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-I feel great about what I have wrote. I’m proud of it and I think each time I write I get better.
-I’m most proud the message I’m putting out there. Also that I expressed everything truly and well and have a good argument .
- There really wasn’t any hard part about the writing. I love writing and it was incredibly fun for me. The only thing that was maybe a little challenging was the citations, but they weren’t all that  bad.
-I’ve learned alot about abortions. How they’re done, how many women are affected by them, even the history behind them.
- I want to world to read my essay and hopefully look deeper into the abortion topic. Because one of the biggest proablems was the fact that people ignore this topic, they don’t talk about it especially in other countries because it’s controversial. Hopefully it would change someone’s mind or even have them think about abortion rights more.

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Question Are there associations between having or being denied an abortion with women's mental health and well-being?

Findings This longitudinal cohort study observed 956 women semiannually for 5 years. Eight days after seeking an abortion, women who were denied an abortion reported significantly more anxiety symptoms and lower self-esteem and life satisfaction, but similar levels of depression, as women receiving abortions; outcomes improved or remained steady over time.

Meaning Abortion denial may be initially associated with psychological harm to women and findings do not support restricting abortion on the basis that abortion harms women's mental health.

Importance The idea that abortion leads to adverse psychological outcomes has been the basis for legislation mandating counseling before obtaining an abortion and other policies to restrict access to abortion.

Objective To assess women's psychological well-being 5 years after receiving or being denied an abortion.

Design, Setting, and Participants This study presents data from the Turnaway Study, a prospective longitudinal study with a quasi-experimental design. Women were recruited from January 1, 2008, to December 31, 2010, from 30 abortion facilities in 21 states throughout the United States, interviewed via telephone 1 week after seeking an abortion, and then interviewed semiannually for 5 years, totaling 11 interview waves. Interviews were completed January 31, 2016. We examined the psychological trajectories of women who received abortions just under the facility's gestational limit (near-limit group) and compared them with women who sought but were denied an abortion because they were just beyond the facility gestational limit (turnaway group, which includes the turnaway-birth and turnaway-no-birth groups). We used mixed effects linear and logistic regression analyses to assess whether psychological trajectories differed by study group.

Main Outcomes and Measures We included 6 measures of mental health and well-being: 2 measures of depression and 2 measures of anxiety assessed using the Brief Symptom Inventory, as well as self-esteem, and life satisfaction.

Results Of the 956 women (mean [SD] age, 24.9 [5.8] years) in the study, at 1 week after seeking an abortion, compared with the near-limit group, women denied an abortion reported more anxiety symptoms (turnaway-births, 0.57; 95% CI, 0.01 to 1.13; turnaway-no-births, 2.29; 95% CI, 1.39 to 3.18), lower self-esteem (turnaway-births, -0.33; 95% CI, -0.56 to -0.09; turnaway-no-births, -0.40; 95% CI, -0.78 to -0.02), lower life satisfaction (turnaway-births, -0.16; 95% CI, -0.38 to 0.06; turnaway-no-births, -0.41; 95% CI, -0.77 to -0.06), and similar levels of depression (turnaway-births, 0.13; 95% CI, -0.46 to 0.72; turnaway-no-births, 0.44; 95% CI, -0.50 to 1.39).

Conclusions and Relevance In this study, compared with having an abortion, being denied an abortion may be associated with greater risk of initially experiencing adverse psychological outcomes. Psychological well-being improved over time so that both groups of women eventually converged. These findings do not support policies that restrict women's access to abortion on the basis that abortion harms women's mental health.

In 1989, the US Surgeon General concluded that "the scientific studies [to date] do not provide conclusive data about the health effects of abortion on women"(pg32) and recommended a prospective, 5-year, longitudinal cohort study to provide the necessary conclusive data on the topic. Since then, numerous studies and reviews on this topic have found no evidence that abortion leads to negative mental health outcomes, yet they have also pointed to the many limitations of the existing literature and the need for more rigorous, prospective longitudinal studies on this topic. Studies finding a negative effect on women's mental health owing to abortion have been critically refuted.

Nonetheless, the assumption that women experience adverse mental health outcomes owing to abortion has been the basis for legislation seeking to mandate counseling before obtaining an abortion and other policies to restrict access to abortion. Currently, 9 states require that women seeking an abortion be counseled on the negative psychological and emotional responses to abortion.

The Turnaway Study is a prospective, longitudinal study that, for 5 years, observed women who obtained and women who were denied a wanted abortion. The Turnaway Study improves on the methodological shortcomings found in the previous literature by taking into account preexisting mental health conditions and examining both possible outcomes of an unwanted pregnancy-abortion and carrying the pregnancy to term. Previous publications using mid-study findings from the Turnaway Study have demonstrated that abortion does not increase women's risk of experiencing symptoms of posttraumatic stress, depression, or anxiety, or of experiencing lower self-esteem or life satisfaction. However, some have argued that the negative psychological effects of abortion are delayed or occur over the longer term. Our study presents all 5 years of data from the Turnaway Study assessing the association of having an abortion with women's mental health and well-being.

This analysis includes all 5 years (11 interview waves) of data from the Turnaway Study. The study protocol is available in Supplement 1. Abortion facilities with the latest gestational limit of any other facility within 150 miles were eligible recruitment sites. Thirty-one abortion facilities representing a range of geographical regions were identified as recruitment sites using data from the National Abortion Federation and professional contacts. All but 2 of the identified facilities agreed to participate. One facility was replaced with a facility with a similar catchment area and similar patient volume. Women were recruited from January 1, 2008, to December 31, 2010, from 30 abortion facilities located in 21 states throughout the United States. Interested prospective participants were connected to researchers at the University of California, San Francisco by telephone, informed consent was obtained orally, and an interview was scheduled 1 week later. Women were first interviewed by telephone 8 days after having or being denied an abortion, and then every 6 months for 5 years. Interviews were completed on January 31, 2016. The structured interview guide contained questions about demographics, physical and mental health, childbearing experiences and intentions, and history of traumatic life events. The gestational limits of the 30 final participating facilities ranged from 10 weeks through the end of the second trimester. This study was approved by the University of California, San Francisco, Institutional Review Board.

To be eligible, participants needed to speak English or Spanish, be 15 years or older, and have had no known fetal anomalies or demise or maternal health indications for abortion. Women were recruited into 3 study groups in a 2:1:1 ratio. These groups were women whose pregnancy was within 2 weeks under a facility's gestational limit who presented and received an abortion (near-limit group; n = 452), women whose pregnancy was up to 3 weeks past a facility's gestational limit who presented and were denied an abortion (turnaway group; n = 231), and women who received a first-trimester abortion (first-trimester group; n = 273). The first-trimester group served to assess whether outcomes differed among women who seek abortions earlier vs later in pregnancy. The turnaway group was further divided into those who gave birth (turnaway-birth group; n = 161) and those who miscarried or later had an abortion elsewhere (turnaway-no-birth group; n = 70). The gestational age limits of each recruitment site varied, so there was some overlap in gestational ages between study groups.

Using validated scales, we examined 4 mental health and 2 psychological well-being outcome measures. Mental health outcomes included 2 measures of depression and 2 measures of anxiety. Depression and anxiety symptoms were assessed using the Brief Symptom Inventory depression and anxiety subscales, where respondents are asked to indicate the intensity of distress felt in the past 7 days. Each of the 2 subscales includes 6 items, measured on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 0 (not at all) to 4 (a great deal). Total subscale scores range from 0 to 24. To identify clinically relevant cases of depression and anxiety, we categorized women with depression and anxiety scores of 9 or more as a case of depression or anxiety, respectively.

Study group, time (years since seeking abortion), and study group by time interactions served as the primary independent variables. Study groups included the near-limit group, which was the reference group; the turnaway-birth group, our main comparison group; the turnaway-no-birth group; and the first-trimester group. The 15 women in the turnaway group who placed their newborns for adoption are included in the turnaway-birth group.

Control variables consisted of baseline characteristics known to be associated with our outcomes. They included age, self-reported race/ethnicity (white, black, Hispanic or Latina, and other), highest educational level (less than high school, high school or equivalent, associate degree or technical school or some college, and college degree or higher), marital status, employment (full-time or part-time), parity, history of child abuse or neglect, history of depression or anxiety diagnosis, prepregnancy illicit drug use, and prepregnancy problem alcohol use (drinking first thing in the morning or inability to remember what happened after drinking).

All analyses were performed using Stata, version 14 (StataCorp). P < .05 (2-tailed) was considered statistically significant. Baseline differences between the near-limit group and the other 3 study groups were assessed using mixed effects regression analyses to account for clustering by site. An omnibus postestimation test was performed to accommodate multiple category associations. For longitudinal models, to assess whether outcome trajectories differed by study group, we used mixed effects linear (for continuous outcomes) and logistic (for dichotomous outcomes) regression analyses. We flexibly modeled trajectories by testing whether including quadratic or cubic terms for time or random slopes for individuals improved the model fit and included them if indicated by a significant ( P < .05) likelihood ratio test. We estimated whether trajectories changed over time or differed by study group via a postestimation test using the lincom and testparm commands in Stata. Longitudinal models adjusted for baseline covariates that could potentially confound the association between the independent variables and model outcomes. Unadjusted results are in eTable 1 in Supplement 2. Gestational age (number of weeks pregnant at the time of the interview) was excluded because it was highly correlated with group owing to the study design. To graph our model results, we estimated the marginal probability of each outcome by study group at 6-month intervals. The benefit of mixed-effects models is that they produce unbiased estimates even when some individuals have missing observations, adjust for differential loss to follow-up, accommodate irregular time measurement, and account for clustering by sites and individuals, as required for our panel data.

We conducted 2 sets of sensitivity analyses to test the robustness of our results. The first set aimed to assess the effect of the recruitment rate on the results by limiting all adjusted analyses to the 464 women from the 11 sites with a recruitment rate of 50% or greater. The second set aimed to assess the effect of adoption by excluding the 15 women in the turnaway-birth group who placed their newborns for adoption.

A total of 1132 of 3016 eligible participants approached (37.5%) consented to participate. A total of 956 women (84.5%) completed the baseline interview, with an average of 5% lost from wave to wave and 558 (58.4%) retained at the last interview. There was no differential loss to follow-up by whether women had a history of anxiety or depression or by study group through wave 10. By the final interview wave (wave 11), women in the turnaway-birth group (82 of 161 [50.9%]) were marginally less likely to participate than those in the near-limit group (270 of 452 [59.7%]; P = .053). The last interview wave was conducted from 5 to 6 years after the women sought an abortion (mean, 5.1 years). The mean for the time variable year was 2.3 (median, 2.0 years). Women participated in an average of 8.2 interviews. The eFigure in Supplement 2 is a flowchart of participant recruitment and retention.

At approximately 1 week after seeking an abortion, educational level, marital status, mental health history, and prior drug and/or problem alcohol use did not differ significantly between women in the near-limits group and the 3 other study groups ( Table 1). Those in the near-limits group differed from women in the other groups in terms of age, employment, race/ethnicity, parity, history of child abuse and neglect, and gestational age.

Depressive symptom trajectories differed by group. Women in the first-trimester group initially experienced fewer symptoms (-0.59; 95% CI, -1.10 to -0.09) and a less steep decline in symptoms compared with those in the near-limit group ( Table 2 and Figure 1). For all groups, depressive symptoms declined over time (eTable 2 in Supplement 2). There were no baseline differences in depression cases; they declined significantly for all groups except the turnaway-birth group, where cases remained relatively flat ( Table 2 and eTable 2 in Supplement 2).

One week after being denied an abortion, women in the turnaway-birth (0.57; 95% CI, 0.01-1.13) and turnaway-no-birth groups (2.29; 95% CI, 1.39-3.18) had significantly more anxiety symptoms than those in the near-limit group ( Table 3 and Figure 2). All groups except the first-trimester group experienced significant declines in anxiety over time (eTable 2 in Supplement 2). Anxiety cases were initially higher among the turnaway-no-birth group (adjusted odds ratio, 4.39; 95% CI, 1.18-16.32) compared with the near-limit group ( Table 3). Anxiety cases declined for all groups except the turnaway-birth group, where cases remained relatively flat (eTable 2 in Supplement 2).

Baseline self-esteem was lower among women in the turnaway-birth and turnaway-no-birth groups than those in the near-limit group (-0.33; 95% CI, -0.56 to -0.09 and -0.40; 95% CI, -0.78 to -0.02, respectively) ( Table 3). Overall, trajectories differed by group and improved over time for all groups (eTable 2 in Supplement 2). The initially lower levels of self-esteem among both turnaway groups improved more rapidly over time ( Figure 2). Women in the turnaway-no-birth group reported significantly lower initial levels of life satisfaction than those in the near-limit group (-0.41, CI -0.77 to -0.06) ( Table 3 and Figure 2). There were significant improvements over time among all groups except the first-trimester group (eTable 2 in Supplement 2).

When we limited our sample to the 11 facilities with a participation rate greater than 50%, results for the adjusted models showing associations with depressive symptoms were similar in direction and in magnitude. Baseline differences in self-esteem, life satisfaction, and anxiety between women in the turnaway-no-birth and near-limit groups were similar in direction but no longer statistically significant. When we removed the women who placed their newborns for adoption from our sample, results for all but 1 of the adjusted models remained similar in direction and in magnitude (eTable 3 and eTable 4 in Supplement 2).

To our knowledge, the Turnaway Study is the first to respond to the US Surgeon General's recommendation to prospectively observe women in the United States for 5 years after seeking an abortion. Our findings add to the body of evidence rejecting the notion that abortion increases women's risk of experiencing adverse psychological outcomes. Women who had an abortion demonstrated more positive outcomes initially compared with women who were denied an abortion.

Women who were denied an abortion, in particular those who later miscarried or had an abortion elsewhere (turnaway no-birth group), had the most elevated levels of anxiety and lowest self-esteem and life satisfaction 1 week after being denied an abortion, which quickly improved and approached levels similar to those in the other groups by 6 to 12 months. These initial elevated levels of distress experienced by both turnaway groups may be a response to being denied an abortion, as well as other social and emotional challenges faced on discovery of unwanted pregnancy and abortion seeking. The reasons women give for seeking abortion-not having enough money, partner issues, bad timing, needing to focus on existing children, and not being emotionally or mentally prepared-are indicative of their difficult circumstances at the time they seek an abortion. The experience of an unintended pregnancy may cause women to contend with their circumstances and reflect on their lives. When relationships and financial situations are thought to be insufficient to support a pregnancy, this feeling of deficiency, rather than the decision to abort or the procedure itself, may be the cause of lowered mental health indicators. These factors, along with the stress of trying to obtain an abortion, likely diminish over time, as indicated by the overall improvements in mental health and well-being outcomes observed in this study. Similarly, Major and colleagues found that women's self-esteem levels were lowest and depressive symptoms highest just before having an abortion, with immediate improvements observed from the period before to the period after the abortion. Women in the turnaway-no-birth group may have experienced the additional stress of trying to find and travel to another abortion facility and raise additional money to pay for the procedure. At the first interview, many of these women reported that they were still trying to access abortion services. These initial adverse outcomes abated after these women miscarried or received their wanted abortion.

Our participation rate of less than 40%, our loss of 42% of our sample by the end of the 5-year period, and our differential loss by study group from wave 10 to wave 11 raise some concerns that attrition could bias our results. Although our loss to follow-up represented good participant retention of about 5% from wave to wave, we cannot rule out the possibility that women with adverse mental health outcomes may have been less likely to participate and/or to be retained. Mitigating concerns of bias include the lack of differential loss to follow-up based on mental health history, as well as our ability to control for history of mental health conditions, child abuse and neglect, and substance use. Furthermore, our use of mixed model regression protects against bias owing to loss to follow up that is predictable from previously measured covariates or outcomes. Concern about bias introduced by low study participation is further lessened by the consistent findings in our sensitivity analyses restricted to sites with more than 50% participation. The lack of change from wave 10 to wave 11 on any of our outcomes lessens our concerns that differential loss by study group at the last interview wave affected our findings.

Another limitation is that because this is an observational study, confounding is a possibility and causal inference can be problematic. By choosing 2 similar groups of women, both of whom were seeking abortion, and adjusting for known confounders and observed differences at baseline we have addressed the threats to the validity of our findings on the effects of abortion on mental health outcomes. Nevertheless, there may have been confounders we did not measure, and our baseline measurement occurred 1 week after the women sought an abortion and thus may not adequately account for unobserved factors.

Correction: This article was corrected on January 18, 2017, to fix a sentence in the Results section.

Accepted for Publication: October 21, 2016.

Corresponding Author: M. Antonia Biggs, PhD, Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health, University of California, San Francisco, 1330 Broadway, Ste 1100, Oakland, CA 94612 ( antonia.biggs@ucsf.edu).

Published Online: December 14, 2016. doi: 10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2016.3478

Author Contributions: Dr Biggs had full access to all the data in the study and takes responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis.

Study concept and design: Foster.

Acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data: All authors.

Drafting of the manuscript: Biggs.

Critical revision of the manuscript for important intellectual content: All authors.

Statistical analysis: Biggs, McCulloch.

Obtained funding: Foster.

Administrative, technical, or material support: Foster.

Study supervision: Foster.

Conflict of Interest Disclosures: None reported.

Funding/Support: This study was supported by research and institutional grants from the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, grant A117053 from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and an anonymous foundation.

Role of the Funder/Sponsor: The funding sources had no role in the design and conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of the data; preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript; and decision to submit the manuscript for publication.

Additional Contributions: Rana Barar, MPH, University of California, San Francisco; Heather Gould, MPH, University of California, San Francisco; and Sandy Stonesifer, MA, SSquared Consulting, provided study coordination and management. Mattie Boehler-Tatman; Janine Carpenter, MPH, OLE Health; Ivette Gomez, Kaiser Family Foundation; Selena Phipps, Access Reproductive Care-Southeast Inc; Brenly Rowland, University of California, San Francisco; Claire Schreiber, MPP, Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation; and Danielle Sinkford, MS, RN, FNP-C, St. Johns Well Child and Family Center, conducted interviews. Michaela Ferrari, MPH, Dignity Health; Debbie Nguyen, Upstream USA; and Elisette Weiss, Sea Change Program, provided project support. Jay Fraser, MA, Judicial Council of California; and John Neuhaus, PhD, University of California, San Francisco, provided statistical and database assistance. All individuals listed were compensated for their contributions. We also thank all the participating health care professionals for their assistance with recruitment.

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Women's Mental Health After Having or Being Denied an Abortion

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Question Are there associations between having or being denied an abortion with women's mental health and well-being? Findings This longitudinal cohort study observed 956 women semiannually for 5 years. Eight days after seeking an abortion, women who were denied an abortion reported significantly more anxiety symptoms and lower self-esteem and life satisfaction, but similar levels of depression, as women receiving abortions; outcomes improved or remained steady over time.

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Revised August 2022 The right to abortion has been both supported and contested throughout history. When banned, abortions still occur, although legal and practical barriers make it more difficult, and less safe, for those seeking abortions. This article provides an overview of the history of abortion law in the United States, including key state and federal laws and Supreme Court rulings.
The First Abortion Laws (1820s-1930s)

Prohibition against abortion didn't appear in state statutes until the 1820s, and early laws were ambiguous and not strictly enforced. Some laws were poison-control measures, drafted to stem the sale of chemical mixes used to induce abortion.

By the late 19th century, most states had laws in place restricting abortion. This was part of a backlash against the growing women's rights movement, which advocated for " voluntary motherhood ." Even though the movement did not support abortion, the demand for birth control was seen as a threat to male dominance; restricting abortion became part of an effort to control women and confine them to a traditional childbearing role.

It also was a way for men in the newly established medical profession to take control over the highly profitable business of childbirth from midwives, whom they condemned for performing abortions.

Despite legal prohibitions, abortions continued surreptitiously into the 20th century.

The Toll of Illegal Abortions

While there were some providers who performed abortions despite its illegality, finding one often depended upon your finances, your race, and where you lived. Women with money could sometimes find a physician in the United States who would perform the procedure for a high fee. By the mid-20th century, some women traveled abroad to obtain an abortion. Those without funds, especially women of color, suffered disproportionately. They were often at the mercy of incompetent practitioners with questionable motives or forced to resort to dangerous self-abortions.

In desperation, some women inserted knitting needles or coat hangers into their vaginas and uteruses, douched with solutions such as lye, or ingested strong drugs or chemicals. Because many deaths were not officially attributed to unsafe, illegal abortion, it's impossible to know the exact number of lives lost. However, we do know that thousands of women a year were treated for health complications due to botched, unsanitary, or self-induced abortions, and many died. Others were left infertile or with chronic illness and pain.

Hospitals had entire wards dedicated to caring for women suffering from health complications, most of whom had tried to induce their own abortion or had had an illegal abortion. In 1939, Cook County Hospital, Chicago's public hospital, reported treating more than 1,000 women annually. That number increased to nearly 5,000 in 1962.

In 1972 I was a third-year medical student doing my first clinical experience in obstetrics and gynecology.... At that time, Cook County had a 40-bed Septic Abortion Ward. It was a large room with the beds separated by curtains. The role of the medical student - my role for the week I was there - was to push a large cart of antibiotic solutions around the room, hang the antibiotics and connect them to the IV line, and take the patients' vital signs. When one of the patients died, I was to call the diener - the morgue attendant who collected the bodies. A death in this ward was a common occurrence.

Making Illegal Abortion Safer

Wherever abortion is illegal, caring and dedicated people take enormous risks to provide safe abortions clandestinely, to treat people who have complications, and to help them find safe providers.

Over a four-year period, the group provided more than 11,000 first- and second-trimester abortions with a safety record comparable to that of today's legal medical facilities.

Laura Kaplan, a former Jane member and the author of The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service, describes the women involved:

"We were ordinary women who, working together, accomplished something extraordinary. Our actions, which we saw as potentially transforming for other women, changed us, too. By taking responsibility, we became responsible. Most of us grew stronger, more self-assured, confident in our own abilities. In picking up the tools of our own liberation, in our case medical instruments, we broke a powerful taboo. That act was terrifying, but it was also exhilarating. We ourselves felt exactly the same powerfulness that we wanted other women to feel."

Organizing to Change the Law

In the 1960s, inspired by the civil rights and antiwar movements, women organized a women's liberation movement. Reproductive rights were among their highest priorities.

When I was 15 and pregnant, abortion was illegal. I was denied any choice-I had a baby that I gave up for adoption. This experience has been a driving force in my life. I became an OB/GYN; I do abortions because I am totally committed to making sure that other women have the options that I didn't have.

Between 1967 and 1973, 14 states modified and four states repealed restrictive abortion laws. Changes included allowing access to abortion in certain circumstances, such as when the pregnancy was the result of rape or incest.

In 1967, Colorado was the first U.S. state to decriminalize abortion, although it was only allowed in cases of rape, incest, or when the pregnancy would cause "permanent physical disability" to the woman. In 1970, New York became the first state to legalize abortion on demand through the 24th week of pregnancy. Hawaii had earlier legalized abortion through 20 weeks, but only for residents of that state, and Washington, D.C., also allowed abortions. Two other states, Alaska and Washington, followed. During this period, women who could afford it began traveling to places where it was legal to get abortions.

Feminist networks offered support, loans, and referrals and fought to keep prices down. But for every person who managed to get to New York or the few other places where abortion was legal, many others with limited financial resources or mobility still sought illegal abortions.

Roe v. Wade: A Milestone Decision

The Court weighed a pregnant person's right to privacy against the state interests in supporting maternal health and fetal life. The Court held that the abortion decision must be left to the person carrying the pregnancy, in consultation with their doctor, during the first trimester; the state may regulate abortion in ways that are reasonably related to maternal health in the second trimester; and the state may regulate or prohibit abortion in the third trimester, except where necessary to preserve the person's life or health.

Weakening the Constitutional Protection for Abortion

While many were thrilled and relieved that abortion was now legal across the country, others were appalled and turned to state legislatures to restrict access. During this period, abortion became a partisan issue. The Republican party adopted an anti-abortion position, whereas the Democratic party supported abortion rights. While Southern Baptists initially supported abortion rights established in , soon abortion became a major wedge issue for the rising tide of white evangelical Christians, who mobilized to restrict abortion access and aligned politically with the Republican party. This change in rhetoric and policy has been traced to their need for a successful uniting issue after their support for racial segregation became unviable as a wedge issue.

From 1973 until 1992, restrictions on abortion were passed in almost every state. Abortion rights activists appealed, but the Supreme Court rejected hearing most of these cases. However, during this time period the Court handed down several major rulings that made it more difficult for young people and those with limited funds to access abortion.

Bellotti v. Baird and Parental Consent

Rebecca Suzanne "Becky" Bell was the first person known to die of an illegal abortion because of parental consent laws. On September 16, 1988, the 17-year-old Indiana teenager died of complications from a septic abortion after becoming discouraged from obtaining a legal procedure because of Indiana's parental consent law.

Hyde Amendment and Medicaid Funding

The Supreme Court also allowed Congress to block Medicaid funding for abortion. When legalized abortion, - a healthcare program funded jointly by the federal government and individual states - covered abortion care as part of comprehensive health care services provided to low-income women.

Because so many women depend upon Medicaid for their health care, the Hyde Amendment effectively made it much more difficult for low-income women - disproportionately women of color - to get abortions.

Planned Parenthood v. Casey: A New Legal Test

The next major Supreme Court ruling regarding abortion access came in 1992, when the Court, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey considered a highly restrictive Pennsylvania law that required a 24-hour waiting period, spousal notification, parental consent, a mandate that doctors give biased counseling to people seeking abortion health care, and burdensome reporting requirements.

In its decision, the Court abandoned the trimester framework and created a new legal test for allowable restrictions.

Before viability - which is the point at which a fetus can survive outside the womb, somewhere between 24 and 28 weeks - the Court allowed restrictions on abortion, as long as the law does not place an "undue burden" on a person's access to abortion. The Court defined an "undue burden" as a restriction that has the "purpose or effect of placing a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion."

Under this new standard, the Court upheld all of the Pennsylvania restrictions except for spousal notification, which it noted could place women in danger from abusive husbands.

The Court allowed states to ban abortion after viability, as long as they had an exception to preserve the life or health of the pregnant person.

Sternbeg v. Carhart and Second-Trimester Abortions

In the aftermath of , state and local legislatures began to pass more and more laws to restrict abortion, and the Supreme Court more often upheld them.

In the 2000 case of Stenberg v. Carhart , the Supreme Court struck down a Nebraska statute prohibiting what anti-abortion advocates called "partial birth abortion." Although the term does not refer to any medical procedure, the law was interpreted as prohibiting doctors from performing an intact dilation and extraction abortion , a procedure sometimes used for second trimester abortions.

The Court held that if a particular abortion method may be safer in some circumstances, the state cannot flatly ban the method and must allow a maternal health exception.

Gonzales v. Carhart Changes Course

Abortion rights advocates once again challenged the law, but this time the Supreme Court had two new conservative appointees: Justice John Roberts joined the Court in 2005, and Justice Samuel Alito in 2006. As a result, the Court overruled Stenberg v. Carhart and upheld the abortion ban in the 2007 case of Gonzales v. Carhart .

This law is one of many instances of politicians dictating the practice of medicine without regard for medical science or a pregnant person's health. It also highlights the increasing politicization of the Supreme Court: A candidate's position on abortion - specifically, being anti-abortion - had become a litmus test for Republican presidents.

In her dissent to Gonzales v. Carhart , Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg criticized the ruling, saying:

Today's decision is alarming ... It tolerates, indeed applauds, federal intervention to ban nationwide a procedure found necessary and proper in certain cases by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG). It blurs the line, firmly drawn in , between previability and postviability abortions. And, for the first time since , the Court blesses a prohibition with no exception safeguarding a woman's health.

The Rise of State Restrictions

According to Guttmacher Institute, since the 1973 decision, states have passed more than 1,300 abortion restrictions (as of 2021). These laws ban abortion after a particular gestational age or based on sex, race, or genetic anomaly , ban specific abortion methods , impose biased counseling and waiting periods , require unnecessary ultrasounds , restrict access to medication abortions , limit who can provide abortion health care, and impose targeted regulation of abortion providers, or TRAP, regulations .

The constant onslaught of anti-abortion rights measures endangers women's health and forces reproductive rights and justice activists to challenge each restriction and fight the same battles repeatedly.

TRAP Regulations Take Hold

TRAP (Targeted Regulations of Abortion Providers) regulations refer to burdensome and medically unnecessary requirements that are more stringent than requirements for other medical procedures of similar risk.

For example, TRAP laws sometimes mandate the width of hallway corridors in abortion facilities - forcing clinics to close if they can't afford expensive renovation costs - or require physicians to obtain admitting privileges at a nearby hospital - when no nearby hospital is willing to grant them, due to religious affiliation or refusal to involve itself in a politically charged issue.

Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt: Challenging TRAP Laws

The Court ruled that these restrictions violated the 14th Amendment because they imposed an undue burden on abortion access. The Court said that reviewing courts must "consider the burdens a law imposes on abortion access together with the benefits those laws confer," and that courts retain "an independent constitutional duty to review factual findings where constitutional rights are at stake."

Texas tried to justify the restrictions on the grounds of protecting women's health, but evidence in the record proved that the provisions provided no medical benefit and in fact endangered women's health.

Personhood Laws

Anti-reproductive rights activists use the concept of "personhood" to attempt to pass laws that define zygotes, embryos, and fetuses as "persons" separate from the pregnant person, and with the full legal rights as a person.

The goal of personhood laws is to criminalize abortion as well as certain forms of birth control that work by preventing sperm from fertilizing an egg. Opponents of abortion rights have even used proposed measures to prevent doctors from treating complicated and potentially dangerous pregnancies.

Many state legislatures have considered legislation with personhood language, and several have passed them, including Alabama, Kansas and Missouri.

Protection of Patients and Providers

When this violence escalated in the early 1990s, a Democratic Congress passed the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act of 1994, which prohibits intentional property damage and the use of "force or threat of force or ... physical obstruction" to "injure, intimidate or interfere with" someone entering a health care facility.

Several states have laws creating a buffer zone around clinics, or a "bubble zone" around a person within a specific distance of a clinic's entrance or driveway. In the 2000 decision Hill v. Colorado , the Supreme Court upheld a floating 8-foot "bubble zone" law in Colorado, but in the 2014 case of McCullen v. Coakley , the Court struck down a Massachusetts law that placed a 35-foot buffer zone around clinic entrances.

Abortion and the Affordable Care Act

Prohibitions or restrictions on abortion coverage are not limited only to statutes governing public funding. In 2010, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was signed into law, extending the Hyde Amendment restrictions on abortion coverage to states' newly created health insurance exchanges.

Abortion advocates continue to fight the Affordable Care Act's restrictions on abortion coverage. These restrictions force some people to continue pregnancies they do not want and may put their health or lives at risk.

Restrictions on Funding Abortion

In addition to restrictive state laws, the federal Hyde Amendment and subsequent federal and state laws banning public funding for abortion continue to limit access for people with low incomes, who are disproportionately women of color.

Currently, Medicaid covers abortion only in cases of rape, incest, or when the pregnant person's life is endangered by an illness, injury, or physical disorder. In May of 2021, President Joe Biden, for the first time ever, proposed a federal budget without the Hyde Amendment, but the Hyde Amendment was restored and passed in March of 2022.

While the Hyde Amendment restricts state Medicaid programs from using federal funds to cover abortion outside the above circumstances, states can use their own funds to cover abortion.

Thirty-three states and the District of Columbia follow the federal standard and only provide abortions in the circumstances outlined in the Hyde Amendment. As of 2018, over of reproductive age women on Medicaid - more than 7 million women - lived in states that restrict abortion coverage.

The Hyde amendment and its progeny have expanded in scope and currently also limit federal funding of abortion services for federal employees, women in the military and Peace Corps, American Indian and Alaskan native women who use the Indian Health Service, and women in federal prisons and immigration detention facilities.

Under the leadership of women of color organizations and their allies, activists are attempting to repeal Hyde and restore public funding for abortion health care.

The Global Gag Rule

In 1984, Ronald Reagan instituted the Mexico City Policy, which came to be known as the "global gag rule." Under this rule, foreign nongovernmental organizations are not allowed to receive U.S. family planning funding unless they agree to stop providing abortion-related services or advocating for the expansion of abortion access, using any source of their funding.

The Domestic Gag Rule

In March 2019, the Trump administration enacted a domestic gag rule, which prohibits U.S. clinics receiving Title X family planning funds from referring their patients for abortion health care.

Supreme Court Changes During the Trump Administration

After Donald Trump became president in 2017, he appointed two new ultra-conservative justices to the Supreme Court - Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh - emboldening anti-abortion rights activists, policymakers, and right wing, antifeminist judges.

Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi and Ohio adopted so-called "fetal heartbeat" bills that prohibit abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. Fetuses do not yet have hearts at six weeks of gestation, but six weeks is usually when doctors can start detecting embryonic cardiac activity via ultrasound. Missouri passed an eight-week ban. Alabama voted to ban all abortions except to save a pregnant person's life, with no exception for rape or incest.

Despite the 2016 Whole Woman's Health decision, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an identical admitting privileges law in Louisiana, purporting to distinguish the effects of the law from the Texas law at issue in Whole Woman's Health.

In June of 2020, the Supreme Court narrowly ruled in June Medical Services v. Russo that the Louisiana law was unconstitutional. Chief Justice Roberts, who had dissented in Whole Woman's Health, concurred in the judgment to provide a fifth vote striking down the Louisiana law.

In his opinion, Roberts criticized Whole Woman's Health and suggested ways to narrow the undue burden standard in future cases, but he concurred on the grounds of respect for precedent. In doing so, he created a blueprint for states to restrict abortion, and in August 2020, Arkansas enacted four new restrictions.

One of these, a ban on dilation and extraction procedures, prevents the most common method of providing second-trimester abortion care. Another requires that abortion providers notify law enforcement officials when a patient 17 years old or younger seeks an abortion.

Supreme Court's Lurch to the Right Sparks More State Bans

Shortly before the 2020 presidential election, staunch feminist Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. Despite the imminent election he would soon lose, Donald Trump nominated fundamentalist anti-abortion advocate Amy Coney Barrett to fill Ginsburg's seat.

The Republican Senate leadership confirmed Barrett's nomination in record time, tilting the balance of the court to a 6-3 hard right supermajority with the three Trump appointees.

In response to this shift, Republican states quickly began passing anti-abortion laws. According to Guttmacher Institute, states enacted 108 abortion restrictions in 2021, far surpassing the previous post- record of 89 set in 2011.

In May 2021, Texas passed a six-week abortion ban - called S.B. 8 - with a private enforcement scheme that attempts to circumvent federal court review. S.B. 8 allows private citizens to file civil lawsuits against anyone who knowingly "aids or abets" an abortion. People receiving abortion care are exempt, but a wide range of others can be sued, including abortion providers and clinic staff, friends and family who help the pregnant person with advice or funds, and drivers who take people to their appointments. The law tells the courts to award plaintiffs at least $10,000 in damages from defendants.

Abortion providers challenged the law, but the Supreme Court allowed the ban to go into effect on September 1, 2021, despite the fact that the law clearly violated .

Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization: Overturning Roe

On June 24, 2022, the United States Supreme Court ended constitutional protections for the right to abortion. The sweeping decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization overturned the longstanding precedents of Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992). For the first time in the history of the Supreme Court and the United States, a fundamental constitutional right was taken away.

Guttmacher Institute predicted that in the absence of , would be certain or likely to ban abortion. These abortion bans will cover much of the South and Midwest of the United States. At the time of , thirteen states had "trigger laws" to ban abortion shortly after 's reversal, including Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Wyoming. Many states ban abortion from the moment of fertilization and others ban abortion between six and 15 weeks of pregnancy. Eleven states have no exceptions for rape or incest. Six states have no exceptions for the health of the pregnant woman. Even when there are life or health exceptions to these abortion bans, pregnant women experience significant hurdles to accessing abortion health care.

Donald Trump's three Supreme Court nominees-Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett-joined Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, who authored the opinion, to strike down The majority opinion argued that abortion is not a constitutional right because the Constitution does not explicitly mention abortion, the framers of the 14th Amendment in 1868 did not intend to protect the right to abortion, and, finally, that abortion rights are not "deeply rooted in the country's history and traditions." The opinion focused on mid-19th century abortion prohibitions, but ignores the long history of legal abortion in the United States. Throughout the opinion, the Supreme Court repeatedly refers to embryos and fetuses as "unborn human beings."

In addition to allowing states to outlaw abortion, the decision puts at risk rights to use in vitro fertilization as well as IUDs and emergency contraception, which many anti-abortion proponents believe- contrary to scientific evidence -cause abortion. The sweeping reasoning of the Court puts at risk a range of privacy-based constitutional rights. In his concurrence, Clarence Thomas calls on the court to revisit the Griswold decision guaranteeing access to contraception and Obergefell , which established the right to enter into a same-sex marriage.

In response to , Republican lawmakers and anti-abortion activists from the Susan B. Anthony List announced they were working on legislation to ban abortion nationwide , which they could achieve if Republicans were to win Congress and the White House in 2024. But they may not have to wait that long, because the Court could do that itself. The opinion has repeated references to "unborn humans"-23 times-laying the groundwork for striking down state laws protecting abortion rights in states such as California and New York.

People seeking abortion care and those who help them now face criminal prosecution and civil lawsuits in several anti-abortion states. But unlike before , we now live in an era of mass incarceration , which makes it far more likely that women will be surveilled , arrested and jailed.

The New York-based privacy group Surveillance Technology Oversight Project released a chilling report in June of 2022 detailing how anti-abortion governments and private entities are already using cutting-edge digital technologies to surveil women's search history, location data, messages, online purchases and social media activities by using geofencing, keyword warrants, big data and more.

Even before , police and prosecutors were already criminally charging pregnant women for miscarriage, abortion and pregnancy loss, such as Texas woman Lizelle Herrera, who was arrested in April for murder after allegedly causing her miscarriage. Approximately 1,200 women-who are disproportionately low-income women and women of color-have been prosecuted for their behavior during pregnancy over the last 15 years. The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers published a report in August of 2021 warning about the threat of increasing criminalization post- .

While conservative states banned abortion, progressive states such as California, New York and Massachusetts responded to by passing laws strengthening abortion rights. As a result, the United States became further divided on access to abortion health, with some states banning abortion and others expanding access to abortion healthcare, particularly in light of a December 2021 FDA policy change on the abortion medication mifepristone, which opened up telemedicine abortion options.

Telemedicine and Medication Abortion

Telemedicine abortion combines medication abortion, which uses pills to end a pregnancy, with telemedicine, which allows health care providers to meet with patients via videoconferencing or telephone consultations.

Medication abortion is a to end an early pregnancy. Approved by the FDA through 10 weeks of pregnancy, medication abortion uses two different medicines : mifepristone, which interrupts the flow of the hormone progesterone that sustains the pregnancy; and misoprostol, which causes contractions. This combination of medications is 95-97 percent effective. Misoprostol alone is also highly effective .

The growth of medication abortion has dovetailed with the expansion of telehealth to provide new opportunities for accessing abortion health care. As abortion restrictions have increased over the last several years, and harassment of people entering health clinics persists, people are increasingly turning to medication abortion and telehealth to increase their safety and privacy when obtaining abortion care.

State & FDA Policy Restrictions on Telemedicine Abortion

Nevertheless, numerous policy barriers limit the reach of telehealth abortion. Many states prohibit patient access to the abortion pill via telemedicine, despite its proven safety.

Currently, require the prescribing clinician to be physically present when prescribing the abortion pill, while require the clinician prescribing the abortion pill to be a physician. Neither of these requirements are necessary because the abortion pill is extremely safe and effective .

Another significant barrier to telemedicine abortion until December of 2021 was that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) restricted the distribution of mifepristone.

When initially approving the drug in 2000, the FDA, under pressure from anti-abortion forces, blocked easy access to mifepristone, using their Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS) - a drug safety program that allows the FDA to restrict the circulation of certain medications to help ensure the benefits of the medication outweigh its risks.

Under the REMS program, mifepristone had to be dispensed in person at a clinic, medical office or hospital under the supervision of a healthcare provider registered with the drug manufacturer.

In March of 2020, a coalition of 21 state attorneys general , led by California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, sent a strongly-worded letter to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and its U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), urging the Trump administration to waive or utilize its discretion on enforcement of its REMS designation. Reproductive health groups also pressured the government to remove the REMS restriction on the abortion pill.

In December of 2021, the FDA partially lifted the REMS restriction by removing the long-standing rule that health care providers must distribute the abortion pill mifepristone to patients in person. However, the FDA kept mifepristone within the REMS program, maintaining a requirement that health care providers must register with the drug manufacturer to become certified to prescribe mifepristone. This greatly limits the number of qualified providers.

Another change in the REMS, however, may make it easier for clinicians to prescribe mifepristone: The FDA will allow some pharmacies to distribute the drug. But the FDA is still blocking the abortion pill from being available in pharmacies, like any other drug.

And while the partial removal of the FDA REMS restriction has opened the door to expanded telemedicine abortion access in many states, 19 states still require in-person distribution of the drug.

Support for Self-Managed Abortions

Reproductive health advocacy organizations like , , and provide information and support on how to safely obtain and use abortion pills. Some states have passed laws and supported the prosecution of people who have obtained abortion pills and used them on their own.

Conclusion: Abortion is a Human Right

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The History of Abortion Law in the United States - Our Bodies Ourselves Today

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Revised August 2022 The right to abortion has been both supported and contested throughout history. When banned, abortions still occur, although legal and practical barriers make it more difficult, and less safe, for those seeking abortions. This article provides an overview of the history of abortion law in the United States, including key state and federal laws and Supreme Court rulings.

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Find out what happens before, during and after an abortion, including what the main methods involve.

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The "right to life" also doesn't imply a right to live by threatening somebody else's life. Bearing children is always a threat the life of the mother

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So you're at a party, and someone says something ignorant. And while you know that they're in the wrong, and that you could totally engage them and win if you were a bit more prepared, your words escape you. To make sure that doesn't happen, we've compiled a series of handy reference guides with the most common arguments - and your counter-arguments - for all of the hot-button issues of the day. This week's topic: How to argue the pro-choice position.
Common Argument #1: A fetus is a human being, and human beings have the right to life, so abortion is murder.

Your Response: I'm probably not going to convince you that a fetus isn't a life, as that's basically the most intractable part of this whole debate, so I'll be brief:

A fetus can't survive on its own. It is fully dependent on its mother's body, unlike born human beings.

Even if a fetus was alive, the "right to life" doesn't imply a right to use somebody else's body. People have the right to refuse to donate their organs, for example, even if doing so would save somebody else's life.

The "right to life" also doesn't imply a right to live by threatening somebody else's life. Bearing children is always a threat the life of the mother (see below).

A "right to life" is, at the end of the day, a right to not have somebody else's will imposed upon your body. Do women not have this right as well?

Common Argument #2: If a woman is willing to have sex, she's knowingly taking the risk of getting pregnant, and should be responsible for her actions.

Your Response: You're asserting that giving birth is the "responsible" choice in the event of a pregnancy, but that's just your opinion. I'd argue that if a mother knows she won't be able to provide for her child, it's actually more responsible to have an abortion, and in doing so prevent a whole lot of undue suffering and misery.

But let's look at this argument a bit further. If you think getting an abortion is "avoiding responsibility," that implies that it's a woman's responsibility to bear a child if she chooses to have sex. That sounds suspiciously like you're dictating what a woman's role and purpose is, and a lot less like you're making an argument about the life of a child.

Common Reply: No, because women can practice safe sex and avoid getting pregnant. If she refuses to use contraception and gets pregnant as a result, that's her fault, and her responsibility.

Your Rebuttal: Not everyone has easy access to contraception, nor does everyone have a good enough sex education class to know how to use it or where to obtain it. But let's just suppose, for the sake of argument, that everyone had access to free contraception and knew how to use it correctly.

Even then, no contraception is 100 percent effective. Presumably, you oppose abortions even in cases where contraception fails (and it does sometimes fail, even when used perfectly). If that's true, you're saying that, by merely choosing to have sex - with or without a condom - a woman becomes responsible for having a child. And that's a belief that has everything to do with judging a woman's behavior, and nothing to do with the value of life.

Common Argument #3: But I'm okay with abortions in cases of rape.

Your Response: Why only in those cases? Are the lives of children who were conceived by rape worth less than the lives of children who were willfully conceived? If preserving the life of the child takes primacy over the desires of the mother - which is what you're saying if you if you oppose any legal abortions - then it shouldn't matter how that life was conceived.

Common Argument #4: "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down."

Your Response: Go home, Todd Akin, you're drunk.

Common Argument #5: Adoption is a viable alternative to abortion.

Your Response: This implies that the only reason a woman would want to get an abortion is to avoid raising a child, and that isn't the case. Depending on the circumstances, the mere act of having a child in a hospital can cost between $3,000 and $37,000 in the United States. Giving birth is dangerous, too: In the United States, pregnancy complications are the sixth most common cause of death for women between the ages of 20 and 34.

Even before birth, there are costs to pregnancy. In addition to the whole "carrying another human being around in your stomach for nine months" thing, many women, particularly teens, are shunned and shamed for their pregnancies - not only by friends, families, employers, and classmates, but also by advertisements in the subway. There's also the risk of violent retribution from abusive partners and parents.

In short, there are a lot of reasons a woman might seek an abortion. Adoption doesn't address all of them.

Common Argument #6: When abortion is legal, women just use it as a form of birth control.

Your Response: Do you have evidence of this? Considering that contraceptives are cheaper, easier, less painful, less time-consuming, less emotionally taxing, and more readily available than abortions, it seems odd to suggest that women who've already decided to use birth control would select abortion as their preferred method. It's more likely the opposite: Historical and contemporary data suggests that women will seek abortions regardless of whether or not they're legal, but that when birth control and contraceptives are more widely accessible, abortion rates go down.

Common Argument #7: Abortions are dangerous.

Your Response: When performed by trained professionals, abortions are one of the safest procedures in medicine, with a death rate of less than .01 percent. The risk of dying while giving birth is roughly 13 times higher. Abortions performed by people without the requisite skills and training, however, are extremely unsafe. An estimated 68,000 women die every year from back alley abortions, which are generally most common when abortion is illegal and/or inaccessible.

If you'd like to examine the health impact of banning abortion, consider Romania, which banned abortions in 1966. That policy remained in place for about 23 years, during which time over 9,000 women died from unsafe abortions, and countless others were permanently injured. That's around two women dying every day. When the policy was reversed, maternal mortality rate plummeted to one-eighth of what it was at its peak under the no-abortion policy.

Abortions and maternal death rates in Romania, 1965-2010. Image credit: BMJ Group
The negative health effects of prohibiting abortion don't end with the mothers. Romania's abortion ban sparked a nationwide orphan crisis, as roughly 150,000 unwanted newborns were placed in nightmarish state-run orphanages. Many of those orphans now suffer from sever mental and physical health problems, including reduced brain size, schizoaffective disorder, and sociopathy.

When abortion is illegal, it becomes exponentially more unsafe for both women and their children. You may not like the fact that women will seek abortions even when they're illegal, but it is undeniably a fact nonetheless.

Common Argument #8: What if Winston Churchill or Martin Luther King had been aborted?

Your Response: Are you saying abortion policy should be influenced by how good of a person a fetus ends up becoming? If that's the case, what if Joseph Stalin or Pol Pot had been aborted?

Common Argument #9: Many women who get abortions regret their decision later on.

Your Response: This is a pretty common argument. As with shaming of teen moms, it pops up in subway ads...

This is a bad argument. Should the government ban people from doing things they sometimes regret? Think of everything you've ever regretted - not moving after college, dating the wrong person - and ask yourself if you wish there had been a law to prevent you from doing that thing. You probably don't, because you probably believe people should be able to choose their own paths in life regardless of whether they regret those choices later on. I agree, which is part of why I'm pro-choice.

Common Argument #10: Taxpayers shouldn't be forced to pay for things they find morally disagreeable.

Your Response: By that rationale, America also shouldn't have a military, since that's funded by taxes, and many taxpayers find American foreign policy morally disagreeable. Also, the Hyde Amendment prevents most public funds from going toward abortions. But that's a moot point, because these are two separate arguments. Believing that abortion should be legal doesn't require you to also believe that taxpayer dollars should fund abortions.

Common Argument #11: What if your mother had aborted you?

Your Response: Well, if I'd never come into existence in the first place, I probably wouldn't have any strong feelings on the matter. Anyway, I love my mother very much and respect her right to make whatever decisions are right for her body and life.
Planned Parenthood on YouTube In summary:

A "right to life" doesn't imply a right to use someone else's body to sustain a life.

Women do not have a "responsibility" to have children, and certainly don't assume such a responsibility by virtue of deciding to have sex.

Outlawing abortion is very dangerous, both for women and their children.

Adoption still requires women to carry a baby to term and then give birth, both of which are also inherently dangerous.

Abortions, on the other hand, are quite safe.

Banning abortion violates a woman's right to control her own body.

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So you're at a party, and someone says something ignorant. And while you know that they're in the wrong, and that you could totally engage them and win if you were a bit more prepared, your words escape you. To make sure that doesn't happen, we've...

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Induced abortions are performed because of these 4 main reasons: to preserve the life or physical or mental well-being of the mother; to prevent the completion of a pregnancy that has resulted from rape or incest; to prevent the birth of a child with serious deformity, mental difficulties, or genetic abnormality; or to prevent a birth for social or economic reasons (such as the extreme youth of the pregnant female or the sorely strained resources of the family unit). A women should be able to decide what and what not she should do with her body, rather than the state.

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abortion, the expulsion of a fetus from the uterus before it has reached the stage of viability (in human beings, usually about the 20th week of gestation). An abortion may occur spontaneously, in which case it is also called a miscarriage, or it may be brought on purposefully, in which case it is often called an induced abortion.

Spontaneous abortions, or miscarriages, occur for many reasons, including disease, trauma, genetic defect, or biochemical incompatibility of mother and fetus. Occasionally a fetus dies in the uterus but fails to be expelled, a condition termed a missed abortion.

Induced abortions may be performed for reasons that fall into four general categories: to preserve the life or physical or mental well-being of the mother; to prevent the completion of a pregnancy that has resulted from rape or incest; to prevent the birth of a child with serious deformity, mental deficiency, or genetic abnormality; or to prevent a birth for social or economic reasons (such as the extreme youth of the pregnant female or the sorely strained resources of the family unit). By some definitions, abortions that are performed to preserve the well-being of the female or in cases of rape or incest are therapeutic, or justifiable, abortions.

Numerous medical techniques exist for performing abortions. During the first trimester (up to about 12 weeks after conception), endometrial aspiration, suction, or curettage may be used to remove the contents of the uterus. In endometrial aspiration, a thin flexible tube is inserted up the cervical canal (the neck of the womb) and then sucks out the lining of the uterus (the endometrium) by means of an electric pump.

In the related but slightly more onerous procedure known as dilatation and evacuation (also called suction curettage or vacuum curettage), the cervical canal is enlarged by the insertion of a series of metal dilators while the patient is under anesthesia, after which a rigid suction tube is inserted into the uterus to evacuate its contents. When, in place of suction, a thin metal tool called a curette is used to scrape (rather than vacuum out) the contents of the uterus, the procedure is called dilatation and curettage. When combined with dilatation, both evacuation and curettage can be used up to about the 16th week of pregnancy.

From 12 to 19 weeks the injection of a saline solution may be used to trigger uterine contractions; alternatively, the administration of prostaglandins by injection, suppository, or other method may be used to induce contractions, but these substances may cause severe side effects. Hysterotomy, the surgical removal of the uterine contents, may be used during the second trimester or later. In general, the more advanced the pregnancy, the greater the risk to the female of mortality or serious complications following an abortion.

In the late 20th century a new method of induced abortion was discovered that uses the drug RU-486 (mifepristone), an artificial steroid that is closely related to the contraceptive hormone norethnidrone. RU-486 works by blocking the action of the hormone progesterone, which is needed to support the development of a fertilized egg. When ingested within weeks of conception, RU-486 effectively triggers the menstrual cycle and flushes the fertilized egg out of the uterus. RU-486 is typically used in combination with another drug, misoprostol, which softens the cervix and induces uterine contractions. By 2020 the two-drug combination, commonly referred to as a "medication abortion" or the "abortion pill," accounted for more than half of all abortions in the United States.

Whether and to what extent induced abortions should be permitted, encouraged, or severely repressed is a social issue that has divided theologians, philosophers, and legislators for centuries. Abortion was apparently a common and socially accepted method of family limitation in the Greco-Roman world. Although Christian theologians early and vehemently condemned abortion, the application of severe criminal sanctions to deter its practice became common only in the 19th century. In the 20th century such sanctions were modified in one way or another in various countries, beginning with the Soviet Union in 1920, with Scandinavian countries in the 1930s, and with Japan and several eastern European countries in the 1950s. In some countries the unavailability of birth control devices was a factor in the acceptance of abortion. In the late 20th century China used abortion on a large scale as part of its population control policy. In the early 21st century some jurisdictions with large Roman Catholic populations, such as Portugal and Mexico City, decriminalized abortion despite strong opposition from the church, while others, such as Nicaragua, increased restrictions on it.

A broad social movement for the relaxation or elimination of restrictions on the performance of abortions resulted in the passing of liberalized legislation in several states in the United States during the 1960s. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade (1973) that unduly restrictive state regulation of abortion was unconstitutional, in effect legalizing abortion for any reason for women in the first three months of pregnancy. A countermovement for the restoration of strict control over the circumstances under which abortions might be permitted soon sprang up, and the issue became entangled in social and political conflict. In rulings in 1989 ( Webster v. Reproductive Health Services) and 1992 ( Planned Parenthood v. Casey), a more conservative Supreme Court upheld the legality of new state restrictions on abortion, though it proved unwilling to overturn Roe v. Wade itself. In 2007 the Court also upheld a federal ban on a rarely used abortion method known as intact dilation and evacuation. In a later ruling, Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022), the Court overturned both Roe and Casey, holding that there is no constitutional right to abortion.

In April 2023 a federal district court judge in Texas issued an order effectively invalidating the federal Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) approval of RU-486 in 2000. An approximately simultaneous order by a federal district court judge in Washington state prohibited the FDA from further limiting access to RU-486 in 17 states and the District of Columbia. Shortly after the two rulings, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit temporarily blocked the Texas judge's finding that RU-486 had been improperly approved but declined to reverse his separate stays of measures that the FDA had taken since 2016 to make RU-486 accessible to more patients, including extending the period during which the drug could be used from 7 to 10 weeks of pregnancy and permitting the drug to be mailed to patients rather than administered at an in-person visit with a doctor.The administration of Pres. Joe Biden then submitted an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court, asking that it temporarily uphold the FDA's approval of RU-486 and its measures since 2016 to make the drug more accessible. One week later the Supreme Court granted the administration's request, ensuring that mifepristone would remain fully accessible until the case is settled by the Fifth Circuit or, if an appeal to the Supreme Court is granted, by the Supreme Court itself.

The public debate of the abortion issue has demonstrated the enormous difficulties experienced by political institutions in grappling with the complex and ambiguous ethical problems raised by the question of abortion. Opponents of abortion, or of abortion for any reason other than to save the life of the mother, argue that there is no rational basis for distinguishing the fetus from a newborn infant; each is totally dependent and potentially a member of society, and each possesses a degree of humanity. Proponents of liberalized regulation of abortion hold that only a woman herself, rather than the state, has the right to manage her pregnancy and that the alternative to legal, medically supervised abortion is illegal and demonstrably dangerous, if not deadly, abortion.

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Abortion | Definition, Procedure, Laws, & Facts

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abortion, the expulsion of a fetus from the uterus before it has reached the stage of viability (in human beings, usually about the 20th week of gestation). An abortion may occur spontaneously, in which case it is also called a miscarriage, or it may be brought on purposefully, in which case it is often called an induced abortion.

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I have an outline set up in my mind. First I will obviously introduce my ideas, then bring in the facts and stats. Then the countries that allow and don't allow abortions. Towards the end Ill write about the personal experiences and struggles some women have faces because of the banning of abortion.
Ill have to explain what abortion is. And why its such a big problem today. And also explain the laws against it.
Ill certainly use my padlet a lot when i'm outlining. Since my padlet has all the notes as to which site what facts are taken from.
I want to start my essay with a quote. The quote being something like "11% of women that perform illegal abortions die" -Harpers Bazaar. Something that really grabs the readers concern because its mentioning people dying. So it makes it seem very important, as it is.
I don't really know how many paragraphs ill need. for the introduction and conclusion, one each. But it depends on how many it takes to fill up 4 whole pages. I think maybe 13-15 in the whole essay.

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Abortion has not always been so safe. Between the 1880s and 1973, abortion was illegal in all or most U.S. states, and many women died or had serious medical problems as a result.
For more than 30 years anti-abortion extremists have attempted to use violence against abortion providers to advance their own personal and political agenda. Unfortunately, people have used threats and violence, including murder, arson, bombing, and chemical attacks to fight against abortion.

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NAF has worked since 1977 to ensure that women, health care professionals, and policymakers have access to factual information about abortion. NAF has created a series of carefully researched fact sheets that cover topics related to abortion and abortion care.
Read facts about abortion "
Throughout the history of legal abortion, anti-abortion extremists have used propaganda, misinformation, and outright lies to dissuade women from choosing abortion. Women have the right to make fully informed decisions about their reproductive health care free from these anti-choice myths.
Learn more about abortion myths "
Every woman's experience is unique. Here, read the stories of real women who have chosen to let the world hear their voices.
Read the stories "
Too many women face unnecessary barriers when seeking abortion services. Sometimes these barriers are legal or economic - other times they are barriers of culture or language. NAF works to ensure access to quality abortion care for all women.
Read more about unequal access to abortion "
Today, policies regarding legal abortion in the U.S. are being debated everywhere from the halls of Congress to the street corners of our smallest towns. A better understanding of the history of abortion in America can help provide a context for making sound policy for the future.
Learn more about abortion's history "

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Abortion Facts NAF has worked since 1977 to ensure that women, health care professionals, and policymakers have access to factual information about abortion. NAF has created a series of carefully researched fact sheets that cover topics related to abortion and abortion care. Read facts about abortion " Abortion Myths

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- I feel good about the research I have gathered for my essay so far. There are definitely alot of different opinions people have. But that will help me in writing my essay.
-I have assembled facts, questions, views from opposing sides, the pros and cons of abortion, and a article written by a woman about her personal experience regarding this topic.
- I do understand my topic fully, I will obviously need to do alot  more research and look into laws and rules passed by for abortion. Since this topic is very political, because it is something people vote for/against.
- I’d say the laws and legislations are a little difficult to keep track of. Just because I’ve never wrote about anything that is so heavily political.

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Author's note: I am sharing this story honestly and using my real name because I hope to break the silence that surrounds this issue.
I am on my knees, my face in the seat of a rocking recliner. The clock passes midnight and it's just the four of us-me, my husband, our baby and a nurse-inside an abortion clinic 90 miles from our home and friends. There is no bed or doctor to ease my way toward delivery of my son, whose life I am ending as my first true act of motherhood.

The nightmare began unfolding for my husband, David, and me on Halloween 2006, the day I answered a call at the office from my doctor informing me of the far-from-optimal results of my prenatal Quad screening, a series of tests I'd agreed to due to my "advanced maternal age" of 35. We were a solid, mature couple reveling in the joy of my growing belly and the limitless possibilities of this much-wanted first pregnancy. A negative outcome was something we'd never considered, nor been prepared for by my doctor.

My OB's office sprang into action, securing me a same-day appointment with a high-risk doc who would provide a level II ultrasound and an amniocentesis, if I wished. We felt secure in our doctors' care.

Two days later, the genetic counselor called us in to deliver the news of our son's chromosomal disorder, which would present a series of major physical and emotional challenges and possible surgeries down the road. My husband and I agreed that life is difficult enough without being dealt a bum hand from conception. The counselor squirmed when we asked about the possibility of termination, and handed us a fistful of printouts about his diagnosis . Then she whisked us through a back door that opened into the parking lot.

At the follow-up appointment with my OB, she told me, "I support your decision, but I cannot help you." She explained her privileges at the hospital-despite it having no religious affiliation-do not permit performing an abortion if there is any chance of a live birth, even though abortion is legal in Florida until 24 weeks. Her only advice was that I find a clinic to provide an induced delivery, because "the other option is barbaric." She did not tell me what that option was or what either of our choices entailed.

I was at the end of my 18 th week of pregnancy and the clock was ticking. My husband and I were completely terrified, devastated-and alone. Terminating a much-wanted pregnancy due to a poor prenatal diagnosis is the ultimate taboo topic and we couldn't think of anyone who'd been through it.

In a near catatonic state, I stumbled through the internet until I found an out-of-town clinic ninety miles away that would induce a second trimester pregnancy. Leaving the safety and comfort of home is more common than I realized, since 87 percent of U.S. counties do not have local access to abortions, even thought they have been a legal right since 1973.

I made the appointment, arranged for a funeral home to pick up our son's body for cremation, picked up a preemie hat and blanket from a friend, then drove to another city and checked into a hotel, as per the clinic's instructions.

I arrived for medical intake the next day. Money was exchanged. Forms were signed. The doctor entered the room, his eyes on my chart. No hello or introduction, no exchange of names. He spoke only to the nurse. Then began the first step toward inducing labor by inserting laminaria, a stick made of a type of dried seaweed, into my cervix to begin softening it and promoting dilation. I felt like livestock.

We left the clinic before noon, filled the prescription for a mild painkiller and returned to the hotel, where I spent the rest of the day and night writhing in nearly unbearable pain. We considered a trip to the ER, even to another state where a friend suggested we could receive care in a hospital. But I felt it was too late to turn back on this path.

I began taking the labor-inducing drug Cytotec, as instructed, in Friday's early morning hours. My body revolted with violent chills-so severe I was sure my son's heart couldn't have survived them-vomiting and diarrhea. We drove to the clinic at 6:30 a.m., with a stolen hotel towel on my lap in case I threw up. At the clinic, Cytotec tablets were inserted vaginally. I was on course for an afternoon delivery, but then I spiked a fever and all meds were stopped.

The doctor examined me around 4 p.m. and said I hadn't dilated at all, and we'd need to start the process over. I asked for something for pain, but he ignored me. The nurse stepped forward; "She asked for pain meds," she said, unwilling to let me be bullied. He acquiesced with a shot in the arm before manually pushing more laminaria sticks into my cervix. I thought I'd pass out from the pain. He then inserted an IV line into my hand to be used for Pitocin, a labor-inducing drug, in the event I didn't start on my own by 8 p.m.

The Pitocin-drip began on schedule, administered by the nurse who stayed through the night with us. With no doctor or anesthesiologist present, an epidural was out of the question. Each contraction kicked me to the floor of the hallway I'd been pacing. I thought for sure I'd deliver by midnight.

Only when the doctor arrived early Saturday morning was I given meds to sleep-on an exam table with my feet in stirrups, David in the chair beside me with his head against the table. I woke around 10 a.m. feeling an urgency to go to the bathroom. It was there that I felt pressure in the birth canal and felt certain my baby was on his way out. I yelled for a nurse who placed a tray in the toilet. And that is where I delivered my son. He was whisked away.

Hours passed before the doctor could examine me. My husband and I waited, exhausted, in the recliner chairs in the same recovery room being used by a steady stream of women there for early first trimester abortions. I was bleeding a great deal. At some point I left to clean up a bit. When I returned the room was empty and David's shoulders were heaving in that silent way men cry. "Did you see him?" I asked, meaning our son. He nodded. "Should I?" Another nod.

The nurse brought Robert John in for us to hold in private. At 19 weeks, 6 days, halfway through my pregnancy and one day shy of requiring a death certificate, my baby lay in my arms. He was fully formed, like a tiny doll. I had to push the preemie hat back in order to really see his face. I took in his long straight nose and the way his perfectly formed hands were tucked beneath his chin. I had to remind myself that the errors in his genetic blueprint wouldn't have been apparent until his toddler years. Exhaustion overtook me and I couldn't unwrap his body any further. I drifted to sleep, Robert in my arms. My husband later told me it was the only time he saw me smile in all those dark days.

Our ordeal wasn't over. An ultrasound performed a few hours later showed that the placenta had not separated from my uterus. The doctor gave me a shot for pain and performed a D&C (dilation and curettage) to detach and remove the placenta. Fifteen minutes later I awoke to a room full of paramedics. One explained that my uterus had been ruptured and I was being transported to a hospital. Five hours of surgery later, after the surgeon warned my husband of a possible hysterectomy, the bleeding was stopped and my uterus successfully repaired. David endured this, the fifth day we'd been away from home, without sleep or support, completely alone.

While I recovered from my surgery in the hospital, I quizzed every doctor: How could this have happened? Why couldn't I have received care in a hospital from the start? The answer stunned me: conservatism and funding. Most hospitals in Florida, I was told, could not afford to allow their doctors to perform legal abortions for fear of losing funding. And that is when I realized that in acting in the best interests of my son and our family, my own life had almost been taken by politics.

I have begun sharing our story in the hope that other parents who find themselves on the short end of the statistics will not be as isolated as we were. I also want people to know that safe, affordable and compassionate access to abortion saves lives. If you believe this doesn't affect you, think again. According to the non-profit Guttmacher Institute, one in three American women will have an abortion by the age of 45. That's likely someone you know and love.

I will forever be grateful to the friends I made on the private discussion boards I found via the online support of aheartbreakingchoice.net for helping me navigate the grief, my subsequent two miscarriages and healing between Robert's death and our daughter's birth. I only wish I'd found the support when we'd first learned our son's diagnosis.

Today, we are parents of a 3-year-old who has healed our hearts and filled our lives with light, joy and bountiful love. In summertime, we hike to a high mountain pass in California where we scattered our son's ashes, and we sit awhile with him while he shows us his view.

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Author's note: I am sharing this story honestly and using my real name because I hope to break the silence that surrounds this issue. I am on my knees, my face in the seat of a rocking recliner.

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Why did you pick your topic?
I picked my topic of pro-abortion because I feel strongly about it. There is an ongoing debate on this and many people have expressed their opinions. I wanted to put my thoughts on this topic out there as well.
What intrigues you about this topic based on your research so far?
It surprises me is how many laws there are against it. It’s alot  more political than I thought it would be.
Have you learned anything yet about this issue that you didn’t know before?
I actually learned alot of facts about abortion that I didn’t know before. I’ll go more in depth.
What questions will guide your research. In other words, what are you wondering and what will you need to seek informations about?
I think I’ll need to find an article about a women who had suffered because of the pro-life movement. And how it changes women’s lives in ways they never wanted.

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Reproductive choice empowers women. They have a right over their own body.
Fetuses cant feel pain when they are aborted.
Legal abortions are safer and doesn't cause death, unlike illegal abortions. If a woman doesn't want a baby, there's no way shell keep it. So she will resort to illegal abortions, which will cause her health problems.
Women who are denied abortions are more likely to become unemployed, on public welfare, below the poverty line.

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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.

Proponents of legal abortion believe abortion is a safe medical procedure that protects lives, while abortion bans endanger pregnant people not seeking abortions, and deny bodily autonomy, creating wide-ranging repercussions.

Opponents of legal abortion believe abortion is murder because life begins at conception, that abortion creates a culture in which life is disposable, and that increased access to birth control, health insurance, and sexual education would make abortion unnecessary. Read more background...

Pro & Con Arguments

Pro 1

Abortion is a safe medical procedure that protects lives.

The death rate for legal abortions is 0.7 deaths for every 100,000 abortions. By contrast, there are one to two deaths per 100,000 plastic surgery procedures, three deaths for every 100,000 colonoscopies, and three to six deaths per 100,000 tonsillectomies. Childbirth has nine deaths per 100,000 deliveries.

Pregnancy-related maternal deaths could increase 20% in US states with abortion bans. Amanda Stevenson, Sociology Professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, explained, "People with resources are more likely to make it out of state or find out about medication abortions. People who can't are more likely to have health issues, to live in poverty and have less access to resources." People of color are especially likely to be in the latter category and, thus, negatively impacted by abortion bans.

The predicted 20% maternal death rate does not include those who will die from "back alley" or illegal abortions because legal options were not available.

Globally 45% of abortions are unsafe, 97% of which take place in developing countries. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), "Evidence shows that restricting access to abortions does not reduce the number of abortions; however, it does affect whether the abortions that women and girls attain are safe and dignified. The proportion of unsafe abortions are significantly higher in countries with highly restrictive abortion laws than in countries with less restrictive laws."
Read More

Pro 2

Abortion bans endanger healthcare for those not seeking abortions.

Medical treatment for nonviable pregnancies is often exactly the same as an abortion.

Ectopic pregnancies occur when a fertilized egg implants somewhere other than the uterine cavity. About one in 50 pregnancies are ectopic, and they are nonviable. Bleeding from ectopic pregnancies caused 10% of all pregnancy-related deaths, and ectopic pregnancies were the leading cause of maternal death in the first trimester.

One out of every ten pregnancies ends in miscarriage. The drugs used for medication abortions are the only treatment recommended for early miscarriages. For later or complicated miscarriages, the same surgical procedure used for abortions is recommended.

While some abortion bans include specific exceptions for nonviable pregnancies and miscarriages, other bans are too vague to be practicable. Healthcare providers may refuse to perform a procedure that could be interpreted as an "on-demand" abortion for fear of liability or prosecution.

Further, bans are a slippery slope to contraceptive and other healthcare restrictions. For example, some already wrongly view Plan B (the morning after pill) as an abortifacient and are thinking of including it in abortion bans.
Read More

Pro 3

Abortion bans deny bodily autonomy, creating wide-ranging repercussions.

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen stated, "eliminating the rights of women to make decisions about when and whether to have children would have very damaging effects on the economy and would set women back decades.... In many cases, abortions are of teenage women, particularly low-income and often Black, who aren't in a position to be able to care for children, have unexpected pregnancies, and it deprives them of the ability often to continue their education to later participate in the workforce."

After being denied an abortion, household poverty increased and lasted four or more years, resulting in an inability to cover basic expenses including food, housing and transportation. A denied abortion was associated with a lowered credit score, increased debt, and an increase in negative public records including evictions and bankruptcies. The households were also more reliant on government assistance. Transgender and nonbinary people denied abortions may face even worse outcomes.

And the consequences can be much more dire. "If a woman of childbearing age dies, it has enormous economic consequences.... It's someone who society has invested in and who has many productive economic years ahead of them," according to David Slusky, Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Kansas. Often, death also removes a wage-earner and caregiver from the household.

60% of women seeking abortions already had other children. Being denied an abortion worsened the well-being of their older children, including not meeting childhood development markers.

The Turnaway Study concluded, "Abortion does not harm women," and "Women who receive a wanted abortion are more financially stable, set more ambitious goals, raise children under more stable conditions, and are more likely to have a wanted child later."
Read More

Con 1

Life begins at conception, making abortion murder.

Conception is the moment a sperm cell fertilizes an egg cell, which begins the process of cell division that creates a human.

Tara Sander Lee, Senior Fellow and Director of Life Sciences at the Charlotte Lozier Institute, stated, "life begins from the moment of conception when the sperm fertilizes the egg, because there is the creation of a new, totally distinct, integrated organism or a human being, which is going to be biologically distinct from all other life forms on this planet." The first cell is biologically distinct because it has its own DNA that is different from either biological parent and all other humans.

Ending a life is murder legally and ethically, even a life that is only a few growing cells at the time of death.

Pope Francis explained, "Abortion is murder. Those who carry out abortions kill.... At the third week after conception, often even before the mother is aware (of being pregnant), all the organs are already (starting to develop). It is a human life. Period. And this human life has to be respected. It is very clear.... Scientifically, it is a human life."

That people may face difficulties without abortion as an option does not excuse or justify murder. A reader of The Atlantic, who gave only the initial K., clarified the moral dilemma: "I wish that I could be pro-choice because the awful circumstances so many women face-that I can't even imagine facing-seem so much more real to me than the rights of a fetus who doesn't even always look human. But abortion is the intentional killing of a human being and we look back with horror at anyone in history who decided a group of people did not actually count as people. We cannot solve the problem of injustice against women with more injustice. We need solutions that support women without killing fetuses."
Read More

Con 2

Legal abortion promotes a culture in which life is disposable.

Echoing a 2014 remark by Pope Francis that connected abortion to " throwaway culture," Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark, New Jersey, stated, "abortion represents a failure to recognize the sanctity of human life and promotes a culture in which human life in its most vulnerable moment is perceived as disposable. Such a proposal targets poor women as needing an expedient solution to a complex problem."

Tobin previously declared legal abortion a "brutalization of the American heart" on par with the "dehumanization of the undocumented" immigrants.

Alveda King, former Georgia state representative and niece of Martin Luther King, Jr., also connected abortion to other societal ills: "Abortion and racism are both symptoms of a fundamental human error. The error is thinking that when someone stands in the way of our wants, we can justify getting that person out of our lives. Abortion and racism stem from the same poisonous root, selfishness. We create the deceptions that the other person is less important, less worthy, less human. We are all fully human. When we face this truth, there is no justification for treating those who look different than us as lesser beings. If we simply treat other people the way we'd like to be treated, racism, abortion, and other forms of inhumanity will be things of the past."

As King notes, some fetuses are treated as less than human. This ideology combined with legal abortion could create a slippery slope to designer babies, gender selection, termination of disabled but healthy fetuses, and other trait-selection-based abortions. The slippery slope can then extend to the mentally disabled and elderly in general.

"[A]bortion is an act rife with the potential for eugenic manipulation," according to US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. "Technological advances have only heightened the eugenic potential for abortion, as abortion can now be used to eliminate children with unwanted characteristics, such as a particular sex or disability."
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Con 3

Increased access to birth control, health insurance, and sexual education would make abortion unnecessary.

Experts largely contribute the decline in abortions in the United States and elsewhere to the improved safety and availability of LARC (long-acting reversible contraception) including IUDs and contraceptive implants that can last up to 10 years.

Access to health insurance to pay for contraceptives also contributed to a drop in abortions. With the passage of Obamacare (Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act), more people were insured with access to free or low-cost contraceptives and reproductive care.

Linda Rosenstock, Public Health Professor of Health Policy and Management at UCLA, summarized the simplicity of the connection: "In the United States each year, about half of pregnancies are unintended and about 40% of those lead to abortion. Access to birth control leads to fewer abortions."

Further, teens are having sex later in life than their parents. 38.4% of American high schoolers reported they have had sex (down from 54% in 1991) and only 27.4% reported they were currently sexually active (37.5% in 1991).

Because teen birth control use has not increased significantly, experts attribute the decline in part to better sex education. A 2021 study found that students who received comprehensive sexual education initiated sex later than students who did not participate in sex ed. The later teens have sex, the less chance there is for them to become pregnant unintentionally, which leads to fewer abortions.
Read More

Did You Know?

1. Throughout much of Western history, abortion was not considered a criminal act as long as it was performed before "quickening" (the first detectable movement of the fetus, which can occur between 13-25 weeks of pregnancy).

2. In 1821, Connecticut became the first US state to criminalize abortion.

3. The death rate for legal abortions is 0.7 deaths for every 100,000 abortions. By contrast, there are one to two deaths per 100,000 plastic surgery procedures, three deaths for every 100,000 colonoscopies, and three to six deaths per 100,000 tonsillectomies. Childbirth has nine deaths per 100,000 deliveries.

4. Abortion rates in the United States have fallen at what the CDC called a "slow yet steady pace" since a peak in 1981. That year there were 29.3 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15-44. The rate fell to 11.4 abortions per 1,000 women in 2019.

5. 60% of women seeking abortions already had other children.

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Abortion - Top Arguments For and Against - ProCon.org

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The Pro Choice side says women should have control of their bodies. Pro Lifers say abortion is murder. Explore both sides of the debate.

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Trump signed a bill on April 13 that allows states to cut off funding from organizations like Planned Parenthood that provide abortions  He suggested that federal funding could continue to go to the women’s health organization only if they would stop having abortions.
According to Ministry of Health  the number of illegal abortions performed at 19,290 between 2005 and 2008. 11% of women that perform illegal abortions die.
Amnesty international:  suicide now accounts for 57 percent of deaths of pregnant females ages 10-19 in El Salvador. Because in an attempt to terminate their pregnancies, women are “ingesting rat poison or other pesticides, and thrusting knitting needles, pieces of wood and other sharp objects into the cervix.”

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These are not great times for choice in America. These are not great times to be a woman in America.

At least, not if you are a woman who believes that your body is your own.

The Trump administration may be the most fervently anti-abortion since Reagan.

This will likely come as a surprise to every man who, prior to Trump's election, assured me, "don't worry, he's really a democrat! He's not going to do anything about abortion!"

It seems you guys were wrong.

Trump has reinstated the global gag rule, preventing funding for overseas reproductive health organizations that offer abortion related services. Closer to home, Trump signed a bill on April 13 that allows states to cut off funding from organizations like Planned Parenthood that provide abortions. He has suggested that federal funding could continue to go to the women's health organization only if they stopped performing abortions.

All of this falls under the banner of a "pro-life" agenda.

Indeed, Vice President Mike Pence and counselor to the President, Kellyanne Conway, both spoke enthusiastically at the March for Life. There, the Vice President proclaimed, "We will not rest until we restore a culture of life in America."

Perhaps when people enact these laws, they imagine what a world with more restrictive abortion rights-or a "culture of life"-looks like. I do not think these people are evil. I suspect they have a vision of a world that is flawed. I think when they imagine that world of outlawed abortions, they imagine a world full of adorable, bouncing babies. They imagine happy mothers, and fathers who are, unexpectedly, delighted and doting fathers.

That is not reality.

"The U.S. is a place where having a baby means risking your own life, as our Maternal Mortal Rate is the highest in the developed world."

It's not hard to see what a pro-life world looks like. It looks like a world with a lot of dead women in it.

El Salvador has a "culture of life." There, abortion is banned for any reason. Estimates from the Ministry of Health put the number of illegal abortions performed at 19,290 between 2005 and 2008. However, it's difficult to trace illegal activity properly, so some other estimates claim this is closer to the annual average. We do know, from a 2011 study by the World Health Organization that 11 percent of the women undergoing these illegal abortions die. That is, at the bare minimum, over 2,000 women.

Amnesty International reports that suicide now accounts for 57 percent of deaths of pregnant females ages 10-19 in El Salvador. Because in an attempt to terminate their pregnancies, women are "ingesting rat poison or other pesticides, and thrusting knitting needles, pieces of wood and other sharp objects into the cervix."

It was not so long ago that women in the United States were in a position similar to the one women in El Salvador find themselves in today.

Before the passage of Roe. Vs. Wade in 1973, it's estimated that between 250 and 8,000 American women were dying per year of illegal abortions.

Today, in the United States, women experience complications from safe, legal abortion less than one percent of the time. And whether or not anyone talks about it, it's a common medical procedure- 30 percent of women in the U.S. have had a safe, legal abortion.

There will be people-like Republican Sen. Dan Foreman, an Idaho lawmaker who recently proposed a bill that would try women who have abortions for first degree murder-who will reply, "why don't they just give the baby up for adoption instead?"

I suspect if someone turned up and asked to live in Dan's house for nine months he would decline, and that's infinitely less invasive than something taking up residence in your body.

Still, the best answer to that is, perhaps because the United States is not such a wonderful place to have a baby. It is a place where, for many, the cost of prenatal care and birthing in a hospital runs around $3,500, and pre and post-natal care can raise that price to around $8,802. That doesn't take into account the incredibly costly proposition of raising a child and the fact that most companies still don't provide maternity leave.

More troublingly, the United States is a place where having a baby means risking your own life, as our Maternal Mortality Rate is the highest in the developed world.

The Maternal Mortality Rate (MMR) in the United States is, according to a study published in Obstetrics & Gynecology, now 24 in every 100,000. For perspective, if that does not seem like a significant enough number to cause concern, the odds of being an American killed in a terrorist attack by a foreign born individual are one in 3.6 million.

But then, don't we have it so much better than so many other countries? Well, in terms of women's reproductive health, not especially.

The Federalist makes an argument that women should not be dressing up to protest restrictions on abortion in Ohio because, "To compare restrictions on abortion... to the abuses many women still suffer around the world today is both intellectually insulting and downright dishonest... In Saudi Arabia, women aren't allowed to drive, wear makeup, or clothes that 'show off their beauty.'"

Pretending that women should remain quiet on the topic of their rights because women have it worse in other countries is absurd. We do not live in other countries. This argument should carry all the weight of a C student, who, when told to do better by their parents, replies by shouting, "I could be getting Fs! I could be shooting heroin into my eyeballs!" Which is to say, it should carry no weight at all.

The comparison to Saudi Arabia as a country that doesn't value women's existence is interesting and timely, though. Our Maternal Mortality Rate puts us statistically on par with Saudi Arabia. Though, in fairness to Saudi Arabia, the CIA dates that statistic regarding their MMR to 2010. Maternal mortality rates are generally on the decline, so Saudi Arabia's rate may have improved in the past seven years. The U.S. is the only country in the developed world where the Maternal Mortality Rate is rising.

So, it is very nice that we are allowed to wear makeup, but it might be nicer still if having a baby were not so likely to kill us. You want to talk about how much better the U.S. is for women than Saudi Arabia? Stop letting pregnant women die at the same rate as Saudi Arabia.

"It's not hard to see what a pro-life world looks like. It looks like a world with a lot of dead women in it."

If the goal of anti-abortionists is to protect life in all its forms, then our MMR should be cause for great concern. It's especially high in places like Texas. While causes for women's deaths during and post pregnancy can vary wildly, and range from drug abuse to cardiac events, notes that, "We do know that most of them died because they were low-income women who lacked good medical care."

Today, as the Republican-led negotiations over the Affordable Care Act occur, experts, like Adriana Kohler, a senior health policy associate at Texans Care for Children, have voiced their concerns to Dallas News. She remarks that changes in funding-like those cutting back on Medicaid, which pays for more than 50 percent of the births in Texas-will "pose a real threat to prenatal care for Texas women and undermine efforts to address maternal mortality."

This is not a change that a group that actually values the sacredness of human life should be enthused about.

So, if you live in the U.S.-especially if you live in the U.S. as a low income woman-pregnancy is a dangerous business.

But you know one good thing about living in the U.S.? Citizens are not required to risk their own lives to save another individual. You do not, for instance, have to fling yourself onto the subway tracks to pull out someone who has fallen in. Unless you are a woman carrying a collection of cells which may become an individual-in which case, it would appear some people really, bewilderingly, expect you to.

But, you are not required to.

Not yet, at least. We have, thank God, not yet restored Mike Pence's "culture of life."

Though we may be coming closer. Missouri just passed a bill imposing additional restrictions on facilities that perform abortions, making it harder for them to operate. A prayer walk of 600 people in Charlotte North Carolina just declared that abortion is "more a man's issue than a woman's issue." (Spoiler: it is not.) In Ohio, a bill is being debated banning most abortions after the first trimester.

All of these changes may seem very slight. However, as The Handmaid's Tale notes, "nothing happens all at once. In a slowly heating pot of water you'll be boiled alive."

So, it's important to start regarding limitation on abortions as the profoundly anti-woman act it is.

A UN Special Rapporteur on Torture categorized denying women access to abortion as torture in 2013. That definition may seem hyperbolic. But then, demanding that women suffer through pain, expense and possibly death because they do not want to do something that a man in power wants them to do seems like the definition of torture.

Napoleon was fairly forthright about his reasons for outlawing abortion. He quipped that he did it because he wanted more cannon fodder.

"We are not a generation that will be happy to be 'hosts.' We are not a generation who considers gestation our 'sole purpose'."

Today, we do it to "make America great again" by insuring that women are confined to the same unthreatening maternal roles that they were in whatever ambiguous time America was "great." Today, outside abortion clinics, "Patients are told that abortion is a violent act and that a woman's sole purpose is to bear children."

Their "sole purpose."

Just like in the great old days.

Beyond the financial cost, the cost to a woman's ability to pursue her own happiness if she has to birth a child and possibly raise an unwanted child is obvious-and of absolutely no interest to men like the Oklahoma lawmaker who regards pregnant women merely as "hosts."

We are not a generation that will be happy to be hosts. We are not a generation who considers gestation our "sole purpose." Acting as an unwilling host for a younger woman or a man is not an acceptable proposition for most women. But it is a proposition that thousands consider worth risking death over.

There are certainly going to be people who will reply to this by shouting, "then women should keep their damn legs shut."

No. Go crawl back to the time capsule you came out of. Ninety-five percent of Americans have pre-marital sex. Nine months of unwanted pain and possibly death is not an acceptable punishment for being unlucky while engaging in an almost universally practiced past time. It is the punishment for 0 percent of men, which is the correct percentage.

According to a study from the Transnational Family Research Institute, 49 percent of pregnancies in the United States are unintentional. The highest rate of unintended pregnancies fall to women of lower socioeconomic brackets between the ages of 18 and 24. So, the women with perhaps the most to lose by having to bear a child. In countries where abortion is an option, 54 percent choose to have one.

And in countries where abortion is not an option? Well, a mother raising an unwanted child doesn't result in a child with the great home life that some conservatives might, bizarrely expect. Being "born unwanted" carries significant psychological risk. A study of children of women who were denied abortions experienced significantly more mental health problems and issues with conflict than wanted children. We also know that, legalized abortion accounts for a significant drop in crime by the time children are adults (in the '90s, following the legalization of Roe vs. Wade in 1973), and studies indicate that post-legalized abortion, we also saw fewer social ills like infanticide, teen age drug use, and teen age childbearing.

That's not because mothers raising children they didn't want were necessarily cruel or neglectful or even unloving. Many of them were likely doing the absolute best they could with very limited help. And they do get very little help. Because anti-abortion advocates only love that baby so long as it's utero-once it is born, they then expect a woman to raise it without childcare assistance or maternity leave. No matter that 40 percent of women cite financial concerns as their reason for having an abortion.

"If anti-abortionists are going to keep calling pro-choice people baby killers, then it's time to start referring to them for what they are: people who would kill women."

If anti-abortionists are going to keep calling pro-choice people baby killers, then it's time to start referring to them for what they are: people who would kill women.

At the very least, they are people who will stand by cheerfully, smugly, while they enact a system that leads to 14-year-old girls drinking rat poison.

That is unconscionable.

We don't need to bend over backwards to appease those people. We certainly don't need to open the democratic party up to them, as some politicians, like Nancy Pelosi and Bernie Sanders, suggest. As nice as it is to be inclusive, the cost of budging on abortion is too high. The cost is too high, because the cost will be life itself for ourselves and our daughters.

It is easy for some politicians to bank on women being too polite to fight about gendered issues.

Don't be. If we're polite about this issue, we will die.

Start calling, start shouting, don't be polite.

And if you don't know where to start? Here are some ideas:

Call on Congress to support the ACT! for Women, which prohibits states from imposing restrictions upon abortion.

Here is a script to call your local senators to demand that they not defund Planned Parenthood.

Demand that the GOP share the healthcare bill they've been working on with the public so we know how it will affect women.

If you feel a law is restricting your right to an abortion, contact the Center for Reproductive Rights.

Know your representative's policies on health care. If they're anti-woman, vote them out.

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Why A Pro-Life World Has A Lot of Dead Women In It

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These are not great times for choice in America. These are not great times to be a woman in America. At least, not if you are a woman who believes that your body is your own. The Trump administration may be the most fervently anti-abortion since Reagan.

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what gives a being the right to life?  Is a fetus a human being? No, the baby doesn’t feel pain, it hasn’t developed. is a foetus the sort of being that has a right to life? is a foetus a separate being from its mother?

you shouldn't bring an unwanted baby into this world. The baby wouldn’t get love and affection. People don’t care about kids in adoption homes, but they care about abortion. Unwanted kids end up in adoption homes.

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An introduction to the abortion debate, setting out the major questions involved in the matter of terminating a pregnancy.