Name(s):
Amateur abortion
Unsafe abortion
Variable criteria for legal induced abortion
Claim
Anti-abortion laws in most countries are not strictly enforced and so serve only to deter the most reliable and skilled practitioners. In countries where abortion is illegal, millions of women die each year as a result of severe illness due to backdoor abortions, and babydumping is also a dramatic consequence of refused abortion. The drain on scarce medical resources, the hidden effect on the woman and her family, and the loss of a woman from her home as a mother and a worker, all add up to make illegal abortion one of the most costly and inhuman plagues of the twentieth century. 2. Women have a right to control their own bodies. Legal abortion is a system of birth control many people find acceptable, more so than permanent drug taking against the possibility of becoming pregnant. No contraceptive method is fail-safe, all require planning. True spontaneity, with both partners able fully to enjoy sex when they wish without the fear of producing an unwanted child, is best achieved by making legal abortion easily available.
Counter-claim
Except for strict physical and medical reasons, no abortions should be granted. Human life is sacred, even if conceived in violence. Once the door is opened to this and other psychological arguments for legal abortion, there is no end for the murder of children while in the womb. Wealthy people, finding pregnancy inconvenient, may purchase instant abortion service using the latest technology. This is an abuse of responsible adulthood, and of the powers of the medical profession. It is a crime against the unborn child. The acceptance of such legal abortions with the countless inevitable instances of criminality that it entails, cheapens human life and makes it just another commodity. In addition, it opens the way for the advocates of euthanasia who may argue just as emotionally for termination of the suffering, the dying and the aged, with all the consequent abuses that this entails. That the two concepts are related is seen in the case of modern China where both foetuses and infants (usually female) were murdered in order to keep the population down. In other words, naturalists may consider even population control is sufficient justification for murder; thus legalized abortion may eventually be ordered by the State for population control purposes.