Abortion Essay, Research Paper

Why Abortion Must Be Legal

Women must have access to safe abortion.

No matter how any of us feel about embryos and fetuses and their “rights”…about women and sex and responsibility…about God’s will, Karma, or the Bible…the fact still remains:

Women have always used abortion as a last resort to prevent the birth of a child, and they always will, regardless of what the laws say or the rest of us think.

But when abortion is illegal, it is unsafe and dangerous. Therefore, abortion must be legal, and it must be accessible too.

Here are some reasons why legal abortion is necessary, taken from various sources available online and offline. Even if you disagree, take a look!

? Laws against abortion kill women.

Making abortion illegal has little effect on the number of abortions, as history and present-day evidence from all over the world show. But illegal abortion is much more dangerous.

In the 1930s, there was “an epidemic of criminal abortion” in the United States. The number of births dropped by about half, as women who refused to bring children into a depressed economy resorted to illegal abortion to end their pregnancies. As a result, about 2500 women died each year from abortion complications, accounting for nearly one in four maternal deaths.1

From 1950 to 1965 in the US, there were 200 to 250 abortion-related deaths reported each year, a number that is acknowledged to be lower than the true death count.2 But even using these statistics, and assuming that illegal abortion was two or three times as dangerous as legal abortion at that time, a simple calculation shows that there were at least 500,000 illegal abortions each year.3 It’s not worth the death of one woman if that’s what it would take to cut the number of abortions by 60%, let alone fifty or a hundred women.

Thanks to changes in the law, today the mortality rate from legal abortion is almost zero, and abortion accounts for only 3% of maternal deaths.4

“It is impossible to achieve a low maternal mortality without access to safe abortion.” 5