Is Abortion Morally Wrong?
Abortion is the intended termination of a human pregnancy, many think that it is morally wrong in all cases, but can it be considered as morally permissible? Thou shall not kill, but what is really considered murder? Who draws the line on which murder should be permissible and which should not? You might want to get rid of bugs that may appear in your house and you squash them, which is not morally wrong but killing another human being with a cruel intent to harm them would be considered morally wrong?
In the mid-1800s states started to pass laws making it illegal to carry out an abortion. The motivations for anti-abortion laws varied from state to state. One of the reasons included fears that the population would be dominated by the children of newly arriving immigrants, whose birth rates were higher than those of “native” Anglo-Saxon women. The real issue at hand regarding the abortion debate is not the women’s rights or other factors but the status of the unborn fetus. Participants of the personal choice argument suggest that the unborn fetus is not a human being, but if the unborn child is indeed a human person, then no amount of freedom justifies its elective termination. Therefore prochoice debaters has made an argument stating the question by presupposing their conclusions, they are only plausible if and only if the unborn are not human persons.
Maybe in a since the abortion choice advocate argues that although the embryo is a human, it is not a human being who has an intrinsic value yet. But this argument seems tainted, for how could size, level of development, environment, and degree of dependency have any bearing on whether or not the unborn human is a person? A person is not a person because of how large he is, how developed he is, where he is, and what he depends on for survival. Maybe we would consider a two year old to be an intrinsically valuable person when compared to an adult or teenager even though he is smaller, less developed, and more dependent on others. Moreover, it is not at all clear how a journey of a few inches through the birth canal miraculously changes a “non-valuable mass of tissue” into a valuable human person.
There are different ways around abortion. Many people should take extra