Abortion Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Abortion - Essay Example 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