The Abortion Debate

Roshni Ghimire

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11 October 2014

Abortion

Abortion simply means ending pregnancy. According to 2012 digital edition English dictionary, an abortion is, “the premature termination of pregnancy by spontaneous or induced expulsion of a nonviable fetus from the uterus”. The trend of abortion is being followed from past thousands of years and have always been a debating issue. According to pro-Life vs Pro-Choice on the Nature of Preborn Life and the Rights of women, Pro-choice supporters claim that beginning of life is unknown women have right to do what they want with their body. Whereas, pro-life supporters claim that a pregnant women have other body inside her womb and performing abortion at any stage is a murder. In

During that time there was no medical abortions available so the only option was surgical abortion. Due to lack of skilled manpower, lack of medical educations and lack of surgical equipment’s performing abortion was a threat to women’s life. Even with the advancement of science and technology in the field of medicine, abortion still meant to be illegal. The American Medical Association states that abortion was always unsafe and wrong process which might take life of women. As a result, National Abortion Federation took a small step in saving the life of women and made abortion physicians-only practice. In 1973 Roe Vs Wade, the Supreme Court made a huge decision of providing women with right to decide whether to have children or not and made abortion legal. In spite of the rights provided by the Supreme Court, 30 states still considered abortion as illegal and 20 states made it legal under certain cases. According to the statistics released by the National center for Health studies, about 4.3 million babies were born in the United States. Among them half of the pregnancies were accidental which caused 4 in 10 to abort. In western nation, United

Abortion may lead women to become infertile or have miscarriages in later pregnancies. The procedure of abortion is based on the time duration of pregnancy. During the first trimester of pregnancy, a women can either have a surgical abortion or medical abortion. Surgical abortion may cause death of women in rare cases approximately 4 to 11 deaths per year. Surgical abortion includes suction aspiration which is a one day procedure. It can be performed up to 14 weeks of pregnancy. On the other hand, medical abortion is a simple and easy process. According to APS (American Pregnancy Association) medical abortions include Methotrexate and Mioprostol (MTX) and Mifepristone and Misoprotol commonly known as RU-486 or the abortion pill. During the second trimester (15 to 23 weeks of last menstrual period), dilation and evacuation (D&E) procedure is performed. It is the safest medical procedure and usually takes 2 days. During the third trimester, termination of pregnancy is more unsafe and lots of serious glitches may arise. This is not legal procedure in number of states because at this phase the baby is fully developed and can feel the sense of pain. Still, it can be performed under certain medical conditions. Basically, the procedure in the third trimester is similar to the second trimester which is Induction Abortion and Dilation and