This course has three written assignments that build upon one another and are designed to take you step-by-step through a process of writing a paper that identifies an ethical question, examines the c

Women Rights in Abortion

Student’s Name: Keisha Thomas

Course Title: PHI 208 Ethics and Moral Reasoning

Instructor: Whitney Easton

Date: January 14, 2019

Ethic Question

Should a woman have the right to an abortion if we recognize the fetus as a person?

Introduction

Abortion can be described as the process of ending a pregnancy specifically terminating the embryo or fetus before it can be able to survive outside the mother’s uterus. A miscarriage represents an abortion that occurs spontaneously without the influence of external factors, but when deliberate measures are taken to end a pregnancy it is referred to as an induced miscarriage or abortion.

There are different laws on the legality of abortions all over the world and even in the United States of America. The creation of regulations or what is referred to as “trigger laws” that keep checks and balances on the real extent of abortion practices play a major role in ensuring the process is carried out in recognized institutions where safety is a major priority (Cornell, 2016). The ongoing debate on whose decision it should still continue to gather momentum as each party demands to be heard. Who has more right on whether an abortion should take place or not? This is the questions that experts are struggling to answer.

This study looks at the right of the woman if the fetus is recognized as a person. Generally, it is against human nature, religious prescriptions and even the laws of any country to end another life. Therefore, there is a dilemma concerning the whole subject of abortion. On one hand, there is a woman who will be responsible for the pregnancy for the whole term, while on the other hand are other parties such as the father and the laws are regulations with clear notions on the importance of the human life. At the end of the day, coming up with a uniform framework that with concrete legislation on the subject will go a great deal towards ensuring the process is procured for the right reasons and with the support of each involved party (Manninen, & Mulder Jr, 2018).

Position Statement

If the fetus is recognized as a person, a woman should not have the right to an abortion.

Reasons in support of your statement

There are a number of reasons that should stop people from procuring abortions. First and foremost, abortion is murder since it involves the ending of human life, and since life starts at conception, the unborn babies have a right to life. A lot of religious views it as a way of going against the word of God, abortion causes psychological damage such as the risk of depression, and it reduces the number of babies that can be adopted by people who cannot have children of their own (Shah, Åhman, & Ortayli, 2014). Other reasons why abortion is wrong when the fetus is recognized as a person include the fact that doctors are bound by their Hippocratic Oath to protect human life, it reduces the value of human life, and it can reach a point where it is used as a contraceptive.

Opposing position statement

Abortion empowers women by giving them control over their bodies.

Reasons in support of opposing the statement

The factors that promote abortion include the US Supreme Court view on abortion as a “fundamental right”, the notion that human life becomes viable only when the fetus can survive independently outside the womb, fetus does not feel pain during abortion processes, legal and professionally done abortions are safe, abortion gives the mothers a choice especially when the fetus has abnormalities and other financial disadvantages, and it is a means of controlling populations (Hasan, & Ng, 2014).

References

Cornell, D. (2016). The imaginary domain: abortion, pornography and sexual harassment. Routledge.

Hasan, K. S., & Ng, V. (2014). Why are you taking this stance? identifying and classifying reasons in ideological debates. In Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) (pp. 751-762).

Manninen, B. A., & Mulder Jr, J. (2018). Introduction. In Civil Dialogue on Abortion (pp. 11-20). Routledge.

Shah, I. H., Åhman, E., & Ortayli, N. (2014). Access to safe abortion: progress and challenges since the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD). Contraception, 90(6), S39-S48.