Faith Davis

Professor William Loudermilk

ENG COMP II

8 April 2019

Abortion Final Draft

Abortion has been a controversial subject in America since the early 1900s. Society,

women specifically, started viewing an unplanned pregnancy as an option that could be easily

disposed of. Before abortion was legalized in 1973 in the United States of America, illegal

abortions were running rampant in the streets and alleys. Women were literally injuring

themselves or paying someone else to injure their bodies, sometimes to the point of death to

terminate a pregnancy. Congress saw this problem and decided to fix it by legalizing abortion,

so women could get “safe” and legal medical procedures done on themselves to end an

unplanned pregnancy. Many Americans were against this new law of legalizing abortion. For

example, the Christians didn’t like it because they believed life began at conception; thus,

abortion was murder of a living human being. Others were against it for medical and safety

reasons. They argued that an abortion procedure or pill simply was not safe for the mother of the

fetus. Her reproductive system and the organs relating to it could be permanently damaged.

After doing some fun research, I decided to write my research paper on this debatable subject.

Abortion should be made illegal in the United States of America, because the safety of a women

is too much at risk and if the fetus is a life, then abortion is the evil killing of a human being.
 If abortion were to be made illegal, what would the rate of illegal abortions do? We

would expect it to go up. People on the other side of my viewpoint use this as a great excuse to

say why abortion should remain legal. While the number of illegal abortions would go up, the

round total number of abortions would go down. To most women, the fear of going to an “alley

doctor” for an abortion procedure and risking their safety scares them into keeping the child.

However, many women don’t get stopped by that fear. In Fadiman’s video MOTHERHOOD by

CHOICE, Not Chance, a abortion doctor being interviewed describes what it’s like helping

women in these hard situations: “And [I] think, ‘Maybe I just won’t go back tomorrow.’ The

face of my friend who died from a self-induced abortion comes to me, and I know if I don’t

come back the next day, there will be another one. Even as hard as we try, it’s still going on.”

(Fadiman) This woman speaks for the pro-choice side of abortion and desperately works to

provide a comfortable and safe place for women to go when they need a comfortable and safe

abortion method. This doctor knows that if she doesn’t go back to help women all over the

country, “another one” will be lost from a self-induced abortion.

In the article written by Sarah Kramer for the Business Insider, she explains what would

happen if abortion was made illegal. At the beginning of the article, she explains the Republican

platform about abortion: “the overall party platform is clear: to keep women from getting

abortions, the government must ban them in whole or in part. But the data shows the opposite is

true” (Kramer) Kramer concludes that laws against abortion do not help the overall rate of

abortion. “So are those laws working in the way pro-life people would hope? In short, no.”

(Kramer) Making abortion legal would not help the rate of illegal abortions go down at all. In

fact, it might make them go up. Thanks to a study by Lancet, Kramer discovered that illegal
abortions were 26% higher than the worldwide average rate in places where abortion was illegal

and inaccessible.

The safety of an abortion procedure is something worth talking about. During an

abortion procedure, depending on the method a woman has decided upon, the health of her body

is extremely compromised. One method used during all stages of a pregnancy uses a medical

instrument to literally scrape the sides of a woman’s uterus to empty the womb of the fetus and

all the relating parts. Any normal functioning human can distinguish how this could be very

harmful to a woman’s body. The “scraping” sometimes causes rips and scratches on the uterus,

causing injury and sometimes permanent damage to her reproductive system and/or womb.

Women are not comfortable getting an abortion from an untrustworthy source because of

all the great risks involved. This was proven when New York first legalized abortion. In

Tolentino’s article for the New Yorker, she writes of the aftermath New York being one of the

first states to legalize the practice of abortion: “roughly three hundred and fifty thousand out-of-

state abortion patients came to New York; in the first two years after the state law passed, sixty

per cent of women who had abortions in New York came from out of state. ‘New York used to

be an oasis,’” (Tolentino)
Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/21255186/ns/health-womens_health/t/abortion-rates-same-

whether-legal-or-not/#.XJhJUKBKjIU

It seems that this trend of New York state being an “oasis” will repeat itself again since

New York just passed a law allowing abortions up to the birth of the baby at the health of the

mother. Women wanting abortions all over the country will now be expected to come to New

York for a “safe” late-term abortion. While these procedures do claim to be safe, one has to

question those claims. One method of late-term abortion is suction. With this method, an

abortion practitioner literally suctions the fetus out of the womb; however, the risk is possibly

suctioning out other parts of a woman’s insides. Stories have been told of women suffering great

injuries because a part of their body was suctioned up along with the fetus in their womb. When
looking at the safety of abortion surgeries and methods, one must look at the science and facts

behind them.

Finally, the question of “Is a fetus a human life or not?” must be discussed. After looking

at the biology of a fetus, a scientist would indeed conclude that it is a life. If astronauts found

what we call a fetus on Mars, they would return and declare that they had spotted life on Mars.

A baby’s heartbeat begins just three weeks after conception, its brain activity begins at week

seven, and every organ is in place by week eight. These facts should be enough to convince the

United States of a fetus humanity. It is unknown why the majority of Americans either regard

this as false or simply are unaware of the scientific facts that a fetus is, in fact, a life.

The moment when a woman uses her emotions and feelings and status of her life as a

standard for whether the fetus in her womb is a child or not, she has crossed into some very

dangerous territory. Some women decide to believe that the fetus is a baby from the moment of

conception; while others choose to believe that it is simply a mass of tissue that can be easily

discarded of. The question of whether a fetus is a life should never be answered based on a

woman’s feelings. For example, a man cannot stab an elderly person in hospice because the man

does not “feel” the elderly person is a human. The fact is that the elderly person is a human; the

proven fact is that a fetus is a life.

One of the roles of government is to protect the innocent. If America, as a whole,

understood and accepted that a fetus in the womb is a full-fledged human life, the government

would have the job of protecting that life from abortion surgeons willing to end its life.
 In conclusion, America should wake up to the facts behind a fetal life. We should also

scrutinize the repercussions of legalizing or, perhaps, illegalizing abortion. We should look at

the health consequences of abortion procedures on women. We should note the best option to

reduce the overall number of abortions that takes place in this country.

Works Cited
Belluck, Pam. "Trump Administration Blocks Funds for Planned Parenthood and Others Over Abortion
Referrals." The New York Times (2019). https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/health/trump-
defunds-planned-
parenthood.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FAbortion&action=click&contentCollection=ti
mestopics&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=6&pgtype
=collection.

Davis, Greg. Abortion Faith Davis. 3 March 2019. Print.

Foner, Eric. Give Me Liberty! An American History. New York: W. W. Norton and Company Inc, 2017.
Print.

Guardian, The. Youtube. 27 October 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWKqeJxzeBc. 3 March

2019.

Kramer, Sarah. The GOP's new abortion plans could lead to some chilling consequences. 26 July 2016.
https://www.businessinsider.com/anti-abortion-womens-health-effects-2016-7. 3 March 2019.

MOTHERHOOD by CHOICE, Not Chance. Dir. Dorothy Fadiman. Perf. Dorothy Fadiman. 2010.
https://archive.org/details/motherhood_by_choice_fadiman_2004.

Office, Home Box. "Abortion: Stories Women Tell." 16 June 2017. Films on Demand. https://fod-
infobase-com.sinclair.ohionet.org/p_ViewVideo.aspx?xtid=135601. 3 March 2019.
Tolentino, Jia. "How Abortion Law in New York Will Change, And How It Won't." The New Yorker (2019).
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-abortion-law-in-new-york-will-change-and-
how-it-wont.

Vondracek, Chrisopher. New York state to expand state abortion law to allow some third-trimester
procedures. 10 January 2019. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/jan/10/new-york-
state-to-expand-state-abortion-law-to-all/. 3 March 2019.