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Abortion Issues: Social Concerns And Debates
from:Abortion issues stem from a variety of concerns. There are two major questions at the heart of all abortion debate: the question Pro-Life advocates - or those opposing abortion – concentrate on is, “When does life begin?” This is central issue of their argument against abortion. Pro-Lifers believe that life begins at conception and therefore abortion should be considered murder. Pro-Choice advocates – or those who support abortion – are concerned with the question, “Do women have the right to choose whether or not they have an abortion?” Pro-Choice advocates believe that abortion is a women’s rights issue and that all women should be free to choose what happens to her body. This debate is incredibly fierce because of the political, social, and moral implications of abortion. Religious Right leaders tend to be Pro-Life, while Feminists tend to be Pro-Choice. But there are many, many exceptions to this statement. In fact, most people fall somewhere in the middle on this particular debate.
There are other abortion issues that are major points of discussion in the abortion debate. These are social issues about the procedure of abortion itself, its effects on society, and highly biased preferences that sometimes lead to choosing abortion.
The first of these is the existence of what are commonly known as “back-alley abortions”. This term refers to an abortion performed outside the medical community and not in safe ways. For example, women who are looking to get an abortion in a country where abortion is illegal may resort to finding an abortion provider who is not a trained medical professional. They may find a trained medical professional who is willing to do the procedure, but only in an unsafe and unclean environment such as a home or even a storage space. Sometimes these people will perform abortions in a way that is not medically proved effective. The term back-alley abortion can also refer to something the woman does to herself to produce an abortion, such as use a coat hanger to scrape her uterine walls.
Another of these abortion issues is the recent study done by economists that the tremendous drop in the crime rate is due to the legalization of abortion with the famous court case Roe vs. Wade in 1973. Many people argue that this study is biased against race, but nonetheless, the data are accurate.
The final of these abortion issues is sex-selective abortion. In many countries, particularly Asian countries, the advent of the prenatal ultrasound and the knowledge of what sex a child will be before its birth brought about abortions due to the sex of the fetus. Many cultures favor male children, and in these countries sex-selective abortion was very common before the initiation of laws preventing them.