Abortion operations gone wrong on the next Maury Povich Show! What? What is this I wondered to myself. I was about 11 years old when I saw this show and what horror it brought to my mind and heart is unexplainable. On the show were kids my age and younger with handicaps. Some were missing a leg or an arm. Some had brain damage or lung problems. What went wrong? The abortion did. The mothers of the children had gone in for an abortion and instead of killing the whole the fetus the doctor only took out some of the fetus. When the women found out they were still pregnant it was to late to have another abortion. How could a mother even consider killing her child? What was more important than life? These questions have rattled my mind for years. This show opened my heart and mind into the world of abortion.

This show and many others like it got me interested in the topic of abortion by puzzling my mind with questions that could only be answered by my own opinions. Depending on how I was brought up and my morals, values, and how I thought decided what the answer to the question was for me. Did I think the killing of an unborn person was okay or did I think it was wrong? Did I think it was all right to deny an already living person the right to chose and live as they chose or did I think it was wrong.

I chose pro-life because I think it is wrong to kill another human being born or unborn. I think it is wrong to use abortion as a form of birth control. I also think it is wrong to deny the child a chance to live because of its mother s and father s mistakes.

An abortion is a procedure that women go through to terminate the life of their child. They go to a doctor s office where the doctor takes the embryo out of the womb of its mother. They then dispose of the embryo. This is all I know about the procedure of abortion.

I think that the reason women have abortions is because they are not responsible enough to take care of the result of their own mistakes. I think most of them are insecure about themselves and their reputations. By this I mean that I think most of them would rather take the easy way out instead of getting fat and ruining their perfect figures and then having it given up for adoption.

I want to find out why women think they have the right to take someone else s life. Why they don t take responsibility for their mistakes? Why there are not any laws forbidding abortion? How the government and church feel about abortion and how the medical field responds to the question if abortion is right or wrong?

I picked this topic because I have many strong feelings toward the subject, but I do not know hardly anything about the topic of abortion itself. I do not know if there are any laws regarding the subject. I do not know how the medical field feels or how most people feel towards the subject. I want to find more factual information on this subject instead of just relying on my opinions.

The Search

When Ms. Hahn told the class we could write a paper on anything we wanted to, many thoughts came to my mind. I wanted to write about something I knew I would like researching. Something I didn t know a whole lot about and something that would allow me to express my opinions. Politics, abuse, women s rights, violence, teens versus adults, racism and teen pregnancy were some of the topics that came to my mind, but the topic that interested me most was abortion.

She first had us write a paper about what we knew on our topic. Boy was that hard work. I knew almost nothing factual about my topic. All my knowledge on the subject was opinionated. I only knew how I felt on the subject. I knew what an abortion was and that was about it. How was I supposed to write a one page paper on what I knew on my topic when it was only about two sentences. To make up for how little I knew on the subject I decided to concentrate on writing how I first found out what abortion was and why I was interested in it so much.

After writing the What I Know paper I began my research. To begin my research I looked in the SIRS for articles about abortion. I was very surprised when about all of one binder was all about abortion. Abortion meant a lot more to the world than what I had thought. After reading the articles I had Ms. Hahn copy the articles that intrigued me most. They also contained the most information about my subject.

Interview? Did I hear Ms. Hahn right? Yes, I did. The next thing we had to do was to do an in-person interview with someone related to our subject. My mind went into a state of chaos. Who would want to talk to me about abortion? One word describes how I got around to finding a person who I could interview - Hectic! I knew from the very beginning that people who had had abortions wouldn t wan to talk to me, so I decided to interview a doctor who either did abortions or a doctor who counseled people who had had abortions.

Did you know that in the phone book, well at least in mine, they don t list where abortion clinics are or what their names are? They just list phone numbers. My mom and I called all the clinics whose phone numbers we had. We got the same answers over and over. People would answer us by any one of these remarks, Sorry I can t help you! , Call back later! , No comment! , No thank you. Or just flat out No! Finally after about a week of calling and bugging one place they agreed to an interview over the phone if I swore to use a fake name for the clinic and person who I was going to interview. Trying to find someone to interview was just an introduction of how much secrecy abortion involves.

Later, I went to the library where I checked out 6 books and a video that I was psyched to watch. When I got home I watched the video and boy did it give me insight on my subject. It was about five totally different women who had all had abortions but because of different reasons. Some decided to become pro-life after their abortion while the others remained pro-choice. It had answered most of my questions of how women felt about abortion and why they would have one. Some reasons seemed stupid to me while others I understood why.

After watching the video I began to read my books. These gave me insight on the more factual details of my subject. As I read I wrote sayings directly quoted from the books or in my own words on notecards. When I was done reading I placed my notecards into categories. After this I began to write my paper.

Abortion

Pain, sorrow, embarrassment, anger, regret, and shock are all emotions that come with the word abortion. Abortion is a very controversial subject that has everybody fighting over the question if it is right or wrong, and those it has fighting over it also have it thinking they know the right answer. Unfortunately no one really knows what the right answer to the question is. We can only speculate and reflect on the subject and from this make our own decisions as to whether we think it is right or wrong.

No right is more basic than the right to live, and the untimely death of a young child is among life s most awful tragedies. To cause such a death is great a wrong (Tribe 3). If Infanticide is wrong, is the destruction of a fetus at eight months of gestation, or a t five any different (Tooley 5)?

Nothing is more devastating than a life without liberty. Rape is among the most profound denials of liberty, and making a woman bear a rapist s child is an assault on her humanity. How different is it to force her to remain pregnant and become a mother just because birth control failed. From her point of view it matters. From the perspective of the fetus how it began makes no difference (White interview). Is there a difference between being killed or having your life left in shambles?

Abortion is not a clear cut constitutional that can be resolved by the dictate of government or court. We are locked in a historical moment-one of billions of such moments humanity has not yet explained (Whitney 6). It is not a classic battle between good and evil. It is far more complex. It cannot be neatly tied up and put away. The only way to address abortion is by telling its story from all sides: humanly, religiously, politically, and medically.

Pro-choice supporters think motherhood is a choice women can make and should be allowed to be delayed until one can best provide for a child emotionally and financially. (Brotman 5) They say a woman s liberty is burdened when government prevents her from ending her pregnancy if that is her choice. To deny a liberty as basic as a woman s freedom not to remain pregnant, not to give birth, and not to become a mother is wrong (Tribe 114).

If we were to decide that the constitution should be changed to give the embryos the same protection that people receive, you would soon remember that the constitution as it currently exists does not protect embryos as people. Also the Fourteenth Amendment states that all people born or naturalized in the United States are citizens of the United States and the state they reside in. This means that even if fetuses were people they are not yet citizens (Tribe 120).

Pro-choice supporters believe that the medical field also supports their way of thinking. Cell biologists and experts in the anatomy and physiology of the developing embryo do not know when a fetus becomes a human being. If doctors can t determine when human life begins then how can fetuses be regarded as human beings from the moment of conception (Reader s Digest 284)? The fertilized egg is clearly not a prepackaged human being. There is no body plan, no blueprint, no tiny being pre-formed and waiting to unfold. The particular person might that it might become is not yet there (qtd. in Tribe p 208).

A radical group of feminists called the Redstockings would openly talk about their experiences with illegal abortions. They and other radical feminists did this to try to make politicians repeal anti-abortion laws (Tribe 44). These radical groups seemed to have made an impression because in 1967 the National Organization for Women (NOW) declared that women have the right to control their reproductive lives. This became one of NOW s women s bill of rights (Tribe 45).

The movement for repeal of abortion laws benefited from such groups like this. Their belief in the idea that women had a right to a legal and safe abortion kept them repealing against abortion laws. The reforming of abortion laws was not enough for some women though. They believed having to have a doctor s approval only reinforced the traditional role of the woman as dependent with no control over her life (Whitney 45).

Pro-life supporters regard motherhood as a woman s highest calling, and they often think that their opponents see children as barriers to material success (Brotman 4.5). They believe that from the very moment of conception the fetus is a person and therefore a bearer of human rights. They also believe that a woman has no right to an abortion because even if the embryo is not yet a person it will later have an opportunity to become a person. They believe that even if a woman is deliberately raped, killing the embryo only creates a second victim (Tribe 114).

Pro-life supporters also turn to the constitution for help. The Fifth Amendment states that no person may for the same offense be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb. This applies to people who are not citizens which they state would apply to the embryo. They also use the Eighth Amendment which ban s cruel and unequal punishment. They also use the Fourteenth Amendment which requires due process and equal protection which they state is not given to the embryo. If a state legislature permits abortion, it allows others to deprive the fetus of life and is denying it the equal protection that it rightly deserves (Tribe 115, 120).

Pro-life supporters also believe that the medical field supports their way of thinking. They say that doctors do know when life begins for the embryo. A four week old embryo has a heartbeat, defined head and face, the beginning of a brain, and little bumps where arms and legs will be. How can doctors say they don t know when the embryo s life begins (Reader s Digest 285)? The magazine, Did You Know?, says to every reader: You once were a fertilized ovum. A fertilized ovum? Yes! You were then everything you are today (qtd. in Tribe p 114).

Pro-life organizations joined forces with the Catholic Church to try to win the battle of abortion, by showing pictures of four week to fifteen week old embryos to people and then asking them if they would kill this precious life inside of them (Tribe 145). Their first major success was in 1973 when bills were passed forbidding any federal money to be used in any way to fund abortion (Whitney 246).

A movement defines itself by the goal it sets. The measure of the integrity of that movement is the fidelity of its leaders to the letter and spirit of that goal. The goal of the right-to-life movement is the extension of constitutional protection to the unborn at all stages of development (Merton 224).

The Roman Catholic Church, currently the best known organized opponent of abortion, was absent from the nineteenth-century debate on the topic. The belief that abortion is murder was not yet part of the Church dogma. The traditional Catholic position on abortion was that a fetus was not a human being until forty days after conception for boys and eighty for girls. It was not until 1869, when Pope Pius IX promulgated the papal enactment, Apostolicace sedis, that abortion became illegal in the eyes of the church (Whitney 31).

The difficult moral question is different from the legal question of whether an embryo is a person. Since the Constitution as it stands does not currently protect embryos as persons (Merton 120). Because the abortion question is so difficult and may be approached in so many different ways, it should not be surprising that the approach taken by the United States Supreme Court causes continuous controversy. It would be foolish to think that any judicial approach to the question would not be controversial, because if it were every answer to the question would be wrong (Tribe 77) .

An example of the controversy the United States Supreme Court causes was during the case of Roe vs. Wade. Roe said she had been ganged raped and later to her dismay found out she was pregnant and had an abortion. Roe lived in Texas where abortion was illegal. She said the only reason she had come forth with the fact that she had had an illegal abortion was because she wanted to challenge the Texas abortion ban so that women in her position could have a legal abortion. She won the case. A decade and a half later she told the whole world in embarrassment that she had lied about having been raped because she didn t want to go to jail for having an illegal abortion (Tribe 4-5).

The world went into a state of chaos. Pro-life supporters said she should be put in jail for having lied to the court and for having an illegal abortion at the time. Pro-choice supporters said she should be allowed to go free because the Supreme Court had already ruled that the government was not allowed to interfere with a woman s right to chose abortion (Tribe 4-5). In an attempt to satisfy both sides the Supreme Court ruled that all abortions be performed by licensed doctors and abortions could not be performed unless it was to protect the woman s life (Whitney 79).

Some other cases from which controversial laws came from are these: In the case of Planned Parenthood vs. Danforth the court ruled that husbands had no veto power over their wives freedom to have an abortion. Nor could parents be given an absolute veto over their minor daughters right to chose abortion. In the case of Colautti vs. Franklin, the Court gave doctors broad authority to determine when a fetus was viable outside the womb and ruled that on the basis of doctor s recommendations, states could act to protect fetal life at viability (Whitney 245-246).

The law from Planned Parenthood vs. Danforth, about parents not being able to veto their daughters right to an abortion was brought to repeal by Pro-life supporters in 1990. The Court changed the law to requiring notification of one parent as long as the alternative of a judicial hearing existed. This did not satisfy the Pro-life supporters. In 1993, they produced a bill to repeal. Again the Court changed it. The law now states that you must notify and get a consent from both parents to have an abortion if your

under the age of eighteen (Whitney 246-247).

Other laws of the modern era state: a woman cannot have an abortion in the third trimester, and/or cannot have an abortion as a form of birth control, however a woman can have an abortion if having the baby could kill her or damage her health. Also she could have an abortion if rape has occurred. Communities are not allowed to provide public funding of abortion or the provision of abortion services. Communities must also provide information about the choices of abortion and the joys of motherhood (Gorney 12.5-14.1).

Courts cannot easily avoid deciding, in the varying of cases produced by new technologies, old human values, and morals, who will be permitted to decide if abortion

should be allowed (Abortion: Personal Portraits). Should it be the woman s choice of denying herself liberty or denying the life of her baby? Should it be the choice of her doctor and the hospital the doctor belongs to or should it be the states decision to determine who gets the right to life and liberty?

The medical field has always had an uneasy relationship with the subject of abortion. From the fifteenth century the Hippocratic oath pronounced a doctor s bargain with life, not death. It is, in fact, one of the rare historical documents to mention abortion at all. The oath states: I will not give a pessary to a woman to cause an abortion, a ringing declaration that might leave little doubt about where the medical community stands (qtd. in Tooley p 222).

Doctors are not all knowing much as we would have the population believe that we are. Some people think it s simple for doctors, that our only concern is with objective issues of medicine and technology. But the doctor s role is quite complex. I think we in the technical community stand at the center of the storm and are pulled by every side. There is our moral responsibility as defined in the Hippocratic oath; there is our social responsibility to the poor, the sick, the needy; our responsibility for global issues of population and sustaining human life in spite of famine and disease; and our utterly personal responsibility for the best interests of each patient. All these must be juggled in our approach to abortion (White interview).

The question of abortion began to arise in the minds of those in the medical field during the 1950s to the 1970s. As advances in medical care increased the safety of pregnancies so did more reasons for doctors to justify abortions. The concept of health began expanding to include the woman s overall mental state. Thus, in cases of rape and incest doctors began to include psychological harm in their calculations of the costs associated with childbirth (Tooley 36). Perhaps most important in altering the views of the medical community was the child s quality of life (Gorney 13.6).

Also two widely reported tragic episodes at this time helped to change medical about abortion. In 1962 when Sherri Finkbine was denied the right to have an abortion after accidentally taking the tranquilizer thalidomide, it causes children to be born badly disfigured, and later had to go to Ireland to have an abortion because she was denied one in the United States. The doctors in Ireland showed the United States pictures of what the child looked like when they took it out of Sherri and it had fins for feet (Tribe 37).

In 1962 Rubella, or the German measles, broke out and provided the second major impetus in the American medical community for abortion reform. The occurrence of Rubella during pregnancy can cause blindness, deafness, and severe mental retardation in the child. As a result of the 1962-65 epidemic, some 15,000 babies were born with birth defects. This tragedy caused doctors to favor easing restrictions on reasons for abortions (Tribe 37).

There were many other forces underlying popular support of abortion reform. Greater sensitivity to issues of poverty and race heightened awareness of the unequal quality and availability of abortion services to women according to social class and skin color. The growth of concern in America about worldwide overpopulation caused for movement toward the relaxation of restrictions on abortion (Tribe 37-39).

Doctors began to come up with solutions to the abortion problem to help in the aiding of reforming restrictions of abortion. They invented the abortion pill, RU-486, which causes fetuses to abort inside the woman. The artificial womb was another substitute for the actual abortion procedure. The artificial womb serves as an incubator for the baby. These inventions and others helped to solve a lot of problems doctors were facing (Tribe 207-213).

The medical community presents itself as objective in that its premises are assumed to be scientifically based. But to often these so-called scientific pronouncements are heavily weighted by the personal prejudices of individual doctors. What people don t always realize is that every scientist and every medical professional is first and foremost human (White interview).

No religion invented by humans has ever managed to tame the mystery of life or to solve the moral dilemmas that are a daily part of human life. Nor have we created a government or court that has been able to solve the problems of human life without some sort of controversy. Nor have we ever created a scientific theory that could not be either

expanded or disproved. Life does not always present itself neatly as a choice between right and wrong. Sometimes the choice that grabs at a person s heart between two wrongs or two rights, and in those cases they want the legal or moral voice to tell them what is right and what is wrong. But sometimes the voice that will give them the true answer is their conscience. In order to settle the dispute between whose right and whose wrong on the topic of abortion people must as a whole first look deep into their soles and in what we believe to be right before we can decide whose right and whose wrong whether it be the government, the church, the medical field, the woman or the unborn fetus. When we have done this we will be able to answer the question of abortion.

Work s Cited

Abortion: Personal Portraits. Videocassette. Films for Humanities and Sciences, 1991. 38

min.

Brotman, Barbara. The Abortion Maze. A crazy quilt of laws among states likely to get even worse. Chicago Tribune 14 Jan. 1990, sect. 4,5.

Gorney, Cynthia. Getting an abortion in the Heartland. Washington Post 2 Oct. 1994, health sect. 12-15.

Merton, Andrew. Enemies by Choice The Right-to-Life Movement and its Threat to Abortion. Boston: Beacon Press, 1983.

The Reader s Digest Association Inc. ABC s of the Human Body. New York: The Reader s Digest Association Inc., 1987.

Tooley, Michael. Abortion and Infanticide. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983.

Tribe, Lawrence. Abortion: The Clash of Absolutes. New York: W.W Norton and Company, 1990.

White, Brooke. Telephone interview. 26 Apr. 1997.

Whitney, Catherine. Whose Life? New York: William Morrow and Company, 1991.