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Bioethical Issues: Legal And Moral Dilemmas Associated With Abortion

431 Words2 Pages

Bioethical Issue
Mary Carnahan
HA 210 Medical Law and Ethics
November 21, 2014

Introduction Researching a bioethical issue; like, abortion. Is there a controversial involving abortion? What were the legal and moral dilemmas associated with abortion? What was the driving force behind the abortion? What were the results?
What does Bioethics Mean? Basically bioethics means medical issues that are controversial. Bioethics “ranges from the use of birth control pills and misuse of medical information to mercy killing and suicide” (Abhijit Naik, 2013). In the late 1960s medicine and biology was making new advancements which brought up ethical concerns. One the concerns were abortion, the concern of “is it murder”, “safe abortions”. In this …show more content…

“For most of the country's first 100 years, abortion as we know it today was not a criminal offense, it was also not considered immoral” (Crime, 2014). In the 1700s women would often take a drug to terminate their unwanted pregnancies. In 1827, the state of Illinois passed a law making the abortion drug illegal, other states followed Illinois’s example. Between 1860 and 1880 abortion became a serious illegal offense but not because it was immoral but because the American Medical Association didn’t want to compete with abortion practitioners, so the AMA eliminating the competition. The word abortion was taboo and it was illegal before the early 1970s which forced many women to have illegal abortions done by unlicensed physicians or if women could afford the procedures they would do it on themselves with a coat hangs. Some women died from complications, like, infections and bleeding to death during or after the procedure was done. Abortions were unheard of and in many states against the law unless it was to save the mother’s life, there for federal law didn’t regulate abortions. Women’s right groups would fight to have the law passed giving women the right to decide if they wanted to terminate their pregnancies. It wasn’t until 1973, when a woman (Jane Roe) took on the state of Texas, were it was illegal in every form to have an abortion unless it was to save the

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