Similar to the anti-drug laws, these statutes also sought to punish the person who performed the abortion, not the woman who received it (Mohr, 1979, p. 43). In 1834, Ohio passed a law stating that “the death of either the mother or the fetus after quickening” is a felony (Mohr, 1979, p. 39). Missouri soon followed by revising their previous abortion law and making “the use of instruments to induce an abortion after quickening a crime equal to the use of poisonous substances after quickening” (Mohr, 1979, p. 40). In 1840, Maine made “attempted abortion of any woman ‘pregnant with child’ an offense, ‘whether such child be quick or not’ and regardless of what method was used” (Mohr, 1979, p. 41). This Maine offense was punishable by jailtime or a large fine. As states continued to pass anti-abortion legislation, certain groups rallied behind this new-found fight against abortion.  

American Medical Association (AMA) and Horatio Storer

Despite certain states passing laws prohibiting the sale of abortion inducing drugs, the nationwide business for them continued to grow. The drugs were openly discussed, even advertised in newspapers, and were readily available (Ravitz, 2016). A woman was able to purchase the drugs from physicians, pharmacists, or order them and have them delivered by mail (Reagan, 2008, p. 10). Along with the growth in popularity of these drugs came criticism.

In 1847, the American Medical Association was founded. The establishment of this Association was the beginning of the politicization of abortion. At this time period, when a woman and a man got married, “the husband assumed virtually all legal rights for the couple” (Primrose, 2012, p. 170). This was both a law, and a patriarchal viewpoint that was accepted within society. It was seen as the duty of women to bear children to their husbands. The American Medical Association asserted that abortions not only posed health risks to women, but also prevented wives from fulfilling this role in their marriage contract. At this time women were also seeking entry into Harvard Medical School, where many sought to pursue careers in gynecology and obstetrics. These career goals threatened the role of women as subjects of their husbands, and so created a kind of push-back by the American Medical Association (Ravitz, 2016).

American Medical Association Role in Outlawing Abortion

In 1857, the American Medical Association began focusing mainly on getting abortion to be outlawed, with Dr. Horatio Storer at the head of this crusade. On top of the previously mentioned patriarchal reasons pushing for this criminalization, a couple of other factors contributed. One was the fear of immigrants in the United States. Storer was one of many Americans who shared this fear, worrying that the nation would soon become out-populated by people of other ethnicities, leaving white people outnumbered. Another was the threat that licensed physicians felt from midwives and homeopaths, who they saw as their competition in the medical field. By outlawing abortion, this threat would be neutralized, and physicians would have power and control over practicing medicine. For these reasons, physicians supported Storer and the American Medical Association in the fight to outlaw abortion (Ravitz, 2016). Overall, Storer, backed by physicians around the nation, helped influence abortion laws by appealing to “a set of fears of white, native-born, male elites losing political power to immigrants and to women” (Reagan, 2008, p. 13). However, their anti-abortion campaign also had to try to reach women in America as well.

Dr. Horatio Storer was the son of David Humphreys Storer, a professor at Harvard Medical School in the field of Obstetrics and Medical Jurisprudence. David Storer argued that the only time an abortion was acceptable was if it was to save the life of the mother, and that a fetus becomes a human being as soon as the embryo enters the uterus. David’s son, Horatio, adopted this mentality and used it in his crusade against abortion. In 1866, he wrote a book entitled, Why Not? A Book for Every Woman , followed by Why Not? A Book for Every Man , which were widely distributed to female patients by their physicians. The books were an attempt to make women feel guilty for having abortions and convince men that they were equally guilty as the father of the unborn. Storer was smart enough to recognize that not all women may give in to arguments based on morals and guilt. For this reason, he “recommended that their physician readers appeal to women’s concerns about their own health as a way to persuade them to have their children” (Dyer, 2003). This ensured that the American Medical Association was fighting against abortion from all possible angles and viewpoints.

Anti-Abortion Laws Continue

With much help from the American Medical Association, the anti-abortion movement gained traction in the nation. This social shift towards the nonacceptance of abortion was reflected in laws passed by states at the time. Within the time period of 1860-1880, “the United States produced the most important burst of anti-abortion legislation in the nation’s history” (Mohr, 1979, p. 200). During these years, states passed “at least 40 anti-abortion [laws],” and “13 jurisdictions formally outlawed abortion for the first time” (Mohr, 1979, p. 200).

The first state to start this wave of legislation was Connecticut in 1860. The law contained four separate sections laying out all things that were now illegal regarding abortion. The first section discussed abortion in general, stating that the act was considered “a felony punishable by up to $1000 fine and up to five years in prison” (Mohr, 1979, p. 201). The second section stated that any accomplices of the person who performs the abortion is guilty of the crime as well. The third section said that the woman who receives the abortion is also guilty of the felony, even if she attempts one on herself. The fourth section discussed abortifacient information and materials, stating that the distribution of either was punishable by fines between $300 and $500 (Mohr, 1979, pp. 201–202). The contents within the third and fourth sections of this statute were things that had never been mentioned before in anti-abortion laws, and signified the “evolution of abortion policy” that was about to sweep the nation (Mohr, 1979, p. 201). This Connecticut law set the stage for other states, which began passing their own more intense abortion laws. Examples include “Colorado Territory and Nevada Territory in 1861, and Arizona Territory, Idaho Territory, and Montana Territory in 1864,” which each made abortion a punishable offense (Mohr, 1979, p. 202).

Contraception Outlawed: Comstock Law of 1873

In 1873, The American Medical Association gained a victory when the Comstock Law was passed. This statute, passed on March 2, 1873, banned both the importation and distribution of any information or drug that aimed towards the prevention of conception (Tone, 2000, p. 439). The law made it illegal to “mail contraceptives, any information about contraceptives, or any information about how to find contraceptives” (Primrose, 2012, p. 173). Congress was able to do this by “enacting the antiobscenity statute to end the ‘nefarious and diabolical traffic’ in ‘vile and immoral goods’ that purity reformers believed promoted sexual licentiousness” (Tone, 2000, p. 439). Simply put, the government banned birth control and any information related to birth control under the guise that both its availability and use would contribute to sexual promiscuity, making it obscene, and allowing it to fall under the purity laws. The penalty for anyone who was caught violating the Comstock Law was “one to ten years of hard labor, potentially in combination with a fine” (Primrose, 2012, pp. 173–174). After Congress enacted this law, twenty-four states passed their own state versions to affirm the federal law (Tone, 2000, p. 441). On top of these federal and state laws, the government also gave “the United States Postal Service authority to decide what was ‘lewd, lascivious, indecent, or obscene’” (Primrose, 2012, p. 174). This was based on the fact that the business of birth control relied heavily on interstate commerce (Tone, 2000, p. 441).

Despite the fact that birth control and all information regarding it was outlawed people did not stop having sexual intercourse. As expected, this resulted in unwanted pregnancies. Women in this position who still sought an abortion despite its illegality were forced to look elsewhere to receive the procedure, which many times consisted of unsafe and unsanitary conditions (Primrose, 2012, p. 175).

Contraception Legalized: Contribution of a “First Wave Feminist” Movement in the United States

Around 1915, coinciding with advocates for the right of women to vote, a large feminist movement began growing, headed by Margaret Sanger, which focused on the importance of birth control. Sanger was a nurse who visited homes and was often asked questions by women on how to prevent having more children. One of Sanger’s patients died from a self-induced abortion, which led her to become more vocal about the unjustness that comes from restricting information on birth control. Sanger believed that the only way to achieve equal rights among men and women was for society to release women from the expected role of being a childbearing wife. In 1916, she attempted to open a contraceptive clinic in Brooklyn, New York, but was shut down after ten days. Despite being open for a short amount of time, the clinic had visits from 464 women. This staggering number displays the desperate need for contraception at the time.

Sanger continued her efforts to fight for contraception, and with support growing, she created the American Birth Control League (Galvin). In 1932, after Sanger was arrested for mailing birth control products, a judge from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals “ordered a relaxation of the Comstock laws at the federal level” (Primrose, 2012, p. 182). The opinion, written by Judge Augustus Hand, stated that contraception could no longer be described as “obscene,” and that there was a great amount of damage caused by this ban. He “ruled that doctors could prescribe birth control not only to prevent disease, but for the ‘general well-being’ of their patients” (Galvin, 1998). This was a great win for Sanger and those who also fought for the legalization of birth control.

In 1942, the American Birth Control League decided to switch their approach and portray birth control as a means of family planning rather than a way to “liberate women” (Primrose, 2012, p. 183). With this change in approach also came a name change: Planned Parenthood. Although Sanger did not approve of this shift in philosophy or name change, both helped the organization present itself as much friendlier towards both men and women, and to become socially accepted (Primrose, 2012, pp. 183–184).

As time went on, the feminist movement towards legalized contraception and abortion continued. In the 1960s, the women’s liberation movement gained much more support after many were being “inspired by the civil rights and anti-war movements” (Ravitz, 2016). This traction in the women’s movement could be seen in the years to come within court decisions.

First Comes Marriage

After the ruling by Augustus Hand in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, there was a large move towards the social acceptance of birth control. However, a Second Circuit decision is only binding in one jurisdiction. While this was a win for those within this area, and certainly did reflect a growing social acceptance, it was not sufficient to repeal laws nationwide. At this point, disagreement among the states on the issue of abortion was rising. For this reason, the issue rose all the way to the US Supreme Court.  

Griswold v. Connecticut , 381 U.S. 479 (1965)

In 1965, the Supreme Court helped strike down any laws within the states that mimicked the Comstock Law in Griswold v. Connecticut. In this case, Estelle Griswold was the executive director of Planned Parenthood in Connecticut. Griswold was arrested for giving out information about contraception under a Connecticut law which banned this. The Supreme Court brought up the idea of privacy within homes and ruled that although the “right to privacy” is not overtly written in the Bill of Rights, it still is a fundamental right protected under the Constitution. They discussed the idea that the Bill of Rights throws “penumbras” under which certain fundamental rights lie. In this case specifically, the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth Amendments all cast grey areas in which the “right to privacy” stands, which is then applied against the states using the Fourteenth Amendment. The court held that the Connecticut statute was overly broad and caused more harm than needed to be done. The statute encroached on a certain area in life where privacy is essential – inside a marriage. This ruling declared that a state is unable to ban the use of contraceptives within a marriage due to the right to privacy.

Then Comes All Persons

Eisenstadt v. Baird , 405 U.S. 438 (1972)

While this was a great win for birth control advocates, it only made the distribution of contraception legal for married couples. In 1972 came Eisenstadt v. Baird , the Supreme Court case which extended this ruling to single peoples as well. In this case, Bill Baird was arrested for selling birth control in the form of vaginal foam to multiple women at Boston University. He was charged under a Massachusetts statute that mimicked the previous federal Comstock Law. After the ruling of Griswold v. Connecticut , this statute had been amended, but it was only to legalize the distribution of birth control to married couples. In the opinion of Eisenstadt v. Baird , Supreme Court Justice William Brennan “declared that ‘whatever the right of the individual to access to contraceptives may be, the rights must be the same for the unmarried and the married alike’” (Garrow, 2001, p. 65). The foundation of this argument stemmed from the fact that “the law violated ‘the rights of single persons under the Equal Protection Clause’ of the Fourteenth Amendment” (Garrow, 2001, p. 64). This ruling helped establish legal contraception for all individuals.  

Abortion Legalized Federally

Roe v. Wade , 410 U.S. 113 (1973)

In 1973, the contraception movement came to a peak when the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Roe v. Wade , federally legalizing abortion. In this case, a single pregnant woman in the state of Texas challenged a “criminal abortion statute which only allowed abortions ‘for the purpose of saving the life of the mother’” (Zagel, 1973). The plaintiff, named anonymously as Jane Roe to protect her identity, who was later revealed to be Norma McCorvey, asserted in the legal briefs that the statute was unconstitutional and a violation of the right to privacy, therefore the law was null and void. Texas argued that it has compelling state interests in the life of the mother, the protection of prenatal life, and in the discouragement of illicit sexual activity, making this statute constitutional. The court understood the state’s concern for the mother and unborn child but did not accept the argument regarding sexual activity. After weighing the valid points brought forward by both Roe and Texas, the Court ruled accordingly. In the first trimester, the state has no say, and all decisions are to be made between a woman and her doctor. In the second trimester, a woman is still able to receive an abortion, but the state is able to make some regulations in order to protect the mother’s life. In the third trimester, abortions are contingent upon demonstrated threats to the mother’s health, due to the fact that the life of the fetus is considered viable.

Throughout history, the idea of access to “family planning” – whether that be birth control or abortion – has been controversial. Abortion drugs were initially very common but were then banned under the Comstock Law after much lobbying by the American Medical Association. After this, feminist movements began picking up the fight for contraception. The pleas of the movements were not answered until much later, when the Supreme Court made their rulings in Griswold v. Connecticut, Eisenstadt v. Baird, and Roe v. Wade.

Figure 1: Legal Historical Timeline of Abortion and Reproductive Rights

II. Current Legal Obstacles Preventing Abortion

After several federal court decisions legalized abortion and the distribution of contraception, and any information regarding it, it seemed as though the fight for reproductive rights was over. Significantly, an “undue burden” on a woman was ruled as unconstitutional. Additionally, the American Medical Association, a previously large motivator in the anti-abortion movement, moved towards a more pro-choice viewpoint and backed up from being vocal against abortion. In 1990, the AMA stated that “the issue of support or opposition to abortion is a matter for members of the AMA to decide individually, based on personal values or beliefs.” In 2013, the Association as a whole shifted further towards pro-choice, stating that “the Principles of Medical Ethics of the AMA do not prohibit a physician from performing an abortion,” as long as it is done in “good medical practice” and does not violate the law (Hart, 2014, p. 292).

However, the federal court rulings only set a legislative basis for states, which were then responsible for the abortion statutes within their own borders. Despite the fact that abortion was made legal on the federal level, states were, and still are, able to enact statutes that could create certain barriers making it hard for women to obtain an abortion. These barriers include zoning laws, mandatory counseling, waiting periods, and minor consent or notification. Besides being inconvenient hurdles to overcome, these barriers also insinuate an assumption that women seeking abortions have not thoroughly contemplated their decision, and/or are not able to properly educate themselves before doing so.

Hyde Amendment of 1976

In 1976, the United States Congress passed an “amendment to a federal appropriations bill specific to [the Departments of Labor and Health and Human Services].” This amendment, titled the Hyde Amendment, “prohibits using U.S. federal funds to pay for abortions in programs administered through” the two aforementioned federal departments. One of the programs that is affected by this amendment is Medicaid, which is “a joint state-federal program for low-income people.” Under the Hyde Amendment, Medicaid programs in states are unable to access and use federal funds to help low-income people get abortions. Since its installment, the Amendment has “been altered to include exceptions for pregnancies that are the result of rape and incest” (Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, 2011, pp. 341–342, 774). This Amendment is a possible barrier for women who are unable to afford an abortion on their own, which is discussed further below.  

Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey , 505 U.S. 833 (1992)

In 1989, Pennsylvania passed the Pennsylvania Abortion Control Act, which sought to intensely restrict a woman’s ability to get an abortion. Under this law:

A woman seeking an abortion must (i) be given certain state-approved information about the abortion procedure and give her informed consent; (ii) wait 24 [hours] before the abortion procedure [after receiving this information]; (iii) if the woman was a minor she had to obtain parental consent; and (iv) if the woman was married she had to notify her husband, in writing of her intended abortion (Medoff, 2009).

Following the passing of this law, the Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania filed a lawsuit, claiming that the law was unconstitutional. The suit made its way to the United States Supreme Court, which ruled that “states could regulate abortions before viability as long as the regulation did not place an ‘undue burden’ on a woman’s access to an abortion” (Medoff, 2009). However, the Court did not give an explicit definition of what an “undue burden” entails, giving states leeway to enact restrictions on the access to abortion. The Court also upheld the first three parts of Pennsylvania’s statute, but struck down the fourth, requiring husband notification. By upholding the first three, the Supreme Court allowed Pennsylvania to set the stage for other states across the nation which sought to limit the access to abortion (Medoff, 2009).

Types of Abortion Barriers

Zoning Laws

One possible barrier to abortion access that states are able to implement is zoning laws. Under the Constitution, each state has a certain amount of police powers that allow for the enactment of laws and regulations that aim to protect, preserve, and promote the public safety, health, morals, and general welfare of the people (Legal Information Institute). Local governments within states are able to pass zoning laws in the community under these police powers. “Zoning laws determine what types of land uses and densities can occur on each property lot in a municipality.” In some areas throughout the nation, local governments use zoning ordinances to limit the areas where abortion providers can reside (Maantay, 2002, pp. 572–575). This topic is further discussed below.

Mandatory Counseling

According to the Guttmacher Institute, as of March 1, 2019, “34 states require that women receive counseling before an abortion is performed” (Guttmacher Institute, 2019a). The legal basis of mandatory counseling laws lies upon the principle of informed consent. This principle is the idea that patients “have the right to receive accurate and unbiased medical information from their health care provider so that they can make an informed decision about their treatment” (Medoff, 2009). Mandatory counseling laws in states make it a requirement for physicians to read a “’script’ to any patient seeking an abortion” (Rose, 2006, p. 105). These scripts are specific to each state, which are left to approve of the information they wish to include. While the counseling information may vary state-to-state in terms of what exactly must be included, each have the same general idea: to warn women who are seeking an abortion of the possible complications, side effects, and other options.

To stay in accordance with the idea of providing unbiased and objective information, states must also counsel women about options other than abortion, and the possible effects associated with them. For example, North Carolina’s “Woman’s Right to Know Act” states that physicians must inform the woman that she “has other alternatives to abortion, including keeping the baby or placing the baby for adoption.” The act also requires abortion providers to provide patients with printed materials that detail the possible complications and effects of abortion, “as well as the medical risks associated with carrying an unborn child to term” (Stam, 2012, pp. 18–20).

The issue with this counseling is that not all the information distributed is necessarily accurate and may “dissuade women from having an abortion by giving them biased medical information … that is deliberately inaccurate and false” (Medoff, 2009).

One piece of information included in the counseling materials of several states is the idea that “abortion is detrimental to a woman’s mental health” (Medoff, 2009). While this may be the case for some women who receive abortions, it is not true for all. This topic is considered further below.

Other information that is commonplace in counseling materials is that abortions are linked to future medical issues within women. In 6 out of the 34 states that include mention of medical issues, the emphasis is on the correlation between abortion and breast cancer, and 22 out of 34 include information about infertility (Guttmacher Institute, 2019a). However, research has shown that the claims being made are not necessarily accurate. Among the 6 states that discuss breast cancer, 5 “inaccurately assert a link between abortion and an increased risk of breast cancer” (Guttmacher Institute, 2019a). Furthermore, in 1996, The National Cancer Institute stated that after doing research, they found “no evidence of a direct relationship between breast cancer and either induced or spontaneous abortion” (Medoff, 2009). Regarding infertility, there is research showing that “vacuum” abortions, which are “the most common method used in over 90% of all abortions – poses no long-term risk of infertility” (Medoff, 2009). In 4 of the 22 states that discuss infertility, the risk is inaccurately portrayed (Guttmacher Institute, 2019a). The distribution of this inaccurate information may scare women away from having an abortion, fearing they will have serious health complications in the future.

In 13 out of the 34 states, the mandatory counseling information tells women that the fetus is able to feel pain during the procedure of the abortion (Guttmacher Institute, 2019a). However, not every state provides the same facts. In South Dakota, women are told that the fetus feels pain no matter how far along the pregnancy may be. In Texas, women are told the fetus can feel pain as early as 12 weeks, while women in Arkansas and Georgia are told it is 20 weeks (Medoff, 2009). However, research has shown “that the necessary physical structures to perceive pain develop between 23 and 30 weeks’ gestation” (Gold & Nash, 2007). This disagreement between states clearly shows how inaccurate the information being distributed to women may be.

Aside from possibly dissuading women from getting an abortion by providing potential complications and side effects, the counseling information can also be laced with bias language meant to do the same. For example, in 2003, Texas passed a law entitled “Woman’s Right to Know Act,” which required abortion patients be given a twenty-three-pages long booklet discussing all of the possible risks listed above. However, the booklet refers to the fetus as an “unborn child,” using word choice to place personhood on the fetus (Rose, 2006, p. 106). It also “speaks at length about the euphoria of giving birth,” while barely touching on the possible issue of post-partum depression if the woman chooses to have the child (Rose, 2006, p. 106). The subtle use of language and emphasis on happy childbirth shows that the state favors the idea of carrying the fetus to term rather than letting the woman have an abortion.

Waiting Periods

Following the mandatory counseling, as of March 1, 2019, 27 out of these 34 states require that there be a waiting period of at least 24 hours until the woman can receive the abortion (Guttmacher Institute, 2019a). In these cases, women are required to visit the physician twice: once to be counseled, and second to undergo the procedure after the waiting period is complete. While this may be a minor inconvenience for some women, it can be quite major for others. For example, if a woman has traveled a far distance to receive the abortion, there are extra costs involved, whether that be money for gasoline, public transportation fees, and/or paying to stay in a hotel. By forcing these women to visit the physician twice, the money they are spending increases, whether that be by a few dollars for a couple of more gallons of gasoline in their car or by a few hundred dollars for an extra night in a hotel room. While the waiting period may be a helpful time for some women to read and further inform themselves on the procedure they are about to receive, it may be a burden for others who have already confirmed their decision and cannot afford these extra costs (Rose, 2006, p. 106).  

Minor Consent or Notification

As of March 1 2019, 37 states in the nation require the involvement of a minor’s parent when deciding to have an abortion. In 11 of these 37 only require parental notification, while 21 require parental consent (Guttmacher Institute, 2019b). Among the many barriers put on access to abortion, “parental involvement laws have some of the highest public support” (Rose, 2006, p. 107). A large portion of this support comes from the idea that minor’s may be too immature to make this life-altering decision on their own and require the potentially important input of their parents (Rose, 2006, p. 107).

In an attempt to avoid the laws requiring them to involve their parent, some young girls travel across state lines to receive the procedure in a state that does not have these laws. If that is not a possibility, other girls turn to unsafe illegal procedures to terminate their pregnancy (Rose, 2006, p. 107). One specific example of this is Becky Bell, a seventeen-year-old girl from Indianapolis. In 1988, afraid to inform her parents that she was pregnant, Becky sought out an illegal abortion (Lewin, 1991). During the procedure, unsanitary instruments were used, which resulted in the young girl contracting a bodily infection. Within one week, Becky’s veins collapsed, her heart stopped, and she died (Rose, 2006, p. 107). This case became an example of the potential issues with the forced involvement of parents.

While parental involvement laws may seem rational, they pay no attention to the possible circumstances within each minor’s situation. For a young girl who has an open and close relationship with her parents, these laws may not pose an issue. Oppositely, for a young girl who has a distant, unhealthy, and/or violent relationship with her parents, such as Becky Bell, these laws may be extremely problematic. In a 1991 study that looked at reasons why minors seeking abortions did not want to inform their parents, the most common reasons listed “were wanting to preserve their relationship with their parents and wanting to protect the parents from stress and conflict” (Henshaw & Kost, 1992). These reasons may be especially true in a household where the pregnancy is the result of a friend/family rape, which would put much stress on the family relationships. Due to these possible issues, 36 out of the 37 states with parental involvement laws “include a judicial bypass procedure, which allows a minor to obtain approval from a court” (Guttmacher Institute, 2019b). This procedure, if approved, grants a minor the ability to receive an abortion without involving a parent.

Current Federal Administration

Election of Donald Trump

Although states have been able to place these barriers limiting the access to abortion within their borders, the rights granted in Roe v. Wade have continued to hold steady in federal law. However, more recently, there has been fear of a perceived threat to these rights. This fear began with the election of President Donald Trump in November 2016. When elected, Trump vowed “to nominate socially conservative Supreme Court Justices, withhold federal funding from Planned Parenthood, and sign legislation banning abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy” (Reinhard, 2016). Although Trump has not signed any legislation doing so, he has indeed followed through on the first two promises.

Nomination of Socially Conservative Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh

In 2018, President Donald Trump nominated Judge Brett Kavanaugh to become a Justice on the United States Supreme Court. Since this nomination, Kavanaugh has been elected to the Supreme Court, replacing Justice Anthony Kennedy, who “protected [ Roe v. Wade ] as the court’s swing vote on abortion” (Bassett, 2018). By replacing Kennedy, Kavanaugh creates “a solid conservative majority on the court,” which could potentially threaten Roe , given his standpoint on the issue of abortion (Gershman, 2018). Although Kavanaugh has not spoken directly about his views on the Supreme Court decision of Roe v. Wade , he has spoken about “the government’s ‘permissible interests’ in ‘favoring fetal life’ and ‘refraining from facilitating abortion,’” indicating his opinions on the subject lean toward a pro-life viewpoint (Bassett, 2018). However, despite the possible personal opinions of Kavanaugh, he has stated that he believes Roe v. Wade is a “settled law” (Gershman, 2018). While there was no further explanation on what exactly Kavanaugh meant by those words, a logical interpretation would mean that “he believes the precedent is too deeply embedded in the fabric of the law to be re-examined” (Gershman, 2018). This would mean that Kavanaugh himself is not even confident in the fact that the Supreme Court could overturn the landmark decision.  

Trigger Laws

Although the possibility of Roe v. Wade being overturned is questionable, some states have “trigger laws” set up in the event that it does happen. These laws are blatant state bans put on abortion, but are presently unconstitutional, therefore, unenforceable. The point of these laws is to have statutes set in place, ready to “become enforceable without further legislative action” the moment Roe v. Wade gets overturned, if ever (Rose, 2006, p. 102). The states that have put these laws in place are Mississippi, Louisiana, North Dakota, and South Dakota (Gershman, 2018).  

Gag Rules Withholding Federal Funding from Planned Parenthood

  When getting elected, President Trump also promised to withhold federal funding from Planned Parenthood. In February 2019, the Trump administration announced, “that it will bar organizations that provide abortion referrals from receiving federal family planning money” (Belluck, 2019). This new legislation is a form of a “gag rule,” which “prohibit those working in state-run health care facilities from even speaking of abortions as an option with patients” (Rose, 2006, p. 109). In this specific federal rule, “clinics will be able to talk to patients about abortion, but not where they can get one” (Belluck, 2019). This means that organizations meant to help women, such as Planned Parenthood, could potentially lose millions of dollars in funding (Belluck, 2019). As of this writing a federal court in Washington state issued a nationwide injunction that stops the rule from taking effect while various lawsuits are pending (Barbash, 2019).

Trump Reinstatement of Global Gag Rule

Aside from being present within the United States, every recent Republican Administration has enforced such gag rules internationally. “The United States is the largest donor of international family planning money, which is dispersed through the United States Agency for International Development.” This agency “funds international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in contraceptives, training, technical assistance, and other family planning needs.” However, in 1984, the Reagan Administration instituted a global gag rule, which mandated that any NGO “that performed or promoted abortion services” were no longer “eligible for USAID funding,” even if abortion was legal in their jurisdiction. When the Clinton Administration came into power, this global gag rule was overturned. This back-and-forth has continued ever since, with the Bush Administration reinstating the global gag rule, and then the Obama Administration overturning it (Gezinski, 2012, pp. 839–840). Predictably, President Trump reinstated it – on his first day in office. This global gag rule is a large setback for many countries in the developing world, where NGOs are a primary source for women’s health care. For example, in some parts of Africa, these clinics “offer HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment, maternal health, and counseling on sexual violence like genital mutilation.” This rule also cuts funding for the International sector of Planned Parenthood (Quackenbush, 2018). By cutting funding to NGOs around the world, the global gag rule can have serious effects on a woman’s ability to get proper health care.

III. Possible Effects After Having an Abortion or Being Denied an Abortion

Before being able to fully understand the potential effects of an abortion, one should know exactly what the abortion process consists of. There are multiple different kinds of abortion procedures a woman can receive that vary in methods and depend on how far along the pregnancy is. By being fully educated on the details of the actual procedure, individuals are able to understand the issues surrounding abortion on a more comprehensive level. The following paragraphs will go through the vital specifics of each procedure.

Receiving an Abortion: How is it Done?  

First Trimester Abortions

“In the United States, most abortions (88 percent) are performed during the first trimester,” which includes the first twelve weeks of pregnancy. Currently, there are two different forms of first-trimester abortions: a medication abortion or an aspiration abortion. A woman is able to choose which one she wishes to receive. As of 2011, aspiration abortion is more commonly used than medication abortion, but the interest for the latter continues to rise. If a medication abortion fails, an aspiration abortion is necessary to abort the fetus (Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, 2011, pp. 324–328).

“In a medication abortion, the pregnancy is interrupted and expelled over the course of a few days using medicines.” While in the presence of the doctor, a woman swallows a pill containing a drug called mifepristone. Later, when at home, the woman takes another drug, misoprostol, either by inserting it vaginally or letting is dissolve inside her mouth. The abortion begins a few hours later, consisting of heavy bleeding and cramping. To ensure the abortion worked, the woman must go back to the doctor one week later for a follow-up appointment. In 95 to 98 percent of cases, this method is effective. However, if it fails, the woman must then undergo an aspiration abortion (Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, 2011, pp. 324–326).

In an aspiration abortion, also known as surgical or vacuum abortion, “suction is used to remove the pregnancy.” A thin tube, called a cannula, is “inserted into the uterus and connected to a source of suction, either an electric pump or a handheld syringe,” which then removes the fetus from the woman. Unlike medical abortions, aspiration abortions only take 5-10 minutes to complete and do not require a follow-up appointment with the doctor unless the woman is experiencing problems (Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, 2011, pp. 324–328).

Second and Third Trimester Abortions

When Do They Happen?

“In the United States, about 12 percent of all abortions take place after the first trimester” (Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, 2011, p. 332). Women enter the second trimester of pregnancy at week 12, and the third trimester at week 28 (Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, 2011, p. 332; Cha, 2015). The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that in 2015, only “about 1.3 percent of abortions were performed at or greater than 21 weeks of gestation.” This means that within the aforementioned 12 percent, almost all of these abortions are done during the beginning and middle of the second trimester. In the rare cases where women seek abortions in their third trimesters, the reasons are serious and based on “an absence of fetal viability,” and/or risks to the mother’s health or life (Cha, 2015).

Procedure Details

For second and third trimester abortions, the procedures differ from those in the first trimester. Currently, there are two different methods used to abort a fetus after the first trimester: dilation and evacuation (D&E), and induction abortion (Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, 2011, p. 332).

In a D&E procedure, the fetal and placental tissues are removed by using a combination of instruments and suction. This method is more commonly used, and quite similar to the aspiration abortions performed during the first trimester. However, due to the fact that the pregnancy is further along, the woman’s cervix must “be opened wider to allow the larger pregnancy tissue to pass, which requires the clinician to soften and dilate the cervix ahead of time.” This can take anywhere from a few hours to two days and can be done either by the use of instruments (osmotic dilators), or drugs (misprostol). The earlier a woman is in her pregnancy, the less time this portion of the abortion takes. After the cervix is prepared, “the clinician removes the pregnancy (fetal and placental tissue) with vacuum aspiration, forceps, and a curette (a small, spoonlike instrument)” (Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, 2011, pp. 332–333).

“After a certain point in pregnancy (usually around twenty-four weeks), a D&E can no longer be performed and the only option is an induction abortion.” In an induced abortion, a woman is given drugs that induce labor. The drugs that are used can vary depending on the circumstances of the situation, and can either be inserted into the vagina, be given through an intravenous line, or injected into the woman’s abdomen. These drugs cause contractions of the uterus, thus sending the woman into labor. The fetus and placenta are then ‘delivered,’ expelling the pregnancy. This method “usually takes place in specialized facilities or hospitals,” and takes more time than D&E’s. Due to this, and the fact that it forces women to endure the mental and physical stress of labor, induction abortion is less commonly chosen than D&E. However, in a case where the pregnancy being ended is wanted, this method allows the woman to deliver and hold the fetus, and say good-bye (Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, 2011, pp. 332–334).  

Reasons Why Women May Get an Abortion

Despite the possible attempts by state law to limit a woman’s ability to get an abortion, the medical procedure is still performed across the nation. While the specific reasoning behind every abortion is different in each individual situation, in many cases, there are common themes of reasoning.

In 2004, a study was done by the Guttmacher Institute to explore the reasons why a woman may seek an abortion. In the study, over 1200 abortion patients at 11 providers completed a survey that asked questions regarding their reasoning. The first portion of the survey was open ended, asking the woman to briefly explain why she was choosing to get an abortion at that time. If there were multiple reasons, she was asked to give them in order from most to least important. After that, there were specific reasons listed that the woman had to confirm whether or not were applicable to her. There were three large reasons listed that then provided even more specific sub-reasons underneath. These three included: “having a baby would dramatically change my life,” “can’t afford a baby now,” and “don’t want to be a single mother or having relationship problems” (Finer et al., 2005, p. 113). Under “having a baby would dramatically change my life,” the sub-reasons for why it would do so were because it would interfere with the patient’s education and/or career, and/or because she already had other dependents in her life (Finer et al., 2005, p. 113). Under “can’t afford a baby now,” a few sub-reasons for lack of funds were because the woman was unemployed, could not leave her job to care for the child, and/or could not even afford the basic necessities of life (Finer et al., 2005, p. 113). Under “don’t want to be a single mother or having relationship problems,” a couple sub-reasons were because the woman was unsure about her current relationship, or because she was not in a relationship at the moment (Finer et al., 2005, p. 113). After the breakdown of these three large reasons, there were various others listed, including: “have completed my childbearing,” “don’t want people to know I had sex,” “don’t feel mature enough to raise a child,” “victim of rape,” and “result of incest” (Finer et al., 2005, p. 113). Finally, the questionnaire provided a space where the woman could write in her own reasons that were not listed or did not qualify within the given categories. The results showed that most women identified with reasons that fell within the three large ones, with 74% of respondents feeling that “having a baby would dramatically change [their] life,” 73% saying they “[could not] afford a baby [at the moment],” and 48% “[citing] relationship problems or a desire to avoid single motherhood” (Finer et al., 2005, p. 113). This study provided many possible reasons as to why a woman may seek an abortion.

In 2013, a similar study was published by BioMed Central Women’s Health that examined the reasons why women get abortions. This study looked at the data collected during the Turnaway Study , which was done to evaluate “the health and socioeconomic consequences of receiving or being denied an abortion in the US” (Biggs et al., 2013, p. 1). Although the premise of the Turnaway Study was not to focus on the reasons why women wanted an abortion, those who participated were required to give their reasoning. This 2013 study took those women’s answers and analyzed them. The sample for this study was “954 women from 30 abortion facilities across the US,” who were questioned between 2008 and 2010 (Biggs et al., 2013, p. 1). Many of the reason’s women mentioned in this study overlapped with those given during the 2004 study, falling under the general concepts of financial instability, partner-related issues, and inconvenient timing. However, some women delved into other reasons motivating their decision. Out of all the respondents, 12% had health-related reasons regarding either herself, the fetus, or both. One woman explained that the medication she had been taking for her bipolar disorder was known to cause birth defects and felt it would be considered child abuse to bring a baby into the world knowing that it may have life-altering defects. Five percent of respondents mentioned reasons that included family members. One woman was scared her family would not accept that she would be having a biracial child, while another stated that her dad wanted her to finish school before having a child (Biggs et al., 2013, pp. 7–8). The 2013 study differed from the 2004 study in the fact that the women were only given open ended questions to answer, rather than checking off possible reasons from a provided list. This emphasis on personal words helped yield answers that reflected how each woman’s reasoning is specific to her own life and situation.

It is important to note that every woman and situation is different. While these studies show a plethora of reasons why women decide to get abortions, the circumstances surrounding every single abortion are personal to the individual(s) involved. The range of reasons can include physical and mental health issues, economic needs, and/or fear of social stigma.  

Potential Physical, Sociological, and Psychological Effects of Abortions

A hypothetical woman who wanted an abortion did it. She jumped through all the hoops: she was granted the fundamental right to receive one by the federal government, came to the educated and reasonable decision that she wanted one, overcame any legal barriers her state instituted on the matter, and was able to get the abortion she sought out to get. Now what? Does the life-altering procedure she just underwent truly alter her life? Or does she return to her regular weekly schedule, viewing the abortion as a minor inconvenience in her life?

The general consensus on this matter is contradicting. When speaking about physical, sociological, and psychological health, some research states that there are no effects on women who receive an abortion, while other research state that they are indeed affected. That is because “both opponents and advocates could easily prove their case by picking and choosing from a wide range of contradictory evidence” (Arthur, 1997, p. 7).  

Physical Effects

After receiving an abortion, there is research concluding that women may suffer from possible physical health effects in the future. The effects that will be discussed below are increased risk of breast cancer and future reproductive health issues.

Breast Cancer

One health risk that has been linked to abortion is an increased risk to breast cancer. According to biologist and endocrinologist Joel Brind, Ph.D., as stated in an article published in Human Life Review :

Breast lobules, which are the lactational apparatus of the breast, remain in their immature Type 1 and 2 states unless they are stimulated by a pregnancy. The pregnancy signals the mother’s body to send estrogen (a potential carcinogen) to her breasts, and the lobules begin to multiply. This multiplication continues until the thirty-second week of pregnancy, when the milk cells are fully mature. If a woman has an abortion or delivers prematurely before the thirty-second week, cancer is more likely to develop in the immature cells. Mature milk cells are much less prone to becoming cancerous (Adamek, 2017, p. 28).

Many other health professionals agree upon this statement and have offered further medical information. One comprehensive review that looked at the link between breast cancer and induced abortion stated that “it is only after 32 weeks’ gestation that elevated levels of pregnancy hormones allow sufficient maturation of cancer-resistant breast tissue to occur” (Lanfranchi & Fagan, 2014, p. 5).  After carrying a pregnancy to full-term, “only about 10 to 30 percent of a mother’s breast tissue remains susceptible to forming cancer,” and this risk decreases another 10 percent with each subsequent pregnancy (Lanfranchi & Fagan, 2014, p. 6).

Future Reproductive Health

Another physical health risk that has been linked to abortion is the risk of future reproductive health issues. Although occurring in less than 1% of cases, after an abortion, there is a possibility that a woman can develop an upper genital tract infection. The upper genital tract involves the pelvis and fallopian tubes, which are important parts of a woman’s reproductive system. Serious infections can cause major issues to these, including chronic pelvic pain and damage to the fallopian tubes. This damage can consequentially lead to future issues, such as infertility and ectopic pregnancy (Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, 2011, p. 318; Lohr et al., 2014, p. 4).

Physical Health: Opposing Views

Despite these statements, there have been dissenting opinions on the idea that induced abortions and breast cancer are linked. “In February 2003, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) convened a workshop of over 100 of the world’s leading experts who study pregnancy and breast cancer risk” (National Cancer Institute, 2003). The conclusion of this workshop was that having an abortion “does not increase a woman’s subsequent risk of developing breast cancer” (National Cancer Institute, 2003). The NCI is a part of the National Institutes of Health under the United States Department of Health and Human Services, and states on the website homepage that it is “the nation’s leader in cancer research.” Due to the fact that it is an organization under the federal government, one can assume that the research they publish is trustworthy. This disagreement upon health professionals makes it hard for women to know the true risk. The scientific facts of the development of breasts points to a clear correlation between abortion and breast cancer, but the highly respected National Cancer Institute dissents from that idea. Similarly, in regard to the possible development of an upper genital tract infection, it is difficult for women to measure the possible risk. The fact that it happens in only 1% of cases is promising, but women are left unsure of whether or not they will end up falling into that small percentage until they actually undergo the abortion procedure.

Sociological Effects

Social Norms and Stigmas

Within every society, there are certain human behaviors that become normalized over time. These behaviors, also known as “social norms,” can include essentially anything about a person, such as how they speak or dress, their mannerisms, or traits of their personality. A stigma can be described as “an attribute that is deeply discrediting that negatively changes the identity of an individual to a tainted, discounted one” (Kumar et al., 2009, p. 626). Stigmas are created and reproduced through a social process. In a 2001 Annual Review of Sociology , Link and Phelan describe this process:

In the first component, people distinguish and label human differences. In the second, dominant cultural beliefs link labelled persons to undesirable characteristics – to negative stereotypes. In the third, labelled persons are placed in distinct categories so as to accomplish some degree of separation of ‘us’ from ‘them’. In the fourth, labelled persons experience status loss and discrimination that lead to unequal outcomes (2001, p. 367).

Throughout history, worldwide, societies have constructed and enforced stereotypical social norms on women as a whole. Some of the most widely held stereotypes are based around the fact that women bear children. Female sexuality can be seen “solely for procreation,” and becoming a mother viewed as being natural and inevitable (Kumar et al., 2009, p. 628). Due to this, societal norms may expect women to be instinctually warm, kind, caring, and nurturing. Therefore, when a woman wishes to end a pregnancy by receiving an abortion, she is challenging these “assumptions about the ‘essential nature’ of women” by using “her agency to deem a potential life unwanted and then [acting] to end that potential life” (Kumar et al., 2009, p. 628). By terminating a fetus, which would eventually develop into a baby, a woman getting an abortion deviates from the assumption that she should be naturally maternal. Instead, she may be labelled with opposite stereotypes, seen as being heartless, promiscuous, and/or selfish. Consequentially, for those who accept these social norms about women, abortion can be seen as a stigmatized act (Kumar et al., 2009, pp. 628–629).

Stigma Causes Underreporting, Which Perpetuates Further Stigma

Over the past several decades, surveys have been an essential way for researchers to gather data on topics they are studying. However, “the usefulness of surveys in studying highly personal or sensitive individual characteristics” has been questioned (Jagannathan, 2001, p. 1825). This may include topics that involve things that are typically regarded as private matters, such as mental health, income, and/or sexual behavior. Personal topics like these can easily have some type of stigma attached to them if a person deviates from any type of social norm within the matter. Survey data involving these topics may be inaccurate if people refuse to participate, even if they are affected by the topic, in fear of being a social deviant. As previously mentioned, abortion is a controversial issue in society that has been stigmatized. Therefore, women who have gotten abortions may feel a social pressure to stay silent, making “it challenging to know the true prevalence of abortion in a given community” (Kumar et al., 2009, p. 629). Studies that have specifically looked at the underreporting of abortions have stated that “only 35% to 60% of abortions are reported in surveys” (Jagannathan, 2001, p. 1825). The social construction of deviance in regard to abortion creates an ongoing cycle of silence about the topic. This cycle is demonstrated in the following chart, provided by Kumar (2009, p. 629):

Figure 2: Cycle of Stigmatization in Society

This chart shows how “silence and fear of social exclusion keeps women” from speaking openly about abortion, “thus sustaining the negative stereotype” (Kumar et al., 2009, p. 630). Underreporting of the issue makes it seem uncommon, which makes it a deviant from social norms. Those who do not behave in accordance with social norms are typically outcasted or discriminated against, making women who get abortions fear stigmatization and not report it, consequentially creating inaccurate data due to underreporting. This then brings the issue back to the beginning of the cycle (Kumar et al., 2009, pp. 629–630).

Psychological Effects

Similar to the physical health effects linked with abortion, the idea that there are mental health consequences after receiving the procedure is a topic of controversy. However, the issue with psychological compared to physical is the fact that every individual is different, and every mind works in unique ways. Physical effects are a matter of science and fact, while psychological effects rely on the unpredictability of the human brain. There is research concluding that after receiving an abortion, women may suffer from possible mental health effects. The effects that will be discussed below are “post-abortion syndrome,” anxiety/panic disorders, and depression.

Post-Abortion Syndrome

The largest source of controversy within the discussion of abortion and possible mental health effects stems from the concept of “post-abortion syndrome.” The idea behind this syndrome is that abortion can cause women “severe and long-lasting guilt, depression, rage, and social and sexual dysfunction,” and can be categorized under post-traumatic-stress-disorder (Arthur, 1997, p. 7). However, this so-called syndrome is “not recognized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association” (Robinson et al., 2009, p. 269).  

Anxiety/Panic Disorders and Depression

Over the years, studies have been done that concur with the idea that abortion is linked to post-abortion syndrome and further mental health problems. Research has stated that most panic disorders in adults form in the six months following a major stressful life event. Therefore, if women view the abortion they received as a traumatic life event, it “may trigger a psychological .. process that culminates in an anxiety disorder” (Coleman et al., 2009, p. 775). Aside from anxiety disorders, a 2009 study found:

Women who have aborted are at a higher risk for a variety of mental health problems including anxiety (panic attacks, panic disorder, agoraphobia, PTSD), mood (bipolar disorder, major depression with and without hierarchy), and substance abuse disorders when compared to women without a history of abortion (Coleman et al., 2009, p. 775).

When looking specifically at anxiety and depression, the study found that among women who had abortions, the risk for panic disorders increased by 111%, and the risk for depression increased by 45% (Coleman et al., 2009, p. 773).

Furthermore, in 2011, “a comprehensive review and analysis of 22 of the world’s best large studies of abortion’s impact on women’s mental health” concluded that “women who had undergone an abortion experienced an 81 percent greater risk of mental health problems” (Adamek, 2017, p. 32).

Psychological Effects: Opposing Views

Despite the studies claiming that women who get abortions are at a higher risk for mental health issues, there is also research that opposes this view.

One study examined 442 women over a two-year period to assess their mental health after receiving an abortion. Those who participated were evaluated one hour before the abortion, and then one hour, one month, and two years after. The study assessed the women for “preabortion and postabortion depression and self-esteem, postabortion emotions, decision satisfaction, perceived harm and benefit, and posttraumatic stress disorder.” The results concluded that two years after receiving their abortion, 72% of the women were satisfied with the decision they made, and 69% would make the same decision again. From pre-abortion to post-abortion, depression decreased, self-esteem increased, and some women reported feeling a sense of relief more than any negative emotions (Major et al., 2000). Further research has agreed with this, stating that “although there may be sensations of regret, sadness, or guilt,” more frequently, women “report feeling relief and happiness” following their abortion (Adler et al., 1990, p. 41). It is important to note that “feelings” do not translate into true psychological issues. For example, a woman may feel a sense of sadness following the procedure, but that does not imply she is clinically depressed.

Link Between Socio- and Psycho-

When looking at whether abortion has a psychological effect on women, it is important to note the intersectionality between sociology and psychology. As discussed above, culturally developed societal norms and stigmas influence individuals to behave and think certain ways. Therefore, the way abortion is socially accepted within a certain group may have an impact on the psychological effects a woman experiences after getting the procedure. If a woman belongs to a community where there are stereotypes put on women, and stigma surrounding abortion, she may have a poor view of herself afterwards. “Women may feel that they are selfish or immoral because they perceive themselves to be defying familial expectations, cultural norms or ideas of motherhood” (Kumar et al., 2009, p. 633). In comparison, if women are part of a community that shows support for their personal decision, they “may experience less grief and anxiety than those who were unsupported by their communities or the larger environment” (Kumar et al., 2009, p. 632). This interrelationship shows how important it is to be socially accepted within society, and how being outcasted may cause real psychological issues within human beings.

Trauma from Unwanted Pregnancy

When looking at the possible realness of “post-abortion syndrome,” it is essential to look more deeply at the root of the issue. This syndrome claims that abortion is an event so traumatic that it may lead to serious psychological effects for women. However, this poses the question: is the abortion the traumatic life event triggering psychological issues, or is it the unwanted pregnancy?

In 2008, the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on Mental Health and Abortion published a report that “concluded ‘that among women who have a single, legal, first-trimester abortion of an unplanned pregnancy … the relative risks of mental health problems are no greater than risks among women who deliver an unplanned pregnancy” (Kaplan, 2009). Furthermore, one study concluded that abortion patients who “had no intention to become pregnant” were significantly less depressed than women whose pregnancy was wanted and “viewed as personally meaningful by the woman” (Adler et al., 1990, p. 42). These research findings indicate the possibility that it is the unplanned/unwanted pregnancy that raises the risk of psychological issues, rather than the actual abortion.  

Abortion is Not Always an Option

Making the choice to get an abortion is a huge decision. Women are forced to decide whether they want to alter their lives by going through pregnancy and bringing a child into the world, or if they want to terminate the fetus and risk the possible side effects. However, for some women, the burden of this choice is not the only difficult part about the situation. Depending on circumstances, even if a woman wants to get an abortion, the likelihood of getting one may be close to impossible. As discussed above, states have been able to pass statutes within their borders that make it difficult for a woman to get an abortion. These legislative barriers include zoning laws, mandatory counseling, waiting periods, and minor consent or notification. On top of these legal obstacles put in place by the state, there may be additional conditions that cause prevention of the procedure. Two large circumstances that may play into a woman’s decision are her geographical location and her financial situation.

Reasons Why Women May Not Be Able to Get an Abortion

Zoning laws and access to abortion providers  .

One large obstacle for women who wish to receive an abortion is the ability to access a provider. As discussed above, some local governments attempt to block abortion providers from residing in an area by using zoning laws, applicable under the police powers given to each state. The use of these zoning ordinances to limit providers can make it extremely difficult for women who want to get an abortion to be able to find a place to receive the procedure within a reasonable geographical range.

A couple current examples of the use of these zoning laws to limit access to abortion providers can be seen in Manassas, Virginia, and San Antonio, Texas. In 2015, both the city’s made amendments to their zoning codes that consequentially affected the access to abortion providers.

In Manassas, Virginia, the amendment “[requires] medical care facilities, including abortion clinics, to obtain a special use permit that would be granted only after a period of public comment and City Council approval.” This means that any new clinics trying to open in Manassas would need to obtain the permit, as well as any current clinics that want to relocate or make expanding renovations. Due to the fact that the city’s council is predominantly Republican, the need for their approval may cause a possible barrier for abortion providers (Stein, 2015).

In San Antonio, Texas, a bill was passed in 2013 that required “all facilities that provide abortion services [to] meet the standards of an [ambulatory surgical center] in order to remain in operation.” Then, in 2015, a zoning code amendment was passed that put restrictions on where these centers can be built. Under the new amendment, ASC’s cannot be built in C-1 areas – a level of classified area for commercial use – “without permission from the Zoning Committee and the City Council, both of which will then have to vote on each individual case.” Similar to the amendment made in Manassas, Virginia, these San Antonio zoning laws “effectively [target] any future abortion providers in the city (Cato, 2015).

Access to Abortion Providers

“Most abortions are provided by freestanding clinics,” and “fewer than 5 percent of abortions are performed in hospitals” (Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, 2011, p. 317). As of 2008, only 610 hospitals in the US perform abortions, and 87% of counties do not have an abortion provider. This means that for the women who want an abortion but do not live in that small thirteen-percent that have providers, they must travel outside of their local community to get one. Large organizations such as Planned Parenthood and The National Abortion Federation provide resources for women to help find the closest abortion providers (Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, 2011, pp. 317–318).

Financial Situation and Cost of Abortion

Just like anything in life, the abortion procedure has a cost. According to Planned Parenthood, an abortion can cost anywhere between zero and almost a thousand dollars. Whether it is performed in a clinic or hospital, and is paid for by the patient, insurance, or government funding, someone is paying for it in the end. However, the price tag of the procedure is not one-size-fits-all. The cost of an abortion varies on many factors, including where the procedure is taking place or how far along a woman’s pregnancy is.

Another factor is the type of abortion a woman decides to get, as discussed above. Due to the fact that these abortions include various differences: where they take place (home vs. doctor’s office), what is used (medication vs. instruments), and follow-up care, the cost of the type a woman gets may vary. Further, if a woman has to get an aspiration abortion after the failure of a medication abortion, she is forced to pay for both.

A few final factors that involve the cost of an abortion are whether or not a woman has health insurance and her overall financial situation, which will be further discussed below (Emily @ Planned Parenthood, 2014).

Cost of Abortion: Health Insurance, Income, and Funding

A large factor that plays into the cost of the procedure is whether or not the patient has health insurance. This factor is different from the rest because it does not determine the actual cost of the procedure, but rather how the procedure will be paid for. If she does have health insurance, it may cover some or all of the costs of the abortion. The patient must call her insurance provider to find out about her coverage. If she does not have health insurance, or chooses not to use it to maintain privacy, the patient must pay out of pocket (Emily @ Planned Parenthood, 2014). Depending on her income and/or financial situation, this factor may be debilitating to the woman seeking the abortion and completely prevent her ability to get one. Simply put, if you cannot pay for a service, you cannot receive a service.

One source, The National Network of Abortion Funds, provides a website where women can search their location and find different organizations that may help them with the costs of their abortion (Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, 2011, p. 320). On the “About” page of their website, the NNAF states that some of their member organizations “work with clinics to help pay for [women’s] abortions[s].” Other member organizations offer to help with different factors that may cost the woman, such as childcare, transportation, and/or a place to stay if they had to travel for the abortion ( About: What are Abortion Funds , n.d.).

In some states, the government may offer financial assistance to women through “Medicaid programs [that] use state funds to provide abortion coverage.” However, “twenty state Medicaid programs do not fund abortion under any circumstances.” As mentioned above, the Hyde Amendment prohibits state Medicaid programs to use federal funds to help pay for abortions. This barrier contributes to a lack of funding, which in turn hurts poor women who are desperately searching for a way to pay for the procedure (Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, 2011, pp. 341–342).

Furthermore, if the domestic gag rule takes effect, this will affect the range of choices for women without other health insurance. As discussed above, the Trump Administration announced in February 2019 “that it will bar organizations that provide abortion referrals from receiving federal family planning money” (Belluck, 2019). This gag rule affects places such as Planned Parenthood, which provides many reproductive health services to women who cannot afford health insurance.

Relation Between Geographical Location and Financial Situation

Individually, the possible geographical and financial obstacles of receiving an abortion are difficult to deal with. However, for some women, the issues may intersect. Take for example a woman who is financially struggling and must travel over 30 miles to reach the nearest clinic that performs abortions. Not only must this woman travel a far distance to undergo the procedure, but she is also forced to worry about all the costs associated with it. First, there is the cost of the actual abortion. Then, there are the travel costs to get to the clinic and back home, whether it be gas money or public transportation fees. If she has children and does not want to bring them with her, there is the possible cost of childcare while absent. If her state has a mandatory waiting period, she is forced to pay these transportation and childcare fees a second time when going back to the clinic to get the procedure. If she gets a medication abortion and requires a follow-up appointment a week later, she has to pay them a third time. On top of all of this, there is the cost of her time. The time it takes for her to travel the far distance, possibly multiple times, is time she could have spent at her job making the money she desperately needs.  

Physical, Sociological, and Psychological Effects on Women Denied Abortions

For women who seek an abortion but cannot receive one due to factors mentioned above, there may be certain physical, sociological, and/or psychological effects.

For women who are unable to get an abortion, the physical effect is obvious: pregnancy. If cannot abort the fetus inside of her, she is forced to continue the pregnancy, and carry the child inside of her until it is delivered. According to a website powered by the American Academy of Family Physicians, being pregnant comes with many physical effects. These effects include, but are not limited to, tiredness, nausea, frequent urination, lightheadedness, heartburn, and vaginal discharge and bleeding ( Changes in Your Body During Pregnancy , 2009). Two of the largest, and most obvious, physical changes with pregnancy are belly and breast growth. As the fetus develops into a fully functioning baby, it grows, causing a woman’s uterus and belly to grow in size as well. Breasts also physically change during pregnancy to allow a woman to breastfeed her child once born, as discussed earlier.

Episiotomies

In addition to pregnancy, the actual delivery of a child may bear its own physical effects on a woman’s body. One of the most common of these effects is the use of an episiotomy during childbirth. “An episiotomy is a surgical enlargement of the vagina by means of an incision in the perineum, the skin and muscles between the rectum and vagina.” This is done “as the baby’s head is crowning,” in order to “enlarge the vagina so that forceps [can] be inserted high into the pelvis, thereby assisting in the birth of the baby.” Aside from the physical incision made to the body, episiotomies may lead to further physical effects, such as postpartum pain, infection at the site of the incision, problems with having intercourse, and vaginal swelling. One article published in 1995 stated that “The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) estimates that as many as 90 percent of women giving birth to their first child in a hospital will have an episiotomy.” Although this number may have changed throughout the years, this statistic shows how significant episiotomies have been within the last twenty years (Griffin, 1995).  

Financial Instability

One factor that may motivate a woman to seek an abortion is her current financial situation. In a 2004 study discussed above, 73% of participants listed “can’t afford a baby now” as their reason for abortion, with sub-reasons including that the woman was unemployed, could not leave her job to care for the child, and/or could not even afford the basic necessities of life (Finer et al., 2005, p. 113). While many women identify with these reasons, not all are able to receive the abortion they want. In these cases, the intense burden of financial instability becomes a possible reality, with the newly added cost of raising a child. While there is the option of giving the child up for adoption, that is not the right choice for every woman.

One study published in 2018 looked at the socioeconomic outcomes of women who were denied wanted abortions compared to women who were able to get them. Similar to the study discussed earlier, done by BioMed Central Women’s Health, this study looked at data collected during the Turnaway Study . After analyzing the collected data, it was determined that women who were unable to get the abortion they sought were more likely to “experience economic hardship and insecurity lasting years” (Foster et al., 2018, p. 407). More specifically, compared to women who were able to receive a wanted abortion, women who were unable were “more likely to be in poverty for 4 years after denial,” and “less likely to be employed full time” six months after denial (Foster et al., 2018, p. 407). These results are an example of how following through with an unintended pregnancy as a result of being unable to receive an abortion can have a negative sociological impact a woman, pushing them into severe financial struggle.

Welfare Stigma

As discussed earlier, when something deviates from the widely accepted social norms and stereotypes within society, it is stigmatized, creating further stereotypes. One of the generally accepted ideas about America is that it is a land full of equal opportunity for everyone. “Most Americans believe that anyone can succeed [through] hard work, and that those at the bottom of the social heap have not tried enough to make it.” Due to this, being impoverished and receiving help from public assistance programs has become a stigmatized act. This is especially true in the case of women who face financial struggles as a result of unintended pregnancy. People who are impoverished due to a physical or mental disability are less stigmatized than those whose financial dependency on the government results from something that is perceived as a “personal failure, such as [being an] unwed mother.” These stigmas further perpetuate stereotypes on poor people and women as whole groups (Goodban, 1985, pp. 403–404).

One study aimed to further examine this social stigma, interviewing one hundred black single mothers who were getting assistance from public programs. The women were asked a variety of questions about being on welfare, such as why they were on it and their feelings surrounding it. Many of the women “believed that they were on welfare for temporary, uncontrollable reasons having to do with their situation, rather than personal characteristics.” Out of the one hundred women, “sixty-one said they were sometimes ashamed of their welfare status” (Goodban, 1985, pp. 414–418). The results of this study exemplify the severity of stigma and stereotypes within society.

Psychological Effects  

Postpartum Depression

One of the most well-known psychological effects of giving birth to a child is postpartum depression. This form of depression is experienced by women in “the postpartum period, which is increasingly viewed as up to 1 year after childbirth” (O’Hara, 2009, p. 1258). Furthermore, women who give birth to a child resulting from an unintended pregnancy have a possible higher risk of developing postpartum depression compared to women who gave birth to a child that was planned and wanted. One study in North Carolina analyzed a group of 550 women who were 12 months postpartum for the possibility of depression. This group included a mixture of women whose pregnancies were intended (64%) and women whose pregnancies were unintended (36%). The results concluded that “depression was more common among women with unintended pregnancy [12%] than women with intended pregnancy [3%]” (Mercier et al., 2013, pp. 1116–1118). Although every individual is different, the possibility of developing postpartum depression is a real consequence that may affect women who give birth to a child. These results imply that this fact may be especially true for women whose pregnancies were unwanted and/or unintended, which can include women who wanted to get an abortion but were unable to. Postpartum depression has also been linked to further psychological, such as suicidal ideation and self-harm (Coker et al., 2017).

When looking at whether being unable to get an abortion has a psychological effect on women, it is important to note the intersectionality between sociology and psychology. Social norms and stereotypes within society can cause people to become outcasted if they do not act in accordance.

As discussed above, being impoverished and receiving help from government programs is stigmatized in American society. In the study that examined one hundred black single mothers on welfare, over half of the participants admitted to sometimes being ashamed of their status. This shame stemmed from the feeling that “they could not seem to succeed no matter how hard they tried, and [were] stigmatized by a society that devalues the poor.” Consequentially, this shame and guilt resulted in a handful of the participants experiencing low self-esteem (Goodban, 1985, p. 418). All of these feelings circle back to the socially normative belief in America that poor people do not work hard and accept government handouts, and that is why they are poor. Aside from guilt and low self-esteem, low socioeconomic status has also been linked as a risk factor for postpartum depression in women who gave birth (O’Hara, 2009, p. 1261).

When comparing women who receive a wanted abortion to women who do not receive a wanted abortion, it is important to note that both may suffer from physical, sociological, and psychological effects. A summary of the effects that were discussed can be found below.

Figure 3: Possible Effects of Receiving and Not Receiving a Wanted Abortion

IV. Conclusion

Abortion is an issue that has been relevant for over two hundred years. Before and during most of the 1800s, certain abortions were legal, and not uncommon. However, a woman was only allowed to seek an abortion before “quickening,” which was when she could feel the fetus moving. Before this, a fetus was not equivalated with a human life. Women who wished to abort their fetus were given certain drugs that would induce the process, and if those failed, a woman could visit a medical practitioner to remove the fetus.

Although abortions done before quickening were legal, they were not an entirely safe practice, and often ended in women dying. As a result, in the 1820s-40s, states began passing various laws in an attempt to control the procedure, which included outlawing the abortion inducing drugs (Connecticut, Missouri, and Illinois), the instruments used in the procedure (Missouri), or the actual procedure itself (Maine).

Within the late 1840s-50s, the American Medical Association was founded and began a crusade against abortion, headed by Dr. Horatio Storer. The Association, made up of licensed physicians, aimed to tarnish society’s view of abortion by painting it as a dangerous and immoral procedure. This anti-abortion movement gained traction, and the social shift towards the nonacceptance of abortion began to reflect in state laws. Beginning in the 1860s, states began passing legislation to criminalize the procedure of abortion and continued to do so throughout the early-to-mid-1900s.

In 1873, Congress went even deeper into the issue of women’s reproductive health and outlawed the importation and distribution of any information or drug that aimed to prevent conception with the passing of the Comstock Law. However, with much help from the feminist movements fighting for contraception, this was later declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 (married persons), and then Eisenstadt v. Baird in 1972 ( single persons).

In 1973, the Supreme Court struck down all state laws criminalizing abortion with the landmark case of Roe v. Wade , which made the procedure federally legal. Despite seeming like a victory for reproductive health, this federal ruling only set a legislative basis for states. Within their own borders, states are responsible for the abortion statutes, and can create certain barriers making it hard for women to obtain an abortion. These barriers include zoning laws to limit the areas where abortion providers can reside, mandatory counseling and/or waiting periods for women who want an abortion, and parental consent or notification requirements for minors. These state barriers are all federally legal under the 1989 ruling of Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey. Some states even went as far as to implement “trigger laws” that will automatically ban abortion if Roe v. Wade ever gets overturned.

On top of these state-by-state barriers, there are also federal barriers that prevent women easy access to an abortion. In 1976, the Hyde Amendment was passed to prevent federal funds from being used by state Medicaid programs to help low-income people get abortions, and it is still in effect today. When President Trump took office, he re-implemented a global “gag rule” that prevents any international non-governmental organizations that perform or promote abortion services from receiving funding from the United States Agency for International Development. In 2019, the Trump Administration implemented a “gag rule” within the US, barring organizations that provide abortion referrals from receiving federal funds. However, despite the possible attempts by state and federal law to limit a woman’s ability to get an abortion, the medical procedure is still performed across the nation.

In the end, each individual’s story is different. Your circumstances are different, your reasoning is different, your journey is different, and your aftermath is different. All of the research in the world cannot predict how a woman is going to be affected by either receiving an abortion or being unable to receive an abortion. The most common reasons and effects of these two situations can be summarized in the tables below.

Figure 4: Common Reasons Why a Woman May Want to Receive an Abortion vs. Common Reasons Why a Woman May Not Be Able to Receive an Abortion

Cases Cites :

Eisenstadt v. Baird , 405 U.S. 438 (1972).  

Griswold v. Connecticut , 381 U.S. 479 (1965).

Roe v. Wade , 410 U.S. 113 (1973)  

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Review of David Boonin, Beyond Roe: Why Abortion Should be Legal Even if the Fetus is a Person (Oxford University Press, 2019)

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• Volume 15 , pages 535–544, ( 2021 )

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Should abortion be legal even if the human fetus is a person? “Person” is intended here in its philosophical sense, to mean a being possessed of equal moral standing and rights as you and me. Most importantly of all, a person is a being with the fundamental right to life. The question about what follows morally and legally when fetal personhood is presumed has occupied a sizeable part of abortion ethics for some time. Far and away the most influential reflection on that question was the philosopher Judith Thomson’s “violinist analogy argument” in defence of abortion rights. Footnote 1 There, Thomson argued that abortion is morally defensible even if it is true that the fetus is a rights-holding person. Her argument rested on a view of pregnancy as supererogatory, and, conversely, of abortion as the mere refusal to be a good Samaritan. Though it might be laudable to do so, no one is morally required to surrender her very body in order to keep another person alive for nine months, Thomson claimed. Ergo, even if fetuses are persons, women are not morally obliged to provide them with life-saving bodily aid by gestating them. They are morally permitted to refuse that bodily aid by means of abortion. They are permitted to choose not to be good Samaritans.

Thomson memorably posed this argument through an analogy in which you are kidnapped by a musical society and hooked up to an unconscious violinist whose kidneys are failing, and who needs to be plugged into your own kidneys for the next nine months in order to survive. After that, he will detach, and you can go your separate ways. As fate would have it, you are the only kidney match. Certainly, Thomson argued, it would be admirable for you to undertake this burden, but surely you do not have to. You are morally permitted to reach around your back and unplug yourself, knowing that the violinist will sadly die, she claimed, confident that the reader will share this judgement. Well, just so with pregnancy and abortion. I think of this as the “good Samaritan view” of abortion rights, since the kernel of the argument is that abortion is no more than the refusal to be a good Samaritan. The violinist analogy is aimed at making the moral permissibility of abortion difficult to refute, including if we presuppose fetal personhood. The violinist is certainly a person, and yet you may unplug. If one is permitted to unplug the violinist, knowing he will die, why is one not permitted to expel a fetus, knowing the same?

In Beyond Roe: Why Abortion Should be Legal Even if the Fetus is a Person (Oxford University Press, 2019), David Boonin presents an engaging restatement of this way of thinking about abortion, citing Thomson as its intellectual progenitor, and defending it against the more prominent objections to stack up in the years since Thomson’s watershed intervention. In concert with Thomson, Boonin’s main proposition is as the title makes plain: that the right to abortion is defensible in moral and, even more assuredly, in legal terms, even if the fetus is a person with the right to life. He writes in the preface:

My main goal in this book is to take the argument that Thomson pioneered in the moral context, adapt it to the legal context, and use it to argue that abortion should be legal even if the fetus is a person. (x)

Like Thomson, Boonin argues that abortion amounts to the refusal to provide an embryo or a fetus with life-sustaining aid that a pregnant person cannot be morally required to provide. Certainly, he claims, no one ought to be forced by law to provide that bodily support. Emulating Thomson’s strategy, Boonin anchors his argument on an extended analogue. Unlike Thomson’s hypothetical violinist, though, Boonin’s is a real life case, which even found its way before a court. The case concerned an American man, Robert McFall, and his cousin, David Shimp. McFall had been diagnosed with aplastic anaemia, a life-threatening condition which threatened to soon take his life if he did not receive a bone marrow transplant. Initial tests indicated that McFall’s cousin, David Shimp, was a potential match. But Shimp did not wish to donate his bone marrow in order to save McFall. In light of the refusal, McFall brought a legal action, effectively asking the court to force Shimp to donate. In McFall v. Shimp , that action was summarily dismissed by the presiding Judge Flaherty. Footnote 2 ‘Flaherty’s basic point was simple:’, writes Boonin, ‘it would be wrong for the state to force Shimp to give McFall the bone marrow he needed. I’ll bet you agree with Judge Flaherty about this.’ (4).

In the first part of the book, Boonin draws out the main lesson of McFall v. Shimp , and seeks to show that if the reader agrees with that principle and the judge’s decision in that case, she must, perforce, agree that abortion should remain legal even if the fetus is a person. The main lesson of the case, Boonin takes it, is that the right to life does not entail the right to the use of another person’s body to stay alive. McFall definitely possessed the right to life. Still, he could not demand the use of Shimp’s bone marrow in order to save his life. And certainly, we should think, the state ought not to force Shimp to make that bodily sacrifice. ‘[B]eing a person doesn’t give you the right to use another person’s bone marrow even if you need to use it.’, Boonin writes (8).

Boonin sets out to establish that the same analysis applies to abortion on the assumption that the fetus is a person. If you believe that Shimp ought not to be forced to donate his bone marrow to McFall, then you should hold that the state ought not to force women to provide life-sustaining bodily aid to fetuses through gestation. But this it would do if it prohibited abortion, it is argued. He traces a number of different abortion scenarios, inviting the reader to presume in each that the fetus, like McFall, really is a person (amusingly, the fetuses are even given names, such as “Al” and “Bob” to help lock that presumption in place). Despite their various features, Boonin claims that all of these abortions are subsumed by the basic principle of McFall v. Shimp .

The second part of the book tackles a cache of objections to this initial argument, which largely proceed by asserting morally relevant disanalogies that may well hold between McFall v. Shimp and the abortion situation. Perhaps a pregnant woman is responsible for the situation that has now arisen, or could be said to have consensually risked pregnancy (both non-issues in McFall v. Shimp ). Perhaps the precise way in which abortion causes fetal death raises distinct moral issues. Does it change things that a woman stands in a relation of biological parenthood to her fetus? And so on.

In the final part, Boonin argues that if you agree with the decision in McFall v. Shimp , you ought to hold not only that abortion prohibitions are illicit, but also that numerous restrictions on abortion access are indefensible as a matter of justice. Among the restrictions he addresses directly are mandatory counselling, waiting periods, and ultrasound requirements, all of which are in operation in some American states.

The importance of the entire ‘good Samaritan’ strain of abortion defence is patently apparent. On a typical reckoning, the philosophical personhood of the fetus is deeply inimical to abortion rights. This is because, while unwanted pregnancy no doubt imposes severe hardships on women, it is hard to make the case that homicide is a proportionate method of avoiding them in almost all cases. In morality and law, homicide is justified only in the direst of circumstances. Considering this, it would appear that everything in the abortion rights battle depends on the correct answer to the personhood question. Needless to say, though, the conditions for philosophical personhood are deeply (maybe even essentially) contested. If the permissibility of abortion can, somehow, be maintained in the face of prenatal personhood, we can spare ourselves grappling with the thorny question about the moral status of the fetus—and, indeed, about what confers personhood universally—on the path to defending abortion rights.

The good Samaritan argument has both moral and legal analogues. While Thomson was primarily concerned with establishing the moral permissibility of abortion, Boonin more emphatically sets out to make the case for the legal right to abort a fetus-person. Footnote 3 On both scores, by grounding his version of the good Samaritan argument on a real life case, Boonin’s account has the relative virtue of being slightly closer to earth than Thomson’s, where we might worry that the sheer bizarreness of the scenario makes it difficult to formulate reliable judgements. McFall v. Shimp actually happened, and Boonin is surely correct to suppose that its decision will be endorsed by most people. Relying on readers’ judgements about that case is hence a solid departure point for further argument.

Admittedly, this advantage is diluted each time the original case is amended to something more outlandish so as to account for a possible morally relevant disanalogy with abortion. I am less sure, for instance, what the correct legal and moral response is where Shimp begins the scenario connected up to a ‘bone marrow transferring machine’ which is slowly extracting his bone marrow and transferring it to McFall, or where McFall turns out to be Shimp’s offspring, than I am about the original case. This “changing-the-case” strategy—a staple of contemporary moral philosophy—is the argumentative method of choice for most of the book, and McFall v. Shimp undergoes multiple emendations to press the main thesis in the face of objections. For example, perhaps we are unsure that McFall v. Shimp applies equally to abortions in which the woman was in some way responsible in becoming pregnant, say, by engaging in consensual sex and forgoing contraceptive use. In that case, we should simply ask ourselves how things ought to stand in an amended case where Shimp is somehow responsible for the situation in which he is now connected up to McFall and already donating his bone marrow, the cessation of which will spell McFall’s death—maybe he went tearing around McFall’s hospital room in full knowledge that he might trip on the slippery floor and wind up stuck on the ‘bone marrow transferring machine’ (24). If we remain convinced that the law ought not to force Shimp to remain hooked up, his negligence notwithstanding, the disanalogy doesn’t bite.

The doubt always lingers, though, that not every morally salient feature of the pregnancy situation can be adequately captured by a McFall v. Shimp Redux. And none, surely, can capture the combined force of everything that seems to matter in this domain. How would it change our moral evaluations of McFall and Shimp’s case if people donating bone marrow to their cousins had been the method of bringing new humans into existence since time immemorial; if our private, social, and working lives were structured against the backdrop of this possibility, and even sat in expectation of it; if the act of donation had come to be considered (rightly or wrongly) as a pivotal aspect of the human experience, but one that also imposed disproportionate social and physical burdens upon the donors, an already disadvantaged class of citizens? It is unlikely that any tweaking of McFall v. Shimp can replicate all the realities which inform our moral response to the abortion problem, and, indeed, against the backdrop of which those moral sensibilities are developed and finessed to begin with. Perhaps the misgivings some have about the methodology which characterises Beyond Roe are not entirely without merit, then.

This critical perspective having been duly noted, Boonin’s constant appeal to intuitions about cases, changing the case in response to objections, and confidently escorting the reader from one conclusion to the next (“if the McFall v. Shimp principle applies to X abortion scenario, then it should also apply to Y abortion scenario”), makes for a readable and compelling discussion, well suited to the aims of the book and its intended wide readership. The arguments are elegantly simple and straightforward; the writing has a crisp, conversational style, and the book moves along at a good pace, with each concise chapter devoted to progressing the argument in one small step, or refuting an objection with little ceremony. Boonin clearly takes pains to make the book suitable for those unfamiliar with abortion ethics literature and the philosophically novice. As he states in the preface, the aim is for the book to be ‘informal and accessible’ (xii), and in this he succeeds, with a minor reservation about some parts in which the appeal to yet more “cases” feels like more of a hindrance than a help. The book does not presume any familiarity with either law or philosophy and is pleasingly free of disciplinary jargon.

Much of the book is in fact a précis of arguments more elaborately made by Boonin in his 2002 book A Defense of Abortion , repackaged and simplified for the general reader. Footnote 4 In the earlier book, Boonin devotes an impressive chapter of over 200 pages to the systematic defence of Thomson’s version of the good Samaritan argument. The chapter contains the most rigorous and robust defence of the view that abortion is morally permissible regardless of fetal personhood of which I am aware (my own copy is dog-eared and underlined throughout). Beyond Roe distils the essence of these arguments, and of the good Samaritan thesis, in a way that will be particularly useful for students or for those encountering philosophical abortion arguments for the first time. But it also has plenty to offer the more inducted, reminding us of the various pulse points in this corner of the discussion, and of where the exchanges will likely bottom out. The flip side of the book’s punchy style is that there is little breathing space to expand arguments and attend to nuances. This can hardly be a complaint in the context, and it is only once or twice that the discussion suffers for it, by my lights. One possible example of where it does is around the discussions of sex-selective and fetal abnormality (or “disability”) abortions—both tricky cases for one or other side of the abortion divide—where no reference is made to some salient moral and legal considerations beyond the so-called fetal-maternal conflict.

The timing of Beyond Roe , at what appears to be a critical juncture for the abortion right in the United States, cannot be a coincidence. After recent personnel shifts on the US Supreme Court, Roe v. Wade , along with its determination against fetal personhood, is seemingly more precarious now than it has been in decades. The landmark decision in Roe v. Wade is familiar to most people as the case in which women’s constitutional right to terminate their pregnancies was first recognised, Footnote 5 Fewer people are aware that Justice Blackmun premised the court’s majority judgment on the denial of the fetus’s personhood under the Constitution. Women’s right to privacy did afford them the qualified right to abortion, it was held, but could not have done if the fetus were a recognised person under the law, and entitled to the constitutional protections that triggered. Had the Constitution recognised prenatal persons, the abortion right would fail, Justice Blackmun reasoned, ‘for the fetus’s right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the amendment’. Footnote 6

In so holding, Roe embraced the orthodox view of abortion ethics set out above: that the right to abortion is incompatible with the personhood of the fetus. As the antithesis to this view, the good Samaritan argument has increased legal and political relevance in any climate where the ascription of legal personhood to the fetus is a real possibility. Boonin articulates a basis for the abortion right that is impervious to a finding of fetal personhood. It is in this sense that his argument goes “beyond Roe”. By pre-empting a legal turn affirming the constitutional personhood of the fetus, and illustrating how the abortion right could be defended consistently with it, the book is a welcome example of what philosophical legal advocacy can look like.

Garnering the reader’s sympathy for the main principle about the limits of positive bodily duties (the ‘lesson’ of McFall v. Shimp ) is always going to be the easier part for the good Samaritan argument. To reiterate, the principle is that the right to life does not entail the right to use another person’s body in order to live. This is because the right to life does not ground a correlative duty on others to keep someone alive by such means, and no one should be forced to undertake burdens they are not morally required to bear. (This is not to deny that there are morally egregious refusals to save: Thomson herself admits that someone who refused to sustain the violinist for merely one hour, when that is all it would take to save him, would be ‘morally indecent’. Footnote 7 )

Few would probably object thus far. The harder sell is always to show that the principle applies to pregnancy and abortion the same way it applies to McFall v. Shimp , and that morally relevant disanalogies do not knock it out of the arena. Boonin documents some of the main objections along these lines and provides a good demonstration of how someone defending the good Samaritan view could defuse them, the persuasiveness of which it is for the reader to evaluate. A cluster of those objections raise the possibility that the positive obligations a woman might owe to her fetus do not match up with McFall v. Shimp . This is the tenor of the responsibility objection (pp. 69–83), which points out that pregnant women can be responsible for the fetus’s situation of need in a way that is not true of Shimp vis-à-vis McFall. And it is trite that greater responsibility grounds greater obligations.

But a more fundamental objection targets the very framing of the abortion issue in terms of whether woman has a positive duty to gestate a fetus. On the good Samaritan view, the ethical question is whether one person’s positive obligations of assistance extend to proffering the use of her body for someone else’s survival, the answer being that, certainly in abortion, they do not. Yet an obvious objection is that abortion is not a positive obligations problem to begin with, but rather a problem about when one is permitted to breach the negative duty not to kill. We may be satisfied that Shimp merely allowed McFall to die when he refused to donate his bone marrow. In that case, the immanent moral issue is only whether Shimp ought to have saved McFall or not. But it seems that when “Alice” aborts “Al”, she (or her doctors) is positively killing Al. If so, the good Samaritan analysis is in some trouble. In both law and morality, the circumstances in which we are permitted to kill outright are far stricter than those in which we are permitted to refuse to save. It doesn’t follow, then, from the fact that Shimp has no duty to rescue McFall that Alice is permitted to kill Al to spare herself similar (or, even, worse) burdens. This is the familiar “killing v letting die” objection to Thomson’s original defence of abortion.

As Boonin notes, it looks as though only some types of abortions, such as those which expel a pre-viable fetus from the uterus without attacking it directly, are readily analysable in terms of refusing to save, on a par with Shimp’s omission (109). Other abortion methods better resemble direct killing which, presuming fetal personhood, would make the issue one of homicide. Homicide may yet be justified, of course, but its road to justification is not easy.

Boonin’s general strategy against the killing v letting die objection, only really glimpsed at here, is to press the implications of special constraints on positive killing where they most rub. For example, most people, Boonin says, will likely think it matters not whether an abortion is carried out by dilation and curettage, a method that directly kills the fetus in the process of extraction, or instead by hysterotomy, where a pre-viable fetus is removed from the uterine environment it needs to survive, given that the result, fetal death, is the same. Added pressure can be applied using another amended version of McFall v. Shimp . Let us change the case again, Boonin suggests, to have it that Shimp is already unhappily hooked up to the bone-marrow transferring machine, only this time it is not enough to free Shimp to simply sever the connection; to free Shimp, a doctor must kill McFall outright, albeit painlessly in his sleep (114). If you think the doctor ought to be able to do this, Boonin argues, then you can have no objection to a mode of abortion that directly kills Al the fetus. More than this, though, you should have no objection to the direct killing of McFall in the amended case:

Since McFall has no right to the life support he’s receiving and would be dead if he weren’t receiving it, you may well think Shimp is entitled to withdraw that support even if doing so involves taking McFall’s life. Since McFall has no right to remain alive at Shimp’s expense after all, doing so would not make McFall any worse off than he has the right to be.’ (115–116)

But that cannot be a full and correct statement of a condition for permissible killing. It is not the case that one is permitted to kill just whenever the killing is done so as to liberate oneself from a burden one would not have been duty-bound to offer, or when the killing will not leave the victim any worse off than she has a right to be, vis-à-vis the killer. Let us assume I have no duty to save you from rough sleeping and death from exposure by handing you over the contents of my bank account. Footnote 8 Does that mean I am permitted to kill you so as to prevent you from commandeering those funds by force? Unlike Boonin, I am less sure we can read directly off a person’s rights to life-saving assistance the extent of her rights against being killed so as to spare someone that that assistance.

Anyone unimpressed by the idea of an intrinsic moral difference between killing and letting die will no doubt deny that Alice cannot abort Al by dilation and curettage if she can abort by hysterotomy. This may seem all the more the case when the outcome for the fetus is the same either way but where the latter “letting die” method is more physically costly to Alice. Footnote 9 Yet those who embrace strict deontological constraints on positive killing know that it will sometimes prove costly on other metrics of goodness. This line of reply only seems to beg the question against the killing/letting die distinction wholesale. We know that the difference is of moral consequence: my moral duty to save people from starvation through charitable donations is nothing like my moral duty not to poison those same people. If the distinction matters morally and intrinsically, why does it not matter here? That is the challenge.

If the morality and legality of abortion cannot, ultimately, fall to be treated as a positive obligations problem, we may find ourselves directed back to the more fundamental matter of fetal moral status. This brings me around, finally, to what motivates the good Samaritan thesis and the entire strain of personhood-bypassing abortion argument. ‘The traditional approach of arguing about fetal personhood doesn’t appear to be working too well’, Boonin writes toward the beginning of the book (6). By what standards, though? One could well say the same thing about the good Samaritan view, given how little favour it has found among those who really do avow prenatal personhood. Footnote 10 The personhood question is intractable insofar as it has not yielded universal agreement about the fetus. Is this different, in this respect, from any other core moral dispute that bears on our legal rights? (Consider: there is not yet universal agreement that the institution of property rights is anything other than state-sanctioned theft.) It is a virtue of the good Samaritan defence of abortion, Boonin says, that it is not susceptible to sorites-type anxieties about where the exact threshold of personhood lies, or about how we are to morally distinguish abortion from infanticide, although he acknowledges that personhood-denying defences of abortion do field answers to these quandaries. And indeed they do. Is it much harder to persuade someone of those answers than to persuade her that abortion is tantamount to the morally permissible refusal to proffer life-saving bodily aid?

Asking what follows about abortion rights if the fetus is indeed a person is without doubt a revealing and worthwhile exercise. Even so, our imaginations tend to buckle under the strain of that presumption at certain points—hence, perhaps, the need to assist by giving the fetuses names (“Al”, “Bob”, “Daniel”), and help animate them as persons. What moral duties do we owe to abstract “persons” that are nothing like persons as we ordinarily conceive of them: without their separateness, their embedment in social life, their transparent vulnerability and emotion? This is perhaps not a question our moral sensibilities have been honed to answer. To object that it chafes too much to speak of the fetuses “Al” and “Bob” invites the obvious retort that one has simply stopped playing the intellectual game. Still, finding the game unplayable on these terms can be telling in itself.

A minor theme of Beyond Roe is the explanatory power of the good Samaritan defence of abortion rights over personhood-denying accounts. Footnote 11 But the personhood-denying defence has explanatory heft of its own. I end by noting just one way in which this is so. Like Thomson, Boonin accepts that the defence of abortion he outlines in Beyond Roe is more narrowly what has been called a defence of extraction . Boonin does not here assert a specific right to kill a fetus-person, only the right to end gestational support knowing this will spell fetal death (47–48). This poses clear problems for post-viability abortions, at which point the fetus could alternatively be extracted alive, still ending the woman’s bodily support. If a woman can expel a fetus alive, the good Samaritan argument does not hold that she is entitled to insist on fetal death, it seems.

Boonin regards this problem as being of limited practical import given how few abortions occur past the point of fetal viability. But recent developments in artificial womb technology threaten to force the issue of whether it is abortion or extraction (or both) that is ethically and legally licit. Whilst still exploratory, these developments hint at new possibilities for early fetal, and even embryonic, survival outside of the uterine environment. Suppose that an unwanted ten-week embryo could be removed from a pregnant woman’s womb and artificially gestated though to maturity. Where does this leave the abortion right on the good Samaritan defence? If we think the woman still ought to be able to control her procreative destiny by intentionally ending the life of that embryo, it is not the good Samaritan argument which will tell us this is so. What this action amounts to in moral terms, and how it should be treated under the law, will surely then depend on the intrinsic moral status of that embryo. Is it a creature whose life we are permitted to end so as to secure the all-round wellbeing of a more developed human being, or is it not?

With possibilities such as ectogenesis on the horizon, the question about the moral status of the fetus cannot be easily batted aside (and it would be remiss not to mention here that Boonin has elsewhere advanced developed views about moral status before birth Footnote 12 ). Changing legal and bio-technological landscapes will likely continue to press on both core questions in abortion ethics: is the fetus a rights-holding person, and, if so, what is the normative relevance of that? What Boonin presents here is a perspicuous and engaging treatment of the second issue.

J. J. Thomson, ‘A Defense of Abortion’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 1:1 (Autumn 1971): 47–66.

McFall v. Shimp , 10 Pa. D. & C. 3d 90 (July 26, 1978).

Although, one might think the claim about legal permissibility is implied in Thomson’s version of the argument. It is passé to think that plenty of morally sub-optimal behaviour is not the law’s proper concern, and even less legitimate, we should therefore think, for the law to enforce positive assistance over and above what even morality requires us to do.

D. Boonin, A Defense of Abortion (Cambridge University Press, 2002).

Roe v. Wade 410 U.S. 113 (1973).

Thomson, ‘A Defense of Abortion’, 59.

I am by no means convinced that I would have no such duty.

Boonin discusses this issue at 117–119.

I have yet to come across someone who subscribes to prenatal personhood and yet regards abortion as morally and legally defensible in broadly good Samaritan terms.

For instance, he suggests, it explains why there is in fact no inconsistency in defending abortion rights while maintaining that fetuses can be adjudged victims of crimes, through, inter alia, ‘feticide’ laws. At a glance, feticide laws seem to ‘stand or fall together’ with the prohibition of abortion, all depending on one’s view of prenatal personhood. But the good Samaritan thesis explains why the abortion right could sit alongside feticide laws. The fact that Shimp should not be forced to let McFall use his bone marrow does not mean that McFall should not be treated as a victim if an armed robber comes along and kills him (55).

See: A Defense of Abortion (above).

Boonin, D (2002) A Defense of Abortion (Cambridge University Press)

Boonin, D (2019) Beyond Roe: Why Abortion Should be Legal Even if the Fetus is a Person (Oxford University Press)

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Greasley, K. Review of David Boonin, Beyond Roe: Why Abortion Should be Legal Even if the Fetus is a Person (Oxford University Press, 2019). Criminal Law, Philosophy 15 , 535–544 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-021-09580-x

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Accepted : 29 April 2021

Published : 14 May 2021

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-021-09580-x

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Ethics guide

Arguments in favour of abortion

This article sets out the women's rights arguments that, in certain circumstances, favour abortion.

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Women's rights arguments in favour of abortion, abortion affects women disproportionately, bodily rights, childbearing, freedom and equality, page options.

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Here are some of the women's rights arguments in favour of abortion:

• women have a moral right to decide what to do with their bodies
• the right to abortion is vital for gender equality
• the right to abortion is vital for individual women to achieve their full potential
• banning abortion puts women at risk by forcing them to use illegal abortionists
• the right to abortion should be part of a portfolio of pregnancy rights that enables women to make a truly free choice whether to end a pregnancy

This argument reminds us that even in the abortion debate, we should regard the woman as a person and not just as a container for the foetus. We should therefore give great consideration to her rights and needs as well as those of the unborn.

Pro-choice women's rights activists do not take a casual or callous attitude to the foetus; the opposite is usually true, and most of them acknowledge that choosing an abortion is usually a case of choosing the least bad of several bad courses of action.

Abortion is an important element of women's rights because women are more affected by the abortion debate than men, both individually (if they are considering an abortion) and as a gender.

Pregnancy has an enormous effect on the woman involved. As Sarah Weddington put it to the US Supreme Court in Roe v Wade :

A pregnancy to a woman is perhaps one of the most determinative aspects of her life. It disrupts her body. It disrupts her education. It disrupts her employment. And it often disrupts her entire family life. Sarah Weddington in Roe v Wade

And Mrs Weddington continued:

And we feel that, because of the impact on the woman, this … is a matter which is of such fundamental and basic concern to the woman involved that she should be allowed to make the choice as to whether to continue or to terminate her pregnancy. Sarah Weddington in Roe v Wade

And the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson wrote:

...a great deal turns for women on whether abortion is or is not available. If abortion rights are denied, then a constraint is imposed on women's freedom to act in a way that is of great importance to them, both for its own sake and for the sake of their achievement of equality; and if the constraint is imposed on the ground that the foetus has a right to life from the moment of conception, then it is imposed on a ground that neither reason nor the rest of morality requires women to accept, or even to give any weight at all. Judith Jarvis Thomson

Many people regard the right to control one's own body as a key moral right. If women are not allowed to abort an unwanted foetus they are deprived of this right.

The simplest form of the women's rights argument in favour of abortion goes like this:

• a woman has the right to decide what she can and can't do with her body
• the foetus exists inside a woman's body
• a woman has the right to decide whether the foetus remains in her body
• therefore a pregnant woman has the right to abort the foetus

The issue brings many ideas about human rights into brutally sharp focus.

• every human being has the right to own their own body
• a foetus is part of a woman's body
• therefore that woman has the right to abort a foetus they are carrying

The important US Supreme Court decision in Roe v Wade to some extent supported that view when it ruled that a woman's right to terminate her pregnancy came under the freedom of personal choice in family matters and was protected by the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution.

This leads some people to claim is that it is unethical to ban abortion because doing so denies freedom of choice to women and forces 'the unwilling to bear the unwanted'.

Opponents of this argument usually attack the idea that a foetus is 'part' of a woman's body. They argue that a foetus is not the same sort of thing as a leg or a liver: it is not just a part of a woman's body, but is (to some extent) a separate ' person ' with its own right to life .

A second objection to this argument is that people do not have the complete right to control their bodies. All people are subject to various restrictions on what they do with their bodies - and some of these restrictions (laws against suicide or euthanasia ) are just as invasive.

The women's liberation movement sees abortion rights as vital for gender equality.

They say that if a woman is not allowed to have an abortion she is not only forced to continue the pregnancy to birth but also expected by society to support and look after the resulting child for many years to come (unless she can get someone else to do so).

They argue that only if women have the right to choose whether or not to have children can they achieve equality with men: men don't get pregnant, and so aren't restricted in the same way.

Furthermore, they say, women's freedom and life choices are limited by bearing children, and the stereotypes, social customs, and oppressive duties that went with it.

They also regard the right to control one's own body as a key moral right, and one that women could only achieve if they had were entitled to abort an unwanted foetus.

No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother. Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood

In summary:

• women need free access to abortion in order to achieve full political, social, and economic equality with men
• women need the right to abortion in order to have the same freedoms as men
• women need the right to abortion to have full rights over their own bodies (including the right to decide whether or not to carry a foetus to birth) - without this right they do not have the same moral status as men

The US Supreme Court decision in Roe v Wade , which gave women a right to abortion (under certain conditions) is seen by many as having transformed the status of women in the USA.

This landmark decision... not only protects rights of bodily integrity and autonomy, but has enabled millions of women to participate fully and equally in society. Kathryn Kolbert (1992)

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Abortion Should Be Legal Essay

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Through every choice in life, there is a decision that must follow. Abortion is a woman’s individual choice; therefore, must be a legal part in todays society. Individual rights have an outstanding role in the controversial topic, on whether abortion should become legal in the United States . The individual rights for abortion show rights of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. As well, women should be able to have the choice to choose to have an abortion for several important reasons. The right to make these decisions should lie in the hands of the “mother” to make decisions concerning their own to make decisions concerning their own bodies. In addition, women should be given the choice to have an abortion if they are too young …show more content…

Bringing unwanted children into this world, with the means of improper care and love is restraining the pursuit of happiness in these children. If us as humans don't have the ability to give a child a healthy life; then the point to bring them into this world is not useful and causes lots more problems that should have never erupted in the first place. Should an individual have the obligation to go through a nine month pregnancy, or go through childbirth, or the mental stress of raising or giving away the child? The individual rights a women has are not only for herself, but the child relying on her to live. One of the woman’s most basic freedoms is the right to control her own body and to determine if she bears a child. Only she can determine whether she is emotional, physical, and economic ready at any given time to have and raise a child.(Chicago Women’s Liberation Union) While the common good for abortion is in a recent study, US Supreme Court found that women have better mental health when they have abortion as an option. It also means children are born and raised by parents who wants them and that young teens have a chance to educate themselves and become parents when they are ready. People often think an abortion is a terrible thing, a choice for those irresponsible teenagers that get pregnant while lots of more stressful arguments go into abortion. Thinking of such a

Why Abortion Should Stay Legal Essay

Abortion is the termination of a human being in the womb; currently abortion is legal in Canada, USA, some parts of Europe and many more countries. Many people are against the legalization and many other are with the legalization, many believe that it should stay legal because they believe women should have control over their bodies and they know what is best for their life. There is also many people who are against the legalization of abortion and they believe it should be banned

Should Abortion Be Considered Illegal Essay

Through out the years abortion has become a huge topic in society. Questions often asked such as, “Should abortion be considered illegal?” and “Why isn’t abortion considered as murder?” are still being asked today. There are many people shouting out other absurd questions about abortion, so who's going to answer them? As a United States citizen you have the freedom of speech and liberty. So should a woman’s decision of her body be decided by society and the government?

Abortion Should Stay Legal Essay

Abortion should be a given right to women in the United States. I believe that abortion should stay legal because laws against abortion hurt and even kill women, women who receive abortions are less likely to have mental health problems than women whose abortions have been denied, and a baby shouldn't come into this world unwanted. Firstly, legal professionally-performed abortions reduce injury and death caused by illegal abortions. According to Daniel R. Mishell, Jr., MD, Chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, before abortion was legalized, women would try to perform self-abortions by using coat hangers, knitting needles, or radiator flush, or by going to illegal

Abortion Should Remain Legal Essay

A woman is walking through a dark alley. She has a bag full of cash that she scraped together and is going to see a man who will probably rip her off. This woman is not what you think, she is receiving an illegal abortion by an untrained surgeon. Many have said that abortion is a crime against humanity, taking away the innocent lives of unborn children. Though, the real crime would be to rob women of their rights and well-being. Abortions should stay legal because the absence of legal abortions will mean rise in dangerous illegal abortions, abortions are a woman’s right, and motherhood has a negative effect on women who aren’t ready.

The Morality Of Abortion Diaries By Penny Lane

The answer to the question should abortion be legal is a resounding no. There are always alternatives to abortion, despite whether people acknowledge them or not. This is the case, especially, in instances such as a rape or a cephalopelvic disproportion; the cases where people say there is ambiguity in the morality of abortion. Although this is not the most popular answer among citizens, abortion just has no real reason to be legal. Although there will be much opposition to the claim, when abortion is legal, it allows for selfishness, despite its clear alternative.

Abortion is Wrong Essay

I have always been convinced that abortion should be illegal. I have always been taught to consider that when a fetus (a baby developing inside the stomach) is growing it has feelings, emotions, and physical processes that make him or her alive just like people who have been born. To have an abortion is to kill someone; it is murder. Often, the aftermath of abortion is devastating with guilt, shame, and even death. Since every action has a consequence, I think we should act in righteousness. Abortion is wrong because it endangers a person’s health, creates negative psychological effects, contradicts my convictions, and goes against the Bible.

Essay Abortions Should Be Illegal

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Why are abortions legal? Do the doctors enjoy killing the babies since they can’t fight back or protect themselves? Do you know what the doctors do to the child when they are giving an abortion? Abortions are wrong and should be illegal around the world or at least in the United States.

Essay on Abortion Should Not be Legal in The United States of America

In Roman times, abortion and the destruction of unwanted children was permissible, but as our civilization has aged, it seems that such acts are no longer acceptable by rational human beings.

Abortion is Morally Wrong Essay

Abortion, the termination of pregnancy before the fetus is capable of independent life, can either be spontaneous or induced. It is called "the knowing destruction of the life of an unborn child." (Mass General Laws Chapter 112 Section 12K) When abortion occurs spontaneously, it is called a miscarriage. However, when the loss of a fetus is caused intentionally, it is regarded as a moral issue. Abortion destroys the lives of helpless, innocent children and is illegal in many countries. An estimate of 1.2 million are performed each year. In retrospect, an estimate 38,010,378 innocent children were aborted since 1973 when the process was legalized.

Why Do We Need To Be Legal Abortion Essay

There are more than 40 million abortions per year. Approximately 125,000 abortions happened today. There have been more than 1.3 billion abortions worldwide since 1980. The numbers grow every day. Abortion is the termination of a pregnancy, and in the US, nine out of ten abortions are done in the first twelve weeks of the pregnancy, or first trimester. Very few abortions are done after the sixteenth week of the pregnancy. There are different types of abortions including: manual vacuum suctions curettage, saline, the abortion pill or shot, and several more (Meconi). Women can get receive abortion during the first eight weeks of her pregnancy Pregnancies can be terminate the pregnancy during the third trimester or around 22

Legalization Of Abortion

Abortion is a medical or surgical procedure that ends a pregnancy (Abortion: Opposing Viewpoints in Context). Although the procedure has been legal in the United States since 1973, it has been a highly controversial issue on whether the law granting the legalization of abortion should be overturned, modified, or to remain the same (Abortion: Opposing Viewpoints in Context). A woman’s right to determine when, how, and if she will give birth, are commonly known as reproductive rights (Reproductive Rights: Opposing Viewpoints in Context). Whether she be poor or rich, a minor or an adult, a citizen or not, a woman should have the right to make decisions regarding her own body. If the government were

Should Women Be Able To Legalize Abortion Essay

Should women be able to kill a poor innocent baby? In other words, should women be able to get an abortion? Some individuals are pro-choice and some people are pro-life. Pro-choice followers are individuals who think women should have the opportunity to have an abortion. Pro-life followers are people who think abortion is murder. In the 1900’s, abortion was a felony in most states. According to “State Abortion Laws,” “In 1921, activist Margaret Sanger founded the American Birth Control League, which later became the organization Planned Parenthood.” In the 1960’s, women advocates raised awareness of abortions. Women informed other women that there could be a permanent injury or even death if they get an illegal abortion. “State Abortion Laws” states, “In the 1990’s, Congress passed several laws banning intact dilation and extraction (IDX), a medical procedure also known as “partial-birth abortion”, in which a fetus can be removed intact.” The article “State Abortion Laws” informs readers that abortion laws are different in many states, but most people do agree with abortion.

The Issue Of Legalizing Abortion Essay

The argument surrounding abortion is a very topical issue in our society and dates way back to ancient days. The issue of legalizing abortion is a growing social concern as all life is sacred and valued. However, in recent years there have been two ethical arguments by the Supreme Court in legalizing abortion that of pro-life and pro-choice. Despite the legal acceptance of abortion in some countries, the matter remains an ethical concern (Jones & Chaloner, 2007).

Abortion Is Murder Essay

Today’s society is made up of such an abundant number of controversial issues. One of the most controversial issues being abortion- the act of intentionally termination a pregnancy resulting in the death of the fetus (Kreider, A. personal communication, March 24, 2011). Abortion is both constitutionally and morally wrong, and should be illegal in the United States in all but two cases: if the mother was raped (and pregnancy was as a result of the rape) or if the mother’s life would be put in endangerment by the pregnancy. Abortion is murder at any stage of pregnancy, and acts against the U.S. Constitution. Not only does abortion harm innocent babies, but abortion also rises the risk of medical complications for the mother. Majority of

Should Abortion Be Illegal? Essay

Did you know that right now in the United States some people think abortion should be illegal and the choice of women to choose what to do about their own bodies and pregnancies is being considered getting taken away from them? Abortion is a medical procedure that terminates pregnancy. It is usually done during the first twelve months of pregnancy, called the first trimester. Abortion has been legal ever since 1973 after the Roe v. Wade court case. This court case overturned all state laws in the United States restricting a woman’s access to abortion procedures during the first trimester and second trimester only in emergency cases. Abortion should be legal so women are free to choose what to do with their own bodies.

Abortion bans are changing what it means to be young in America

Associate Professor of Health Behavior and Biological Sciences, University of Michigan

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Julie Maslowsky receives funding from the National Institutes of Health.

University of Michigan provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation US.

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Adolescence and young adulthood is a time of identity formation, when young people figure out who they are and who they want to be. One of the ways they do this is by considering the world around them, paying attention to social issues and starting to understand their society and their place in it. Laws and policies signal to young people what society thinks of their value, their role in society and their opportunities for the future.

But the experience of growing up in the post-Roe v. Wade era looks very different from that before the 50-year precedent was overturned in 2022 .

Following the Dobbs v. Jackson Supreme Court decision, more than half of U.S. adolescents, ages 13-19, now live in a state with severely restricted or no legal abortion access . As a result, today’s young people are coming of age in what one expert in health law and bioethics has termed an “ era of rights retractions .”

I am a developmental psychologist and population health scientist who studies adolescent development and sexual and reproductive health , and it is clear to me from a variety of indicators that, following Dobbs, the experience of adolescence and young adulthood in America has fundamentally changed.

Abortion bans are not only affecting those who need an abortion – they are shaping an entire generation.

How young people view the Dobbs decision

In 2022, my colleagues and I conducted a national survey of young people between the ages of 14 to 24, beginning shortly after the leak of the Supreme Court’s opinion in the case.

We asked them about their knowledge of the Dobbs decision, how they felt about it and how they believed it was impacting the lives of young people in their state. Our research showed that the majority of young people are aware of and alarmed by the Dobbs decision and its implications.

Our own research and other emerging data make it clear that abortion restrictions not only affect young people who become pregnant or seek an abortion. These restrictions are affecting how young people think about voting, where they should choose to live, study and work, and how to control their fertility. Abortion restrictions may also have serious impacts on young people’s mental health.

Implications for voting

Some 8 million young people are becoming newly eligible to vote in 2024 . Research shows that young people are the most likely to support abortion rights .

Abortion is a top issue that is currently motivating young voters . Change Research found in its recent national poll that 3 in 4 young voters believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases.

More than half of young voters say they will not vote for a candidate whose position on abortion is different from theirs. In the 2022 midterm elections, young people reported that abortion was the top issue influencing their vote.

How these young people vote may shape the 2024 election at both the national and state level in important ways. Their votes could serve as a referendum on reproductive rights directly in states where the issue is on the ballot and indirectly by shaping who young people want to represent them.

Where to attend college, live and work post-Roe

High school seniors are considering abortion access when deciding where to go to college. Over 70% reported considering reproductive health care access in their college decision.

Abortion access also matters to those entering the workforce. In a recent national survey, two-thirds of young workers reported that they did not wish to live in a state with abortion bans .

Another survey found that 60% of young women are more motivated to move to another state now that their state has passed a ban on abortion, or would be if their state did pass a ban.

Managing fertility

Following Dobbs, young people’s access to contraceptive services is changing too.

In Texas in March 2024, an appeals court ruled that the state could outlaw providing contraception to minors without parental consent at Title X clinics, which receive federal funding to provide confidential contraception regardless of age, income or immigration status. This ruling removed the only confidential access to contraception available to teens in that state.

Recent research that my colleagues conducted with college students in several U.S. Southeast states shows that they are worried that more legal restrictions on contraception are coming. In our study, one young person reported : “I fear that these changes are only a precursor to more strict laws regarding contraception and health care. I fear for the rights and bodies of those like me and those who are less fortunate.”

Some young people have already taken permanent action to avoid pregnancy. Nationally, there have been significant increases in the number of young people who are choosing to undergo permanent sterilization , either vasectomy or tubal ligation. The effects are largest for tubal ligation. The rate of tubal ligation was rising prior to Dobbs, but immediately following Dobbs, one large national study found that the rate jumped by about 20% and has continued to rise at nearly twice its pre-Dobbs pace.

These increases signal that some young people simply do not want to take the chance of becoming pregnant or impregnating someone when comprehensive reproductive health care is not available or is under threat.

Effects on mental health

Emerging data shows that mental health outcomes are worse in states with abortion bans.

For instance, a recent large, national study examined changes in mental health symptoms in the months before and after the Dobbs decision, comparing people living in states with trigger abortion bans versus those living in states without trigger bans. A trigger ban was a law designed to be “triggered” , or take effect, as soon as the legal precedent set by Roe v. Wade no longer applied. The study found that women (but not men) ages 18 to 45 living in states with trigger bans showed greater increases in symptoms of anxiety and depression after the Dobbs abortion decision was announced, compared with women living in states without such bans.

Unfortunately, the study did not include young people under age 18, nor did it look separately at young adults, who have most of their childbearing years ahead of them, to determine how they were being affected. Excluding young people from research and lumping them in with middle-aged adults is a common occurrence in studies focusing on abortion access and its consequences, a problematic practice highlighted by a recent expert consensus report .

Scholars predict that mental health consequences of reproductive health care restrictions will be more severe for historically marginalized populations . I expect this will include young people.

Our initial research indicates that many young people are experiencing significant stress and worry as a result of changing access to abortion. When describing her feelings about the decision, one young woman said, “I feel so many things. Anger, sadness, outrage. It makes me scared for my own future and for other women.”

• Mental health
• Adolescents
• Young people
• Reproductive health
• Abortion bans
• Abortion ban
• Dobbs v. Jackson
• Dobbs decision
• Reproductive health care
• Overturning Roe v Wade

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• Made by History

How Doctors Came to Play a Key Role in the Abortion Debate

O n June 13, The Supreme Court announced its unanimous decision in FDA vs . Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine , governing access to a critical drug used in medication (non-surgical) abortions and to manage miscarriages. The decision preserves access (for now) to the widely used drug mifepristone, currently legal in 36 states. The court decided the case on procedural grounds, concluding that the plaintiffs, a coalition of anti-abortion physicians and medical associations, lacked standing.

Reproductive-justice advocates cautioned that challenges to the availability of the drug are likely to make their way back to the court, threatening access to a medication that has proved extraordinarily safe and effective.

Yet this case goes far beyond issues of legal standing and procedure. The plaintiffs explicitly deployed their authority as doctors and medical providers to frame their interests as rooted in safety, patient care, and public health, rather than in their religious or moral opposition to abortion.

The complex history of how physicians have organized to legitimate their authority over the reproductive lives of their patients is worth examining, as it reveals how anti-abortion forces are building on a well-worn path that has been at least partially cleared by abortion-rights advocates.

The familiar claim that the decision to have an abortion should be made “between a woman and her doctor” has long been associated with abortion-rights rhetoric as a right to privacy from the state. This principle was at the heart of the Roe majority opinion authored by Justice Blackmun. The “and her doctor” part of this formulation has received less attention, but is at the heart of the argument in the mifepristone case.

Read More: Supreme Court Unanimously Strikes Down Challenge to Abortion Drug Mifepristone

Physicians’ assertions of authority over the right to terminate a pregnancy and other issues of reproductive health did not begin with Roe . As the Roe opinion noted, in the late 19th century, the American Medical Association’s Committee on Criminal Abortion had denounced abortion and asserted that it should only be permitted if “at least one respectable consulting physician” also concurred with the decision. Thus, even when physicians took positions allowing for some access to abortion, they insisted that medical professionals hold an an outsized voice in the process.

In the early 20th century, elites associated with the American Eugenics movement advocated for laws permitting states to sterilize individuals without their consent, in their efforts to rid the population of those they deemed “undesirable” or “unfit.” Doctors were again critical to this effort to supervise and legitimate curbs on reproductive freedom.

In the 1930s, a group called the American Eugenics Society organized meetings of doctors to encourage them to play an active role in the eugenic sterilization programs as an extension of their responsibility as medical professionals. Having doctors on state eugenic boards gave these sterilization schemes the aura of respectability, as they were overseen by medical professionals. As one physician explained to his colleagues at a 1937 conference on the subject, “There is no longer any doubt but that the physician has a eugenic responsibility. In any eugenic scheme of society, the physician, and particularly those concerned with preventive medicine, must play an important part. He will function most in the therapeutic measures of sterilization and birth control.” Doctors thus framed their role not only as treating individual patients but as also having authority over policy and law, especially over issues related to reproduction.

Appeals to physicians to use their authority in this manner continued well after the public respectability of the American eugenics movement waned. In the 1950s and 1960s, some obstetricians and other doctors advanced similar arguments about their obligation to advocate for population control policies. Dr. C. Lee Buxton, Chief of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Yale School of Medicine argued in a medical journal in 1966 that “the medical profession should accept a major responsibility in matters related to human reproduction as they affect the total population and the individual family.” Doctors would play a significant role in the growing population control movement , again deploying their medical expertise and authority to advance laws rooted in social control.

Read More: 'I Don't Have Faith in Doctors Anymore.' Women Say They Were Pressured Into Long-Term Birth Control

This authority was not just a legal right; by this logic it was a professional obligation that doctors could not refuse. Consequently, doctors served on state eugenics boards that oversaw systematic non-consensual sterilizations until into the 1970s. At least 60,000 documented involuntary sterilizations were approved and performed by state bodies in the 20th century.

Obstetricians like Buxton also supported the framework eventually enshrined in Roe that physicians, rather than the state, possessed the authority to determine whether a pregnancy should be terminated or carried to term. In 1970, an AMA committee revised its position opposing access to abortion but still cautioned against "mere acquiescence to the patient's demand" for an abortion, a sentiment expressed elsewhere by doctors who also supported Roe . Again, we see skepticism from medical authorities that a pregnant person be trusted to make reproductive decisions for themselves.

Most state eugenic laws were repealed by the 1970s, but non-consensual sterilizations continued under certain circumstances. Notably, the federal government continued to approve the procedure for Native American women under the auspices of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Elsewhere, physicians, rather than state authorities, oversaw non-consensual sterilizations.

For example, in the 1970s, doctors at Los Angeles County Hospital, the teaching hospital of the USC School of Medicine, performed hundreds of tubal ligations on Mexican-origin women, many of whom later stated they never provided their consent.

Ten of these women eventually sued the hospital, naming Dr. Edward Quilligan, the Chief of ob/gyn at the time, as the defendant. The women offered heart-wrenching testimonies about the profound damage these non-consensual sterilizations caused them and their families. Quilligan told a journalist at the time (and to producers of a documentary on the case 40 years later) that he had done nothing wrong: “We were practicing good medicine.”

The judge agreed . In other words, physicians were not only entitled to abridge the reproductive autonomy of their patients, but they were also sometimes required to do so in the name of “good medicine.” Indeed, Quilligan suffered few professional repercussions and he has been honored at the highest level by prestigious medical schools and professional associations.

Read More: Abortion Rights Benefit People Who Want Kids, Too

When a group of anti-abortion medical providers incorporated as the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine with the express purpose of filing a lawsuit to ban mifepristone, the briefs they submitted all built on this history. They too were doctors drawing on the principle valorized in Roe that decisions regarding the termination of pregnancy required their authority and involvement.

These briefs are largely free of religious and moral arguments, focusing instead on estimates of gestational development, safety of medication, and the efficacy of review processes, among others that fall under the authority of medical providers. And their language often centers on issues between a woman and her doctor, sometimes in paternalistic terms. One brief insisted that their interest in banning the drug stemmed from their ethical commitment to “protect women and girls from the documented danger of chemical abortion drugs,” against all evidence about the safety of the drugs. 

Such arguments draw on the troubling history of deference that (historically largely male) physicians have demanded to sometimes supersede the autonomy of their (female) patients.

Abortion and reproductive health providers do face significant legal, political, and personal threats for their work; their safety and professional right to practice must be protected vigorously. Nor should medical expertise and evidence-based research be dismissed. They are a vital part of reproductive health and care.

But a reliance on medical expertise need not be rooted in reflexive deference to that expertise, as Justice Blackmun envisioned. Indeed, the Women’s Health Movement of the 1970s developed approaches to reproductive health, including contraception, access to abortion, care and support during pregnancy and delivery, and child raising that demonstrated how medical expertise and reproductive autonomy can work together. Many reproductive justice groups today advocate similar practices, including advocating for legal access to self-managed abortions that do not require a physician’s involvement.

But the framing of reproductive decisions as lying “between a woman and a doctor” has opened the door for foes of reproductive autonomy to advance their arguments in the neutral language of medical authority. To secure a more expansive vision of reproductive justice will require retiring this phrase in favor of a vision of reproductive justice that does not reject medical experience or advice, but guards against any potential coercion, even when it comes bearing a white coat, to any person’s reproductive autonomy.

Emma Peterson is a recent graduate of Yale University with a degree in the History of Science, Medicine, and Public Health. Daniel Martinez HoSang is a Professor of American Studies at Yale University with a secondary appointment in the Section of the History of Medicine at Yale School of Medicine.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here . Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors .

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Write to Emma Peterson and Daniel Martinez HoSang / Made by History at [email protected]

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Persuasive Essay Why Abortion Should Be Legalized

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• News24,(2013). Why abortion should be legal. Retrieved from https://ww.news24.com/MyNews24/Why-abortion-should-be-legal-20131230
• Amnesty International,(2018). Facts on Abortion. Retrieved from www.amnesty.org/en/what-we-do/sexual-and-reproductive-rights/abortion-facts/
• More than 25 million Abortions are performed every year. Retrieved from www.refinery29.com/en-us/2017/09/174289/unsafe-abortion-statistics­­­­­­-­­­­
• Kartha Pollitt, Abortion quotes. Retrieved from www.brainyquote.com/topics/abortion
• Mesce D; Sines E (2006). Washington, D.C., Population Reference Bureau [PRB], 2006. 58 p. Retrieved from https://www.popline.org/node/563328
• ­­­­­https://brightkite.com/essay-on/women-have-the-right-to-abortion
• https://essayforum.com/writing/right-abortion-argumentative-paper-6112/
• https://www.debate.org/opinions/do-women-have-the-right-to-abortion
• https://www.allfamilieshealth.org/abortions/
• https://www.bartleby.com/essay/Women-Have-the-Right-to-Abortion- P3RXPEYTJ
• https://revcom.us/a/1265/what-is-abortion.htm
• https://www.babygaga.com/15-whisper-confessions-of-women-forced-to-have- the-baby-they-didnt-want/

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There will be no perfect abortion law. But the pro-life movement can still make progress.

On June 13, just under two years after its landmark ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court unanimously held that a group of pro-life doctors lacked standing to challenge the federal approval of and subsequent expansion of access to a drug used for abortions. While many commentators have cast this decision as a blow against the pro-life movement, the reality is more complicated. The court’s opinion, which is legally and constitutionally sound, should prod the pro-life movement to realize that it needs to convince fellow citizens to reject abortion as unjust. This will require much more than just amassing enough political or judicial leverage to make it illegal.

In the two years since Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization , a dismaying reality has set in: Following two decades of declining numbers and a brief decline immediately following the decision, abortions are once again on the rise. Despite newly introduced almost-total bans on abortion procedures in 14 states, the nation saw an increase in reported abortions over the past three years of 10 percent ; in the 36 states without bans, there was a reported increase of 25 percent, an unprecedented jump. 

Nor have those 14 statewide abortion bans swayed the opinions of Americans on this neuralgic issue. Recent polls by the Pew Research Center show that more Americans than ever now think that abortion should be legal in most or all cases—63 percent, up four points since 2021. That percentage changes hardly a whit for American Catholics , whose opinions on abortion are all but a mirror of those of the larger population. And in cases where the question of legal abortion has been presented to the voting public on a statewide ballot, abortion rights advocates have triumphed every time—seven times in all since 2022. 

The editors of America have long held that while abortion is a moral evil—the consistent teaching of the church since the time of the Apostles—the question of its legal status in the United States, under our Constitution, belongs properly to state legislatures. Moral opposition to abortion, founded in the recognition of our common humanity with the unborn, society’s obligation to protect the life of the innocent and Catholic social teaching, is what drives the church’s pro-life advocacy. But the reason Roe was wrongly decided—and ultimately overturned—was not because it was immoral but because it invented a right with no basis in the text of the Constitution and assigned a complex moral question on which Americans disagree passionately to judges unanswerable to voters . 

In its recent unanimous decision, the Supreme Court demonstrated that, regardless of the political alliances and machinations that produced its current set of justices, it appears serious about getting out of the abortion business. The pro-life movement should welcome that restraint , which it spent almost 50 years advocating and organizing to achieve, even if it means that the road toward legislation protecting the unborn heads steeply uphill.

Unfortunately, the zeal by some legislators in the current political moment to ban abortion at all costs—in some cases without nuance or consideration for the hard cases that inevitably arise in any moral calculus —has galvanized opposition to restrictions on abortion as much or more than it has helped convince Americans to respect the lives of the unborn. Even as legislators in some states seek to eliminate abortion completely, others have reacted to Dobbs by making already permissive abortion policies even less restrictive. 

Perhaps even more telling than this legislative dichotomy is the media landscape in which abortion regulation is discussed. While the vast majority of abortions in the United States occur during the first trimester and because women do not want to have or feel they could not support a child, public discussion of abortion legislation has been dominated by a focus on questions about the adequacy of legal exceptions protecting the life and health of women late in pregnancy (even to the point of such media coverage being bemoaned by some pro-choice activists ). Another consistent theme has been the fears of medical practitioners in states where they say even managing a late-term miscarriage could potentially land them in legal trouble. 

The public debate about abortion, it seems, has fallen into the category of issues described by the truism that “hard cases make bad law.” Pro-life advocates are often focused on minimizing the set of exceptions to abortion bans in those states where they can get laws passed rather than tackling the harder problem of how to convince voters—who keep rejecting restrictions on abortion at the ballot box—that abortion can be safely and justly regulated and limited at all.

It may seem that Catholics are required always to implement the most comprehensive restrictions on abortion, regardless of the practical likelihood that such laws will be passed or, if passed, be enforceable. But this conflates a question of moral truth (“Can abortion ever be justified?”) with one of prudential and practical reason (“What is the best way to limit the injustice of abortion in the United States in the 21st century?”).

No less a pro-life champion than Cardinal John O’Connor recognized that support for “imperfect legislation” could be a necessary component of pro-life advocacy (see Catholic New York, 6/14/90). It is certainly the case that any achievable legislative restriction on abortion will be imperfect, from a strict moral analysis, for the foreseeable future.

What is needed, far more than a perfect abortion law, is a clear focus on the moral failure of a society in which abortion rates are rising rather than falling, in which too many women feel afraid, unable or unwilling to carry pregnancies to term and welcome new life into the world. The pro-life movement should evaluate the laws it fights for on the basis of whether or not they help us have that conversation.

Six years ago, the longtime Catholic Worker and social justice activist Shelley Douglass wrote of her dream of a world where the mandates of justice would make both war and abortion unthinkable. The question of how to accomplish this was less a legal or moral one, she thought, than a spiritual one: What kind of world do we want? “It’s hard to imagine the kind of justice, economic justice and justice for women, that would have to exist for there really to be a world where abortion is unthinkable,” Ms. Douglass wrote. “Not illegal: unthinkable!”

Such a world would not see abortion as a right to be granted or withheld. It would be one where we do not bemoan the lack of elective abortion as an option but value the lack of it as a sign that no woman need choose it any longer.

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The Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade in 2022. Here’s the state of abortion rights in the U.S.

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Judges, state lawmakers and voters are deciding the future of abortion in the U.S. two years after the Supreme Court jolted the legal status quo with a ruling that overturned Roe vs. Wade.

The June 24, 2022, ruling in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization sparked legislative action, protest and lawsuits — placing the issue at the center of politics across the country.

Abortion is now banned at all stages of pregnancy, with limited exceptions, in 14 Republican-controlled states.

In three other states, it’s barred after about the first six weeks, which is before many know they are pregnant. Most Democratic-led states have taken actions to protect abortion rights, becoming sanctuaries for out-of-state patients seeking care.

That’s changed the landscape of abortion access, making it more of a logistical and financial ordeal for many in conservative states. But it has not reduced the overall number of procedures done each month across the U.S.

Here’s what to know about the state of abortion rights in the U.S. now.

Limited abortion access prompts more out-of-state travel

Bans in Republican-led states have prompted many people seeking abortions to travel to get care.

That translates into higher costs for gas or plane tickets, hotels and meals; more logistics to figure out, including child care; and more days off work.

A new study by the Guttmacher Institute, which advocates for abortion access, found that out of just over a million abortions provided in clinics, hospitals and doctors’ offices, more than 161,000 — or 16% — were for people who crossed state lines to get them.

More than two-thirds of abortions done in Kansas and New Mexico were for out-of-staters, particularly Texans.

Since Florida’s six-week abortion ban took effect in May, many people had to travel farther than before, because throughout the Southeast, most states have bans.

Low-income patients and those lacking legal permission to be in the country are more likely to be unable to travel. There can be lasting costs for those who do.

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In Alabama, the Yellowhammer Fund, which previously helped residents pay for the procedure, has paused doing so since facing threats of litigation from the state.

Jenice Fountain, Yellowhammer’s executive director, said she recently met a woman who traveled from Alabama to neighboring Georgia for an abortion but found she couldn’t get one there because she was slightly too far into her pregnancy. The woman then went to Virginia. The journey wiped out her rent money, and she needed help to remain housed.

“We’re having people use every dime that they have to get out of state, or use every dime they have to have another child,” Fountain said.

It’s usually provided with pills rather than procedures

Nearly two-thirds of known abortions last year were provided with pills rather than procedures.

One report found that pills are prescribed via telehealth and mailed to about 6,000 people a month who live in states with abortion bans. They’re sent by medical providers in states with laws intended to protect them from prosecution for those prescriptions.

The laws in Colorado, Massachusetts, New York, Vermont and Washington specifically protect medical providers who prescribe the pills to patients in states with bans.

The growing prominence of pills, which were used in about half of all abortions just before the Dobbs ruling, is a frontier in the latest chapter of the legal fight.

The U.S. Supreme Court this month unanimously rejected an effort by abortion opponents who were seeking to overturn or roll back the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone, one of two drugs usually used together for medication abortions. The issue is likely to return.

Supreme Court upholds FDA’s approval of abortion pills for early pregnancies

Supreme Court tosses out conservative Christian group’s attack on the abortion pill mifepristone, the most common method of abortion in the U.S.

June 13, 2024

Abortion is on the 2024 ballot

In this presidential election year, abortion is a key issue.

Protecting access has emerged as a key theme in the campaigns of Democrats, including President Biden in his reelection bid. Former President Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, has said states should decide whether to restrict abortions. He also suggested states could limit contraception use but changed his tune on that.

“We recognize this could be the last Dobbs anniversary we celebrate,” Kelsey Pritchard, a spokesperson for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said in an interview. She noted that if Democrats win the presidency and regain control of both chambers of Congress, a right to abortion could be enshrined in the law.

The issue will also be put directly before voters in at least four states. Colorado, Florida, Maryland and South Dakota have ballot measures this year asking voters to approve state constitutional amendments that would protect or expand access to abortion.

A New York measure would bar discrimination against someone who has an abortion. There are attempts to put questions about abortion access on the ballots this year in Arkansas, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska and Nevada.

There’s also a push for a ballot measure in Arizona, where the state Supreme Court this year ruled that an 1864 abortion ban could be enforced. With the help of some Republicans, Democrats in the Legislature were able to repeal that law.

Generally, abortion rights expand when voters are deciding. In the seven statewide abortion policy-related votes since 2022, voters have sided with abortion-rights advocates in every case.

It’s still up to the courts — including the Supreme Court

The Dobbs ruling and its aftermath gave rise to a bevy of legal questions and lawsuits challenging nearly every ban and restriction.

Many of those questions deal with how exceptions — which factor in far more often when abortion is barred earlier in pregnancy — should apply. The issue is often raised by those who wanted to be pregnant but experienced life-threatening complications.

A group of women who had serious pregnancy complications but were denied abortions in Texas sued, claiming that the state’s ban is vague about which exceptions are allowed. The all-Republican Texas Supreme Court disagreed in a May ruling.

The U.S. Supreme Court also heard arguments in April on the federal government’s lawsuit against Idaho, which says its ban on abortions at all stages of pregnancy can extend to women in medical emergencies. The Biden administration says that violates federal law. A ruling on that case could be issued at any time.

Meanwhile, bans have been put on hold by judges in Iowa, Montana, Utah and Wyoming.

Mulvihill writes for the Associated Press.

More to Read

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The newest election battlefield for abortion: State supreme courts

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Abortion ban has supercharged Arizona politics. What will GOP legislators do?

April 17, 2024

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Two Years of Outrage: US Abortion Restrictions since Dobbs

State Bans Violate Rights of Millions to Privacy, Health, Nondiscrimination

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Two years ago today, the United States Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization removed constitutional protection for access to abortion. The decision was an egregious regression of women’s rights and made the US one of only four countries to withdraw legal grounds for abortion over the past 30 years.

Since Dobbs, many countries have enacted policies that expand abortion access, continuing a global, decades-long trend . In 2023, the Mexican Supreme Court decriminalized abortion nationwide, and abortion is now legal in Mexico City and 12 out of 32 Mexican states. France enshrined the right to abortion in its constitution earlier this year.

Meanwhile, state courts in the US have upheld laws that have nearly killed pregnant women and have required women to carry non-viable fetuses to term . In Mississippi,  abortion bans forced a 13-year-old girl to carry out a pregnancy from rape . Texas and Oklahoma have passed laws that empower private citizens to sue clinics, healthcare workers, and individuals for helping someone obtain an abortion, and lawmakers in Texas and Missouri have sought to make it illegal to obtain out-of-state abortions .

Currently, 14 of the 50 US states have criminalized nearly all abortions, depriving access to 18 million women and girls of reproductive age. Another 17 states have banned abortions starting at 6 to 26 weeks of pregnancy.

The bans have a disparate impact on racial and ethnic minorities, particularly those with low incomes. Over 60 percent of people seeking abortions are people of color, and many, including 60 percent of Black and American Indian and Alaskan Native women of reproductive age , reside in states with complete abortion bans. Black people have higher-risk pregnancies and are more likely to miscarry or have stillbirths than white pregnant people. Because many people of color who reside in restrictive states fall below the poverty line , leaving the state to obtain a legal abortion elsewhere is often impossible .

The Supreme Court’s revocation of national protections for abortion access, and the restrictive state laws that followed, means the United States is violating  the rights to life, health, privacy, nondiscrimination, and freedom from cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, among others.

Access to legal abortion is essential to achieve gender equality. Every year, more leaders, legislatures, and courts abroad understand this. US states should repeal restrictions on abortion, enshrine access to abortion in state constitutions, and advance the global trend of recognizing women’s autonomy.

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Princeton Legal Journal

The First Amendment and the Abortion Rights Debate

Sofia Cipriano

4 Prin.L.J.F. 12

Following Dobbs v. Jackson ’s (2022) reversal of Roe v. Wade (1973) — and the subsequent revocation of federal abortion protection — activists and scholars have begun to reconsider how to best ground abortion rights in the Constitution. In the past year, numerous Jewish rights groups have attempted to overturn state abortion bans by arguing that abortion rights are protected by various state constitutions’ free exercise clauses — and, by extension, the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. While reframing the abortion rights debate as a question of religious freedom is undoubtedly strategic, the Free Exercise Clause is not the only place to locate abortion rights: the Establishment Clause also warrants further investigation. 

Roe anchored abortion rights in the right to privacy — an unenumerated right with a long history of legal recognition. In various cases spanning the past two centuries, t he Supreme Court located the right to privacy in the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments . Roe classified abortion as a fundamental right protected by strict scrutiny, meaning that states could only regulate abortion in the face of a “compelling government interest” and must narrowly tailor legislation to that end. As such, Roe ’s trimester framework prevented states from placing burdens on abortion access in the first few months of pregnancy. After the fetus crosses the viability line — the point at which the fetus can survive outside the womb  — states could pass laws regulating abortion, as the Court found that   “the potentiality of human life”  constitutes a “compelling” interest. Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (1992) later replaced strict scrutiny with the weaker “undue burden” standard, giving states greater leeway to restrict abortion access. Dobbs v. Jackson overturned both Roe and Casey , leaving abortion regulations up to individual states. 

While Roe constituted an essential step forward in terms of abortion rights, weaknesses in its argumentation made it more susceptible to attacks by skeptics of substantive due process. Roe argues that the unenumerated right to abortion is implied by the unenumerated right to privacy — a chain of logic which twice removes abortion rights from the Constitution’s language. Moreover, Roe’s trimester framework was unclear and flawed from the beginning, lacking substantial scientific rationale. As medicine becomes more and more advanced, the arbitrariness of the viability line has grown increasingly apparent.  

As abortion rights supporters have looked for alternative constitutional justifications for abortion rights, the First Amendment has become increasingly more visible. Certain religious groups — particularly Jewish groups — have argued that they have a right to abortion care. In Generation to Generation Inc v. Florida , a religious rights group argued that Florida’s abortion ban (HB 5) constituted a violation of the Florida State Constitution: “In Jewish law, abortion is required if necessary to protect the health, mental or physical well-being of the woman, or for many other reasons not permitted under the Act. As such, the Act prohibits Jewish women from practicing their faith free of government intrusion and thus violates their privacy rights and religious freedom.” Similar cases have arisen in Indiana and Texas. Absent constitutional protection of abortion rights, the Christian religious majorities in many states may unjustly impose their moral and ethical code on other groups, implying an unconstitutional religious hierarchy. 

Cases like Generation to Generation Inc v. Florida may also trigger heightened scrutiny status in higher courts; The Religious Freedom Restoration Act (1993) places strict scrutiny on cases which “burden any aspect of religious observance or practice.”

But framing the issue as one of Free Exercise does not interact with major objections to abortion rights. Anti-abortion advocates contend that abortion is tantamount to murder. An anti-abortion advocate may argue that just as religious rituals involving human sacrifice are illegal, so abortion ought to be illegal. Anti-abortion advocates may be able to argue that abortion bans hold up against strict scrutiny since “preserving potential life” constitutes a “compelling interest.”

The question of when life begins—which is fundamentally a moral and religious question—is both essential to the abortion debate and often ignored by left-leaning activists. For select Christian advocacy groups (as well as other anti-abortion groups) who believe that life begins at conception, abortion bans are a deeply moral issue. Abortion bans which operate under the logic that abortion is murder essentially legislate a definition of when life begins, which is problematic from a First Amendment perspective; the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment prevents the government from intervening in religious debates. While numerous legal thinkers have associated the abortion debate with the First Amendment, this argument has not been fully litigated. As an amicus brief filed in Dobbs by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Center for Inquiry, and American Atheists  points out, anti-abortion rhetoric is explicitly religious: “There is hardly a secular veil to the religious intent and positions of individuals, churches, and state actors in their attempts to limit access to abortion.” Justice Stevens located a similar issue with anti-abortion rhetoric in his concurring opinion in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989) , stating: “I am persuaded that the absence of any secular purpose for the legislative declarations that life begins at conception and that conception occurs at fertilization makes the relevant portion of the preamble invalid under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Federal Constitution.” Judges who justify their judicial decisions on abortion using similar rhetoric blur the line between church and state. 

Framing the abortion debate around religious freedom would thus address the two main categories of arguments made by anti-abortion activists: arguments centered around issues with substantive due process and moral objections to abortion. 

Conservatives may maintain, however, that legalizing abortion on the federal level is an Establishment Clause violation to begin with, since the government would essentially be imposing a federal position on abortion. Many anti-abortion advocates favor leaving abortion rights up to individual states. However, in the absence of recognized federal, constitutional protection of abortion rights, states will ban abortion. Protecting religious freedom of the individual is of the utmost importance  — the United States government must actively intervene in order to uphold the line between church and state. Protecting abortion rights would allow everyone in the United States to act in accordance with their own moral and religious perspectives on abortion. 

Reframing the abortion rights debate as a question of religious freedom is the most viable path forward. Anchoring abortion rights in the Establishment Clause would ensure Americans have the right to maintain their own personal and religious beliefs regarding the question of when life begins. In the short term, however, litigants could take advantage of Establishment Clauses in state constitutions. Yet, given the swing of the Court towards expanding religious freedom protections at the time of writing, Free Exercise arguments may prove better at securing citizens a right to an abortion. 

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Abortion Debate Shifts as Election Nears: ‘Now It’s About Pregnancy’

Two years after Roe was struck down, the conversation has focused on the complications that can come with pregnancy and fertility, helping to drive more support for abortion rights.

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By Kate Zernike

In the decades that Roe v. Wade was the law of the land, abortion rights groups tried to shore up support for it by declaring “Abortion Is Health Care.”

Only now, two years after the Supreme Court eliminated the constitutional right to abortion, and just six months before the presidential election, has the slogan taken on the force of reality.

The public conversation about abortion has grown into one about the complexities of pregnancy and reproduction, as the consequences of bans have played out in the news. The question is no longer just whether you can get an abortion, but also, Can you get one if pregnancy complications put you in septic shock? Can you find an obstetrician when so many are leaving states with bans? If you miscarry, will the hospital send you home to bleed? Can you and your partner do in vitro fertilization?

That shift helps explain why a record percentage of Americans are now declaring themselves single-issue voters on abortion rights — especially among Black voters, Democrats, women and those ages 18 to 29 . Republican women are increasingly saying their party’s opposition to abortion is too extreme, and Democrats are running on the issue after years of running away from it.

“When the Dobbs case came down, I told my friends — somewhat but not entirely in jest — that America was about to be exposed to a lengthy seminar on obstetrics,” said Elaine Kamarck, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, referring to the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade.

Abortion opponents say that stories about women facing medical complications are overblown and that women who truly need abortions for medical reasons have been able to get them under exceptions to the bans.

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She needed an abortion. In post-Roe America, it took 21 people and two states to help her.

The ability to choose to and then have an abortion has changed the course of three generations of my family..

The ability to choose to and then have an abortion has changed the course of three generations of my family. It has been inextricably linked to my immigration story, and foundational to my ability to become a mother. And last year I helped a teenager access an abortion who was living in a state without abortion access. She was part of my chosen family and was the reason friends and strangers in my life came together to confront the many challenges of navigating an abortion in a post-Dobbs United States . 

I immigrated to the United States from Colombia when I was 3 years old. I came with my mother, my brother and my father. We arrived in Los Angeles without community or family, but like the generations before me, we had an unwavering grit and determination to build a life full of possibilities as a family of four. 

Life was hard. Culture shock, loneliness and poverty almost crushed us. In the face of all these structural and interpersonal barriers, my mother was clear-eyed. For her, our future belonged in the United States. My father was not as strong as she was and about three months after immigrating, he abandoned us. He left my mom with only $200, no family, no connection to the country and a broken heart. We didn’t speak English. We were cut off from everything we knew. But my mother’s resolve and love built our path to survival. She did what millions of immigrants have done before her – she made miracles happen every day.

Ten Commandments posters in class? Ten Commandments in Louisiana schools is fine – as long as they note the ones Trump broke

Abortion helped my mother – and me – to survive

Like a seemingly relentless cascade of challenges, after the shock of my father's abandonment wore off, my mother found out that she was pregnant. She was already caring for two young children who had been abandoned by their father. She was distraught about the abandonment, but finding out she was pregnant almost destroyed her.

My mother was raised Catholic. She never imagined she would have an abortion. But looking into the confused eyes of her two young children, she knew that the circumstances were dire. For my mother, keeping me and my brother alive and cared for meant being present for us.

Her abortion was her way to survive and, by extension, ensure that I could, too. It was a pivotal moment in my life and will always be part of me, a piece of my story – of coming to this country, of finding the tools to survive. Learning about my mother’s abortion, and how essential it was for our family, shaped my understanding of reproductive rights and the power of choice. 

Thirty years after my mother’s abortion, I was in my own doctor’s office pregnant. My partner and I were there to hear the heartbeat of our first child. I was equal parts excited and apprehensive about being a first-time mom. I remember the warm jelly being rubbed on my belly and the anticipation of this first glimpse of my future child.

That giddy anticipation quickly turned to anxiety. I can recall the concerned look on the doctor’s face, but the rest is a blur. I don’t remember what the doctor said. I don’t even remember if there was a heartbeat. I just know that I was sent home for an excruciating weekend of waiting. Waiting to find out what was wrong with my pregnancy. Waiting to be told that the pregnancy wasn’t viable.

On Monday, the doctor told me I had a choice. There would be no way for me to carry this pregnancy to term. I could let my body miscarry the embryo on its own, which could take up to a few weeks, or I could get an abortion the following day. I knew right away I wanted an abortion. I knew, just like my mother three decades ago, that I could make the choice that was right for me and my family.

The pain of losing a wanted pregnancy was searing, but having the agency to terminate the pregnancy how I wanted allowed me to heal and, ultimately, to try again when I was ready. It took about eight months for me to get pregnant again.

Opinion alerts: Get columns from your favorite columnists + expert analysis on top issues, delivered straight to your device through the USA TODAY app. Don't have the app? Download it for free from your app store .

I am forever grateful I was able to have a medication abortion in the comfort of my home, with the love of my community supporting me. I was able to manage the pain of that loss on my own terms.

As a result, I was able to experience the joy of becoming pregnant again without unnecessary trauma. My beautiful baby boy came into this world more than a decade ago. His life and my life, as a mother and as a child, were connected to the agency that I had and that my mother had before me.

Abortion access takes a village that too many don't have

For both me and my mother, we had legal and material access to abortion. We chose abortion at a time when it was legal in every state.

Legality doesn’t always coincide with access in a country that so often makes life impossible for poor and marginalized people. But as challenging as it was to access abortion before the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization in 2022, today it is even worse. According to the Guttmacher Institute , 14 states have total abortion bans, three states ban abortion after six weeks and seven states ban abortion at or before 18 weeks’ gestation.

And it is in this landscape where the third story of abortion in my life happened. 

I met Romina (not her real name) when she was 8 years-old. I watched her grow from a timid child into a curious, sweet and somewhat rebellious teenager. Like so many young people who immigrate with their parents, Romina had a tremendous amount of responsibility placed on her shoulders at a young age. She found escape and comfort in a young man and got pregnant. She was younger than 15, and she was terrified. 

Romina from Paola Mendoza on Vimeo .

Romina wanted an abortion. Her mother fully supported her decision. The dreams of immigrant mothers are no different from the dreams of all mothers. All mothers want their children to live a better life than theirs, to give them the opportunity to fulfill their hopes and dreams. But they lived in a state with one of the most extreme abortion bans in the country. 

Romina reached out to me for help accessing an abortion, and I was determined to make it happen. 

In a post-Roe v. Wade world, I knew I couldn’t help Romina alone. Getting Romina an abortion was going to require a large community. After consulting with many lawyers, we decided the safest legal route was to have Romina leave her home state, along with her mother, so she could have an abortion in another state, many miles away. 

Coming out saved my life. LGBTQ+ ex-Christians like me deserve to be proud of ourselves.

In post-Roe America, abortion access is increasingly under threat

Whereas I was able to access abortion with ease with just my doctor and partner present, it took 21 people to help Romina access the abortion that she wanted and that her mother supported. Some of those people were my best friends and others were total strangers. Together we were lawyers, community organizers, doctors, neighbors, artists, mothers, daughters, caretakers, queer people – these were the people who made up Romina’s community of care.

I can’t help but think about what would have happened if my mother were in Romina’s position. My mother didn’t know even one person, let alone 21. 

Stories like Romina's highlight the critical need for accessible and safe abortion care. The landscape of reproductive rights is increasingly under threat, with many states  enacting stringent bans , exacerbating disparities in access. Yet, amid these challenges, our collective efforts demonstrate the resilience of communities in supporting individuals' autonomy.

As a storyteller, I often think of the millions of families who can trace a thread of connectedness through their experiences of abortion. So many family histories are linked together by abortion. Some of those stories we pass down; some we never know.

I am who I am because of my mother. I found strength in her resolve and love – things she could give me because she was able to manage her reproductive health and future. I, in turn, was able to manage mine and as a mother, pull together a community of people to protect Romina’s.

Paola Mendoza  is a film director, activist and co-author of "Together We Rise," "Sanctuary" and the forthcoming book "SOLIS." A co-founder of the Women’s March, she served as its artistic director. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Huffington Post, Glamour, Elle and InStyle. Paola is a co-founder of The Resistance Revival Chorus, The Soze Agency and The Meteor.

You can read diverse opinions from our USA TODAY columnists and other writers on the Opinion front page , on X, formerly Twitter, @usatodayopinion and in our Opinion newsletter .

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About six-in-ten Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases

Note: For the latest data on abortion, read our 2022 report, “ America’s Abortion Quandary .”

Abortion has long been a contentious issue in the United States, and it is one that sharply divides Americans along partisan, ideological and religious lines.

Today, a 59% majority of U.S. adults say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while 39% think abortion should be illegal in all or most cases. These views are relatively unchanged in the past few years. The latest Pew Research Center survey, conducted April 5 to 11, finds deep disagreement between – and within – the parties over abortion. In fact, the partisan divide on abortion is far wider than it was two decades ago.

Explore an interactive look at attitudes on abortion.

Pew Research Center conducted this study to better understand Americans’ views on abortion. For this analysis, we surveyed 5,109 U.S. adults in April 2021. Everyone who took part in this survey is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology .

Here are the questions used for the report, along with responses, and its methodology .

In the latest survey, Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents are 45 percentage points more likely than Republicans and Republican leaners to say abortion should be legal in all or most cases (80% vs. 35%). This gap is little changed over the last few years, but the current divide is wider than it was in the past. For instance, as recently as 2016, there was a 33-point gap between the shares of Democrats (72%) and Republicans (39%) who supported legal abortion in all or most cases.

This wider gap is mostly attributable to a steady increase in support for legal abortion among Democrats. In 2007, roughly two-thirds of Democrats and Democratic leaners (63%) said abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Support among Democrats has risen by nearly 20 points since then, and 80% now say abortion should be legal in all or most cases.

Views among Republicans have remained relatively steady during this period. In 2007, around four-in-ten Republicans (39%) said abortion should be legal in all or most cases; today, 35% say this.

There are ideological differences within both parties over abortion, though the divide is starker within the GOP. Among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, 59% of moderates and liberals say abortion should legal in all or most cases, compared with just 22% of conservative Republicans.

While liberal Democrats are 17 percentage points more likely than conservative and moderate Democrats to say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, wide majorities of both groups (89% and 72%, respectively) say this.

Support for legal abortion varies by race and ethnicity, education and religious affiliation.

Majorities of adults across racial and ethnic groups say abortion should be legal in all or most cases. White adults and Hispanic adults, however, are slightly less likely to say this than Black and Asian adults. Nearly six-in-ten White (57%) and Hispanic adults (58%) say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, compared with larger majorities of Black (67%) and Asian (68%) adults.

Support for legal abortion is greater among those with higher levels of education. Those with postgraduate (71%) and bachelor’s (65%) degrees are more likely than those with less education to support legal abortion in at least most cases. Adults with no more than a high school education are divided on the issue: Half say abortion should be legal in at least most cases, while 47% say abortion should be illegal in all or most cases.

White evangelical Protestants continue to be opposed to abortion in all or most cases. Around three-quarters of White evangelicals (77%) say it should be illegal in all or most cases, while 21% say it should be legal in at least most cases. In contrast, a majority of White Protestants who are not evangelical (63%) say abortion should be legal in all or most cases.  

Religious “nones” – those who are religiously unaffiliated – overwhelmingly support legal abortion. Around eight-in-ten (82%) say it should be legal in all or most cases, while just 16% say it should be illegal.

Among the public overall, there is a modest gender divide in views of whether abortion should be legal: 56% of men and 62% of women say it should be legal in at least most cases. Within both parties, the views of men and women are largely aligned: 80% of Democratic women and 79% of Democratic men say abortion should be legal in all or most cases; similarly, 32% of Republican men and 39% of Republican women say the same.

Note: This is an update of a post originally published July 17, 2017.

Hannah Hartig is a senior researcher focusing on U.S. politics and policy research at Pew Research Center .

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