Restricting Abortion Laws

Abortion is and always has been a major topic for debate in America because of all the moral and legal issues that surround it. Even after the Supreme Court’s decision to get rid of state laws banning abortion, in part with the Roe V. Wade (1973) case, pro-life activists continue to thrive for new laws banning, or at least tightly restricting induced abortion. As of February 22, 2006, South Dakota became the first US state to pass a law banning abortion, except in cases to save the woman's life. This law was just recently enforced on June 1, 2006 and is intended to motivate the Supreme Court to reconsider its previous ruling in the Roe V. Wade case, as the Supreme Court most certainly should.

In the Roe V. Wade case, Norma L. McCorvey or "Jane Roe" lied about her pregnancy stating that it was the result of a rape when it really wasn’t. Since this was insignificant in establishing abortion as being a fundamental right under the United States Constitution, the Supreme Court ruled, in favor of Roe, that abortion be legalized in all states. But what about the fundamental rights of Norma McCorvey’s unborn child, shouldn’t it of had the fundamental right to live? This is where the debate on abortion gets controversial and sometimes heated; at what point of the pregnancy can the fetus be considered a human being with rights of its own, and does a woman have the fundamental right to violate the rights of her unborn child by determining whether or not the it lives.

Pro-Choice activists are more in favor of equality and women’s rights rather than the developing life that she possesses and believe that abortion should be legal just as long as the fetus is nonviable, which is before twenty weeks of gestation. The problem with this is that, upon conception, potentially the fetus is going to be viable and is going to be a functional human being. To interfere with this process is violating the rights that the unborn child has to live. A fetus is incapable of determining whether or not it wants to live, so to not grant that fetus a chance to live and to make that decision for it is down-right unconstitutional-- more so than to not grant women the right to do as they please with their own bodies Women should have the right to do as they please with their own bodies, just not the right do as they please with someone else’s body.

Since pro-life activist’s moral and legal standing clearly overpowers that of their opposers, pro-choice activists attempt to contribute other factors about abortion into their argument that may further justify their inhumane cause. In 1999, economists John Donohue and Steve D. Levitt gained widespread attention for their paper "The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime." The paper stated that all unwanted children, especially those born to African-American mothers have a higher statistical probability of being uneducated, adolescent, and impoverished. Although they claimed that unwanted children are at a "higher statistical probability", they provided no statistical evidence to prove this nor has any ever been given before the paper was written, making their paper not only full of unreasonable assumptions, but making it bias and somewhat racist.

Abortion is an issue that is not likely to be resolved any time soon, but at least South Dakota has set a good example for the rest of the states in America to tighten their restrictions, allowing induced abortion only to mothers whose lives are in danger due to their pregnancy. Since either the mother or the child is to die, a mother should have the right to choose who lives, and she should have the right to abort her baby and live the rest of her life in guilt that she couldn’t conjure up the strength to face death so that her child could live. There should be no other reason what so ever to permit abortion considering that people can put unwanted children up for adoption 24 hours after the delivery with no questions asked. A 2004 survey showed that only 8.2 % of the 1.31 million aborted pregnancies in America that year were a result of rape, incest, or maternal health. The other 92 % were a result of mothers just not wanting to have a child due to various reasons that are simply not good enough to justify aborting a human being. Restriction upon abortion need to be enforced in all states of America, and all across the globe for that matter because no matter where you are or what the reason is, induced abortion is never right.