Major Issues of Abortion - Essay Example

Abortion Introduction No right is more essential than the right to live. And the premature death of a young child is among life's most dreadful tragedies. To cause such a death is an immense wrong. And if infanticide is wrong, is the ruin of a fetus at eight months of gestation, or at five, any diverse Nothing is more demoralizing than a life without freedom. A life in which one can be compelled into parenthood is just such a life. Rape is among the most reflective rejections of liberty, and convincing a woman to accept a rapist's child is a murder or an attack on her humanity. How diverse is it to force her to remain pregnant and become a mother just for the reason that efforts at birth control by chance failed From her standpoint, the pregnancy is also unwanted. From the point of view of the fetus, how the pregnancy began certainly makes no difference. If compelling a woman to persist a pregnancy that will just about surely kill her is not permitted, how different is it to force her to maintain a pregnancy that will almost certainly shorten her life Or a pregnancy that will leave her life a shambles Are there means of approaching issues like abortion that evade pitting these absolutes against one another Approaches of choosing that uphold respect for the deepest principles on both sides of the equation Ways that face the authenticity of sex and power that trigger the struggle Analysis One of the famous cases in the American history has been the case of Roe V. Wade. It was a case in which the Supreme Court said that except in narrow state of affairs, the Constitution of the United States does not allow the government to interfere with a woman's right to desire abortion. Roe v. Wade is various things. It is a legal verdict by the Supreme Court; a rallying cries for both sides in the abortion debate. But it is in addition, and was in the beginning, a completely human story, one that has become by now common to numerous as a story similar to other stories repeated all over the United States daily. It seems telling that in Roe v. Wade both the woman on one side of the "versus" ("Roe") and the fetus on the other (stand for by Wade) are anonymous. In much of the debate over abortion in our society, one side or the other is condensed to ghostly secrecy. Many who can willingly imagine the concrete humanity of a fetus, who hold its picture high as well as weep, hardly see the woman who carries it and her human dilemma. To them she becomes an all but invisible abstraction. Numerous others, who can willingly imagine the woman and her body, who cry out for her right to control her fate, hardly imagine the fetus within that woman and do not envisage as real the life it might have been permitted to lead. For them, the life of the fetus becomes a similarly invisible concept (Tribe & Norton, 1992). America is at a junction. In the year 1989, the sixteen-year era of judicial defense of legal abortion rights that started with the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade ended with that Court's five to four decision maintenance certain state regulations of abortion in the case of Webster v. Reproductive Health Services. A right that, ever since the time of Watergate and Vietnam, had been kept by judges from the horseplay of local politics-the woman's right to make a decision for herself whether to finish a pregnancy-is now focused to regulation, and perhaps even prohibition, by our chosen legislature. A right that numerous Americans took for granted is now in a real sense up for grabs. Anyone who doubts that this is the meaning of Webster needs look no further than the morning newspaper. As the 1990s dawn, the nature of politics in America is altering daily, and the gloom of the question of abortion rights grows, with extensive worth for our society. Even as the public program is prolonged to deal with such new questions as the right to die, no matter intimidates to split us politically in quite as influential a way as the abortion issue does. Our national institutions are braced for an apparently never-ending clash of absolutes. The political stage is already conquered by the well-rehearsed and intensely felt arguments, on either side of the abortion issue that we have come to know so well. The debate is endless. None of its members ever seems even gently convinced by the influence of the other side. As the apparently tempting force of the pro-life movement bears down on the apparently fixed object of abortion rights, local politics may at times be weighed down by the kind of single-issue confrontation that has already distorted the face of national elections. If this happens, the losers will be the self-governing process and the American people (Tribe & Norton, 1992). For most Americans the years after Roe and the legalization of abortion in the United States were not a time to face cautiously or to talk about unemotionally the many subtle as well as complex legal and moral questions that abortion as a public issue offers. For those who were certain that abortion should never have been announced a "right" at all, those years were a time for quiet mourn or energetic protest. For those who understood that abortion would indefinitely remain a sensibly declared legal right, and to whom this was inoffensive, there was no need to believe the question of the proper government treatment of abortion (Dionne, 1989). With the legal status of abortion snatched from the political contesting ground by the Court's 1973 Roe decision, the public stage was left mainly to those who alleged most strongly that abortion was wrong totally, that it was morally wrong to let each woman choose for herself, and that as a result the law should be changed to make it doable for abortion to be criminalized again. The debate was therefore controlled by those prepared to wage the only political movement that our legitimate structure made available-a political movement to change the federal judiciary-and by those who goes up against them. Since it was judges who had read abortion rights into the Constitution, abortion opponents supposed, we required judges who would read abortion drop out of it. For a time some supported a constitutional amendment that would efficiently have forbidden abortion or would at least have come back the question to each state's legislature, but the substantial political agreement and effort necessitate for performance of any such amendment proved indefinable. The argument was polarized; its terms became static. For all its other meaning, the Webster decision offers an opportunity for all of us to inspect the bitter and disruptive public question of abortion "policy" (Tribe & Norton, 1992). Views on Abortion A woman's feelings about abortion depend largely on her reason for choosing to end the pregnancy, the conditions during the procedure, and her response to the experience. There are many reasons for choosing to have an abortion. Perhaps underlying them all is a deeply maternal, instinctive feeling that the time is not right to give birth and that to do so would be detrimental to all concerned. If there is any doubt about the decision or any moral conflict, the emotional effect may be devastating. For some women, an abortion is one of the most profound events they will experience in life (Claire, 1995). Mira Dana, a psychotherapist at the Women's Therapy Centre in London, has conducted postabortion counseling sessions for almost 20 years. In her view, There are three general reactions women display after an abortion and on coming home from hospital. (1) Euphoria ... an expression of the feeling of relief and freedom at having solved a problem, having got rid of a burden and having executed a decisive action. They will feel strong and powerful and in control of their lives. They will feel the need to laugh and have a good time ... [and] keep excessively busy ... feelings of loss, anger [and] guilt are of no relevance for them at this period ... these emotions are bound to come later, sometimes even months or years later, sometimes in a disguised form, apparently with no connection to having had an abortion.... Detachment- Some women will experience a sense of "shock" ... numbness inside. They will go on doing ordinary activities they are used to doing, but with a sense of detachment, distance ... unreality. This detachment is an attempt to avoid experiencing the painful feelings connected to the termination.... She may feel an inner emptiness ... Depression-Some women get into a state of depression which could be described as a general sense of hopelessness and diffused (unfocussed) feeling of blackness... feeling bad about yourself and your life and your environment, but without actually knowing what it is-a state of no specific emotion but this "darkness" ... feelings of worthlessness ... and that nothing is of much importance ... [Other reactions may be] Fear of Sexuality ... Many women need time after an abortion before they feel relaxed and able to have sexual relationships again because they fear another abortion.... Ambivalence-not only about having a baby. There are many issues in a woman's life about which she may be equally confused but which get "hooked" on the one issue of having a baby.... Envy-Often women feel envious of other women who have babies after the termination.... Some women will refrain from visiting their friends who have newborn babies as they feel it is too painful to be with them (Claire, 1995). Not all women feel loss, anger, guilt, and depression after an abortion, as Mira Dana suggests, but some do, and most women certainly experience at least one of those feelings. Mira Dana has a deep perception and understanding of women's reactions to abortion and the problems created by having to keep the experience a secret (Claire, 1995). The majority of us are torn by the abortion question. There is something intensely misleading with reference to discussing the abortion debate exclusively in terms of a clash between pro-life "groups" as well as pro-choice "groups," as though each of us could correctly be labeled as belonging to one camp or the other. For almost everyone, the genuine truth is that the clash is an interior one. Few people who actually authorize themselves to feel all of what is at venture in the abortion issue can avoid a thoughtful sense of internal division. Whatever someone's "bottom line"-whether it is that the choice must belong to the woman or that she must be disallowed from killing the fetus-it is hard not to feel profoundly the tug of the opposing view (Mason-Dixon 1989). Something similar to horror must be felt by everybody involved in the question of abortion that has not become knocked out to the reality of what is at stake. This feeling may be less strong with abortions carried out in the very start stages of pregnancy, when the embryo is a tiny, visually undifferentiated, multicelled growth without audibly human features. But surely by some point in pregnancy, as soon as abortion involves a fetus that is noticeably human in form, or when it involves a fetus that one might envisage feeling pain, few of us can shun the sense of terrible choice that each abortion necessitates. The "absolutes" described here are the fetus's right to life and the woman's right to freedom. We have seen, nonetheless, that neither "absolute" is actually that. We have seen that whatsoever right a woman might have to prefer abortion would be damaged if the fetus could be saved exclusive of sacrificing the woman's freedom to end her pregnancy. Most would instinctively sense the force of any such fetus's claim to life (Tribe & Norton, 1992). But that claim to life, as we have also seen, must sequentially be compensated by the possible evils, real, even if ill distinct, of state-run fetus factories. Examining intimately the basis of our apprehension at such government participation in the extraction as well as incubation of fertilized embryos suggests that the fundamental clash would not pit life against freedom, the unborn against their mothers, so much as it would pit life against the avoidance of government interruption into life's mysteries, life against the avoidance of potentially hideous state intervention into processes we instinctively feel should be past government's reach. Not astonishingly, the question of when life ends, like the one of when it starts, has found its way to the nation's highest court. On the day it determined Webster, the Supreme Court proclaimed that it would start the case of Nancy Cruzan, a woman whom a car accident reduced to what doctors call a relentless vegetative state, a state of unconsciousness as well as unresponsiveness from which she will never recuperate. Nancy Cruzan's parents are fighting the state of Missouri to institute the right to withdraw Nancy's feeding tube so that she may die (Mason-Dixon 1989). By the time the Cruzan case was disputed in the Supreme Court in December 1989, Court watchers had already associated the fate of Nancy Cruzan with that of "Jane Roe." The oral argument was cautiously observed for clues not only concerning where the Court was leaning on the right to die issue itself, but also concerning where the Court was leaning on the broader subjects of personal liberty and privacy that surface most radically in the abortion context. Conclusion The logic of the right-to-die argument will not of necessity have any close encounter with the sense of the abortion debate. Yet many like arguments over abortion, right-to-die quarrels may, eventually, pit the value of protecting life in opposition to the value of evading gross technical intrusions. At bottom there is a resemblance between the state's verdict to lay hands on the intimate and subtle matter of life's reproduction and the state's decision to have the last utterance on the personal and subtle matter of life's termination. A woman's right to make a decision if and how to give birth therefore shares a common root with the right to keep away from the humiliating tangle of state-mandated technology that has become death's least human face. as a result, it may be that the right-to-life desire and the pro-choice impulse may yet find widespread cause-in the wish to avoid government treatment of technologies to save or protect life, but only at the cost of giving up what we sense to be most natural. Yet we must give in that reverence for what seems natural and repugnance to what seems to change nature's plan can all too effortlessly become a mask for the wish to protect the power that some of us exercise over others, that men especially wield over women. For some pro-life believers, although not for all, facing that mask directly may be a source of great distress, a first step toward deciding to take away the mask and recognize the world anew. Reference: Laurence H. Tribe; W. W. Norton, 1992. Abortion: The Clash of Absolutes. W.W. Norton & Company. New York London Miriam Claire, 1995. The Abortion Dilemma: Personal Views on a Public Issue. Insight Books. Plenum Press, New York and London. Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 ( 1973). See Mark Tushnet, "The Name of the Rose," Constitutional Commentary ( 1989), 215, 216. Dionne, 1989. "Poll on Abortion Finds the Nation Is Sharply Divided," New York Times, A1. Mason-Dixon 1989. Opinion Research for WCIX, WTSP, Miami Herald, Tampa Tribune, et al., reprinted in Polling Report, 4. Read More