Keep Abortion Legal essays

Keep Abortion Legal essays Prior to the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, abortion was illegal in most states. The 5-4 decision favoring the plaintiff in this case defined a constitutional right to privacy on the basis of which the Court said abortion should be allowed in certain cases. Rather than offering a sweeping decision rooted in the importance of the right to privacy or the value of unborn life, the Court employed a continuum of fetal development along which the conflicting interests of the mother and the unborn child must be balanced at various stages of pregnancy. The result: three decades of political debate and polling about the legality of abortion under various specific circumstances and in each of the three trimesters. Each individual has his or her own opinion about whether or not abortion should be completely legal or not. But I believe that abortion should be legal and that there should be no more debate about it. In order to get to the heart of the debate, I will have to address some of the main arguments of those who believe that abortion should be illegal. The best way to this is to separate these questions into certain groupings. This will help to answer questions from all different spectrums of the issue including the right to life, questions dealing with the Constitution and psychological areas. To answer these questions I will use examples and truths from American society not only to persuade those who dont believe, but also to make them realize that the answer was right in front of them the whole time. 1. Arguments concerning the right to life There are those who say that abortion should not be legal in the United States and it must be stopped because the right to life must be protected. To that I would say laws have never stopped abortion, but only relegated it to back-alley butchers. The hypocrisy is clear: when illegal abortion was the leading killer of pregnant women in the United States, th...