Roe V. Wade Essay

In the United States, laws that had to do with abortions didn’t exist until the 1800s. During that time women did not have many rights. In 1821, Connecticut passed the first law in the United States barring abortions after “quickening”, which were usually performed by administering a type of poison to the woman after the fourth month of pregnancy. By the 1880s, all states had laws criminalizing abortions and these laws stayed intact until the 1960s and 1970s. In 1973, the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade made it possible for women to get safe, legal abortions from trained medical practitioners. This led to dramatic decreases in pregnancy-related injury and death. The Roe case came out of a Texas law that prohibited legal abortion except to save a woman’s life. At that

Henry Wade was the Texas Attorney General who defended the law that made abortions illegal. After hearing the case, the Supreme Court ruled that Americans’ right to privacy included the right of a woman to decide whether to have children, and the right of a woman and her doctor to make that decision without state interference. Those who are against abortion say it is comparable to murder as it is the act of taking human life. A known fact about abortions is that they can result in medical complications later in life, the risk of ectopic pregnancies doubles, the chance of a miscarriage and pelvic inflammatory disease also increases. Opponents have said that women who don’t want a child should prevent the risk of unwanted pregnancy by taking any type of birth control or become abstinent. The people who are for abortion say it is a safe procedure. The majority of women (88%) who have an abortion, do so in their first trimester. Medical abortions have less than 0.5% risk of serious complications and don’t affect a woman’s health or future ability to become pregnant or give