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Argumentative Essays on Pro Choice (abortion)

What makes a powerful pro choice essay topic.

When it comes to crafting a compelling pro choice abortion essay, the selection of a captivating topic is paramount. A well-chosen topic has the potential to make your essay shine and captivate the reader's attention. So, how can you brainstorm and discover the perfect essay topic? Here are some expert recommendations:

• Consider your passions: Embark on a journey of brainstorming topics that truly ignite your interest. By doing so, you ensure that you remain engaged throughout the writing process, allowing you to produce an essay that is truly compelling.
• Immerse yourself in research: Dive deep into the vast sea of information surrounding the pro choice abortion movement. By gaining a comprehensive understanding of the subject matter, you can identify potential essay topics that will expand your knowledge base and captivate your readers.
• Analyze the ongoing debates: Stay up-to-date with the latest discussions and controversies surrounding pro choice abortion. By analyzing diverse viewpoints and arguments, you can find inspiration for unique and thought-provoking essay topics.
• Evaluate personal experiences: Reflect upon your own encounters or experiences with the pro choice abortion movement. These personal insights can provide invaluable perspectives and make your essay more relatable to your readers.
• Consider your target audience: Ponder upon the diverse readership that your essay will reach. Choose a topic that appeals to both supporters and skeptics of pro choice abortion, ensuring a broader and more impactful discussion.

Overall, a good pro choice abortion essay topic should be thought-provoking, relevant, and capable of sparking meaningful discussions.

Best Pro Choice Abortion Essay Topics

Here, we present some of the most compelling pro choice abortion essay topics:

• The Empowering Role of Pro Choice Abortion in Women's Reproductive Rights Movement
• Analyzing the Ripple Effect: The Impact of Pro Choice Abortion on Society
• The Ethical Enigma: Exploring the Considerations of Pro Choice Abortion
• Untangling the Web: A Critical Analysis of the Media's Portrayal of Pro Choice Abortion
• Unearthing the Roots: Examining the Historical Background of the Pro Choice Abortion Movement
• The Dance of Equality: The Intersectionality of Pro Choice Abortion and Feminism
• A Constitutional Right or a Moral Dilemma: Delving into the Controversy of Pro Choice Abortion
• Unveiling the Unseen: The Psychological Effects of Pro Choice Abortion on Women
• Abortion Access and Healthcare Disparities: A Closer Look at the Impact
• Shifting Paradigms: The Influence of Pro Choice Abortion on Religious Beliefs and Practices
• Unmasking the Numbers: Exploring the Economic Implications of Pro Choice Abortion
• Pro Choice Abortion and Population Control: A Deeper Examination
• The Global Tapestry: A Comparative Analysis of Pro Choice Abortion Perspectives
• Unlocking the Mind: The Impact of Pro Choice Abortion on Mental Health
• Examining the Opposition: Religious versus Secular Arguments against Pro Choice Abortion
• The Symphony of Empowerment: The Relationship between Pro Choice Abortion and Women's Empowerment
• Peering into the Crystal Ball: Predictions and Challenges for the Future of Pro Choice Abortion
• Through the Prism of Diversity: Exploring the Impact of Pro Choice Abortion on LGBTQ+ Rights
• Beyond Statistics: The Role of Pro Choice Abortion in Reducing Maternal Mortality Rates
• Analyzing the Legal Frameworks: A Global Perspective on Pro Choice Abortion

Engaging Pro Choice Essay Questions

To ignite meaningful discussions, consider these thought-provoking questions for your pro choice abortion essay:

• What are the main arguments employed by supporters of pro choice abortion?
• How does the pro choice abortion movement differ across various countries?
• What are the ethical implications of pro choice abortion in cases of fetal abnormalities?
• How does the media shape public opinion on pro choice abortion?
• What are the potential consequences of restricting access to pro choice abortion?
• How does pro choice abortion intersect with racial and socioeconomic disparities?
• What role does religion play in shaping attitudes towards pro choice abortion?
• How has pro choice abortion influenced women's reproductive healthcare policies?
• What are the psychological effects experienced by women who choose pro choice abortion?
• How has the pro choice abortion movement evolved over time?

Pro Choice Abortion Essay Prompts

Consider these essay prompts to explore various angles of pro choice abortion:

• Imagine a world where pro choice abortion is universally accepted. Describe the potential positive outcomes and challenges.
• Write a persuasive essay arguing that pro choice abortion is an inherent human right.
• Create a captivating dialogue between two individuals with contrasting views on pro choice abortion.
• Analyze the impact of pro choice abortion on the future of gender equality.
• Compose a compelling personal narrative about a woman's journey in making a pro choice abortion decision and its consequences.

Addressing Pro Choice Abortion Essay FAQs

Here are answers to frequently asked questions about writing pro choice abortion essays:

Q: What are the key elements of a compelling pro choice abortion essay?

A: A compelling pro choice abortion essay should possess a powerful thesis statement, well-researched arguments supported by credible evidence, and a clear logical structure. Additionally, incorporating personal experiences and maintaining a balanced tone can elevate the impact of your essay.

Q: How can I address counterarguments in my pro choice abortion essay?

A: Address counterarguments by presenting them objectively and refuting them with logical reasoning and evidence. This demonstrates your ability to consider different perspectives and strengthens your overall argument.

Q: How can I make my pro choice abortion essay stand out?

A: To make your essay stand out, choose a unique and thought-provoking topic, present original arguments supported by credible sources, and employ engaging and persuasive language. Incorporating personal anecdotes or real-life examples can also make your essay more memorable.

Q: Is it important to consider the opposing viewpoint in a pro choice abortion essay?

A: Yes, considering the opposing viewpoint is crucial to demonstrate a comprehensive understanding of the topic. Address counterarguments respectfully and refute them with strong evidence to strengthen your own argument and showcase your ability to engage with different perspectives.

Q: Are there any specific guidelines for referencing sources in a pro choice abortion essay?

A: Yes, it is important to properly cite all sources used in your pro choice abortion essay. Follow the guidelines of a recognized citation style, such as APA or MLA, to ensure accurate and consistent referencing. This adds credibility to your essay and avoids plagiarism.

Remember to always consult your instructor or follow any specific guidelines provided for your essay assignment. Happy writing!

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Woman Vs Society: Pro Life and Pro Choice Views on Abortion

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The pro-choice movement is a collective advocacy effort that upholds the principle of individual autonomy and reproductive rights, asserting that individuals should have the legal freedom to make decisions regarding their own bodies, including the choice to have an abortion.

The pro-choice movement has a rich history that spans several decades, characterized by significant milestones, activism, and legal battles. It emerged as a response to the restrictive abortion laws and societal stigmatization surrounding reproductive choices, aiming to challenge and change the status quo. During the mid-20th century, trailblazers such as Margaret Sanger played a crucial role in advocating for birth control and setting the stage for reproductive rights activism. The pro-choice movement reached a significant milestone with the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case of Roe v. Wade in 1973. This pivotal decision granted women the constitutional right to choose abortion, solidifying the legal foundation upon which the movement was built. However, the pro-choice movement has not been without its challenges. It has faced opposition from anti-abortion groups, prompting pro-choice advocates to organize, mobilize, and form influential organizations like Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL). Grassroots activism, public awareness campaigns, and strategic lobbying have been vital in defending and expanding access to abortion services. Throughout its history, the pro-choice movement has also sought to address the societal stigma surrounding abortion. By sharing personal stories, fostering empathy, and promoting open dialogue, activists have aimed to destigmatize abortion and create a more compassionate and understanding society.

A significant portion of the population supports the principles and goals of the pro-choice movement. Many people believe that individuals should have the right to make decisions about their own bodies, including the choice to have an abortion. They argue that access to safe and legal abortion services is essential for reproductive autonomy, gender equality, and the overall well-being of women and marginalized communities. This perspective emphasizes the importance of comprehensive reproductive healthcare and the removal of barriers that restrict access to abortion. At the same time, there are individuals who hold reservations or have moral objections to abortion. Some may believe in the sanctity of life from conception or have religious or cultural values that influence their stance. These individuals may align themselves with the anti-abortion movement and advocate for stricter regulations or the complete prohibition of abortion. Public opinion on the pro-choice movement is also influenced by factors such as education, socioeconomic status, political ideology, and personal experiences. Cultural shifts, increased awareness about reproductive rights, and public discourse have contributed to a greater acceptance and understanding of the pro-choice position in many societies. In recent years, there has been a growing emphasis on intersectionality within the pro-choice movement, recognizing that reproductive justice intersects with other social justice issues, including race, class, and LGBTQ+ rights. This broader perspective aims to address the diverse needs and experiences of individuals seeking reproductive healthcare and advocates for policies that promote equitable access to comprehensive reproductive services.

The topic of the pro-choice movement is crucial as it centers on the fundamental principles of bodily autonomy, reproductive rights, and gender equality. It emphasizes the importance of individuals having the freedom to make decisions about their own bodies, including the choice to have an abortion. The pro-choice movement highlights the significance of safe and legal access to reproductive healthcare, ensuring that individuals have the power to determine their reproductive futures. By advocating for reproductive rights, the movement challenges oppressive structures, fights against stigma, and strives to create a society where individuals are empowered to make informed choices about their reproductive health, free from judgment and coercion.

The topic of the pro-choice movement is worthy of an essay because it encompasses profound social, ethical, and legal dimensions. Exploring this subject provides an opportunity to delve into the complexities surrounding reproductive rights, bodily autonomy, and the ongoing struggle for gender equality. Writing about the pro-choice movement allows for an examination of historical milestones, legal battles, and the impact on individuals and society. Additionally, it prompts critical analysis of the intersections between reproductive justice and other social issues like healthcare access, socioeconomic disparities, and cultural norms. By exploring this topic, one can contribute to the discourse, promote awareness, and foster a deeper understanding of the multifaceted nature of the pro-choice movement.

1. The pro-choice movement extends beyond the United States: While the pro-choice movement gained significant momentum in the United States, its influence is not limited to a single country. 2. Intersectionality plays a crucial role in the pro-choice movement: The pro-choice movement recognizes that reproductive rights intersect with other social justice issues, such as race, class, and LGBTQ+ rights. 3. Access to abortion services remains an ongoing battle: Despite the landmark ruling of Roe v. Wade in the United States, access to abortion services continues to be a contentious issue. Numerous states have implemented restrictive laws, such as mandatory waiting periods, targeted regulation of abortion providers (TRAP) laws, and limitations on insurance coverage. These efforts have led to a patchwork of access across the country, with disparities in availability and barriers for individuals seeking reproductive healthcare.

1. Steinem, G. (2015). My Life on the Road. Random House. 2. Norris, A., Bessett, D., Steinberg, J. R., Kavanaugh, M. L., & De Zordo, S. (2011). Abortion stigma: A reconceptualization of constituents, causes, and consequences. Women's Health Issues, 21(3), S49-S54. 3. McNeil, R. M., & Berer, M. (2017). The abortion law in Northern Ireland: Lessons for the United States. Guttmacher Policy Review, 20, 98-103. 4. Luker, K. (1984). Abortion and the politics of motherhood. University of California Press. 5. Rees, D. I., Sabia, J. J., & Argys, L. M. (2017). A review of the effects of abortion policies. Southern Economic Journal, 83(4), 823-869. 6. Stotland, N. L., & Bryant, A. G. (2020). ACOG practice bulletin No. 225: Management of pregnancies with substance use disorders. Obstetrics & Gynecology, 135(6), e274-e298. 7. Jones, R. K., & Jerman, J. (2017). Population group abortion rates and lifetime incidence of abortion: United States, 2008-2014. American Journal of Public Health, 107(12), 1904-1909. 8. Clark, A. (2017). Reproductive rights and the state: Getting the birth control, RU-486, and morning-after pills and the Gardasil vaccine to the US market. Law and Policy, 39(2), 139-165. 9. Upadhyay, U. D., Weitz, T. A., & Jones, R. K. (2013). Barriers to abortion and their consequences for patients traveling for services: Qualitative findings from two states. Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, 45(2), 84-91. 10. Roth, R. A. (2003). Making women pay: The hidden costs of fetal rights. Cornell University Press.

Relevant topics

• Pro Life (Abortion)
• Women's Rights
• Freedom of Speech
• Racial Profiling
• Homelessness
• Civil Disobedience
• Gun Violence
• Illegal Immigration

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Key Arguments From Both Sides of the Abortion Debate

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• Reproductive Rights
• The U. S. Government
• U.S. Foreign Policy
• U.S. Liberal Politics
• U.S. Conservative Politics
• Civil Liberties
• The Middle East
• Race Relations
• Immigration
• Crime & Punishment
• Canadian Government
• Understanding Types of Government
• B.A., English Language and Literature, Well College

Many points come up in the abortion debate . Here's a look at abortion from both sides : 10 arguments for abortion and 10 arguments against abortion, for a total of 20 statements that represent a range of topics as seen from both sides.

Pro-Life Arguments

• Since life begins at conception,   abortion is akin to murder as it is the act of taking human life. Abortion is in direct defiance of the commonly accepted idea of the sanctity of human life.
• No civilized society permits one human to intentionally harm or take the life of another human without punishment, and abortion is no different.
• Adoption is a viable alternative to abortion and accomplishes the same result. And with 1.5 million American families wanting to adopt a child, there is no such thing as an unwanted child.
• An abortion can result in medical complications later in life; the risk of ectopic pregnancies is increased if other factors such as smoking are present, the chance of a miscarriage increases in some cases,   and pelvic inflammatory disease also increases.  
• In the instance of rape and incest, taking certain drugs soon after the event can ensure that a woman will not get pregnant.   Abortion punishes the unborn child who committed no crime; instead, it is the perpetrator who should be punished.
• Abortion should not be used as another form of contraception.
• For women who demand complete control of their body, control should include preventing the risk of unwanted pregnancy through the responsible use of contraception or, if that is not possible, through abstinence .
• Many Americans who pay taxes are opposed to abortion, therefore it's morally wrong to use tax dollars to fund abortion.
• Those who choose abortions are often minors or young women with insufficient life experience to understand fully what they are doing. Many have lifelong regrets afterward.
• Abortion sometimes causes psychological pain and stress.  

Pro-Choice Arguments

• Nearly all abortions take place in the first trimester when a fetus is attached by the placenta and umbilical cord to the mother.   As such, its health is dependent on her health, and cannot be regarded as a separate entity as it cannot exist outside her womb.
• The concept of personhood is different from the concept of human life. Human life occurs at conception,   but fertilized eggs used for in vitro fertilization are also human lives and those not implanted are routinely thrown away. Is this murder, and if not, then how is abortion murder?
• Adoption is not an alternative to abortion because it remains the woman's choice whether or not to give her child up for adoption. Statistics show that very few women who give birth choose to give up their babies; less than 3% of White unmarried women and less than 2% of Black​ unmarried women.
• Abortion is a safe medical procedure. The vast majority of women who have an abortion do so in their first trimester.   Medical abortions have a very low risk of serious complications and do not affect a woman's health or future ability to become pregnant or give birth.  
• In the case of rape or incest, forcing a woman made pregnant by this violent act would cause further psychological harm to the victim.   Often a woman is too afraid to speak up or is unaware she is pregnant, thus the morning after pill is ineffective in these situations.
• Abortion is not used as a form of contraception . Pregnancy can occur even with contraceptive use. Few women who have abortions do not use any form of birth control, and that is due more to individual carelessness than to the availability of abortion.  
• The ability of a woman to have control of her body is critical to civil rights. Take away her reproductive choice and you step onto a slippery slope. If the government can force a woman to continue a pregnancy, what about forcing a woman to use contraception or undergo sterilization?
• Taxpayer dollars are used to enable poor women to access the same medical services as rich women, and abortion is one of these services. Funding abortion is no different from funding a war in the Mideast. For those who are opposed, the place to express outrage is in the voting booth.
• Teenagers who become mothers have grim prospects for the future. They are much more likely to leave school; receive inadequate prenatal care; or develop mental health problems.  
• Like any other difficult situation, abortion creates stress. Yet the American Psychological Association found that stress was greatest prior to an abortion and that there was no evidence of post-abortion syndrome.  

Additional References

• Alvarez, R. Michael, and John Brehm. " American Ambivalence Towards Abortion Policy: Development of a Heteroskedastic Probit Model of Competing Values ." American Journal of Political Science 39.4 (1995): 1055–82. Print.
• Armitage, Hannah. " Political Language, Uses and Abuses: How the Term 'Partial Birth' Changed the Abortion Debate in the United States ." Australasian Journal of American Studies 29.1 (2010): 15–35. Print.
• Gillette, Meg. " Modern American Abortion Narratives and the Century of Silence ." Twentieth Century Literature 58.4 (2012): 663–87. Print.
• Kumar, Anuradha. " Disgust, Stigma, and the Politics of Abortion ." Feminism & Psychology 28.4 (2018): 530–38. Print.
• Ziegler, Mary. " The Framing of a Right to Choose: Roe V. Wade and the Changing Debate on Abortion Law ." Law and History Review 27.2 (2009): 281–330. Print.

“ Life Begins at Fertilization with the Embryo's Conception .”  Princeton University , The Trustees of Princeton University.

“ Long-Term Risks of Surgical Abortion .”  GLOWM, doi:10.3843/GLOWM.10441

Patel, Sangita V, et al. “ Association between Pelvic Inflammatory Disease and Abortions .”  Indian Journal of Sexually Transmitted Diseases and AIDS , Medknow Publications, July 2010, doi:10.4103/2589-0557.75030

Raviele, Kathleen Mary. “ Levonorgestrel in Cases of Rape: How Does It Work? ”  The Linacre Quarterly , Maney Publishing, May 2014, doi:10.1179/2050854914Y.0000000017

Reardon, David C. “ The Abortion and Mental Health Controversy: A Comprehensive Literature Review of Common Ground Agreements, Disagreements, Actionable Recommendations, and Research Opportunities .”  SAGE Open Medicine , SAGE Publications, 29 Oct. 2018, doi:10.1177/2050312118807624

“ CDCs Abortion Surveillance System FAQs .” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 25 Nov. 2019.

Bixby Center for Reproductive Health. “ Complications of Surgical Abortion : Clinical Obstetrics and Gynecology .”  LWW , doi:10.1097/GRF.0b013e3181a2b756

" Sexual Violence: Prevalence, Dynamics and Consequences ." World Health Organizaion.

Homco, Juell B, et al. “ Reasons for Ineffective Pre-Pregnancy Contraception Use in Patients Seeking Abortion Services .”  Contraception , U.S. National Library of Medicine, Dec. 2009, doi:10.1016/j.contraception.2009.05.127

" Working With Pregnant & Parenting Teens Tip Sheet ." U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Major, Brenda, et al. " Abortion and Mental Health: Evaluating the Evidence ." American Psychological Association, doi:10.1037/a0017497

• The Pro-Life vs Pro-Choice Debate
• The 1969 Redstockings Abortion Speakout
• Abortion on Demand: A Second Wave Feminist Demand
• The Roe v. Wade Supreme Court Decision
• Abortion Facts and Statistics in the 21st Century
• Is Abortion Legal in Every State?
• Biography of Margaret Sanger
• Biography of Norma McCorvey, 'Roe' in the Roe v. Wade Case
• Pro-Choice Quotes
• Roe v. Wade
• Supreme Court Decisions and Women's Reproductive Rights
• 1970s Feminism Timeline
• 8 Major Issues Facing Women Today
• Understanding Why Abortion Is Legal in the United States
• Oppression and Women's History
• Analysis of 'Hills Like White Elephants' by Ernest Hemingway

Abortion Research Paper: Example, Outline, & Topics

The long-standing debate surrounding abortion has many opponents and advocates. Groups known as Pro-Choice and Pro-Life argue which approach is better, with no easy solution in sight. This ethical complexity is what makes abortion a popular topic for argumentative writing. As a student, you need to tackle it appropriately.

If this task sounds daunting, read this guide by our custom-writing experts to get excellent writing tips on handling this assignment. You will also find here:

• abortion topics and prompts,
• a research paper outline,
• a free essay sample.
• 🤔 Why Is Abortion a Good Topic?
• ☑️ Research Paper Prompts
• 👨‍⚕️ Abortion Research Questions
• 📚 Research Topics
• 🔬 Before You Start
• ✍️ Step-by-Step Writing Guide

📋 Abortion Research Paper Example

🔍 references, 🤔 why is abortion a good research topic.

Abortion studies are a vast area of research and analysis. It touches upon numerous domains of life, such as politics, medicine, religion, ethics, and human rights perspectives.

Like gun control or euthanasia, the abortion debate offers no evident answers to what kind of regulation is preferable. According to a recent survey, 61% of US adults are in favor of abortion , while 37% think it should be illegal. The arguments from both sides make sense, and there is no “yes-no” solution.

All this makes investigating the abortion debate a valuable exercise to hone your critical analysis skills. It will teach you to back up your claims with sound evidence while giving credit to counterarguments. Besides, expanding the body of abortion research is beneficial for the American community and women’s rights.

☑️ Abortion Research Paper Prompts

The first step to writing a successful paper is choosing an appropriate topic. Abortion is surrounded by numerous legal, medical, ethical, and social debates. That’s why the choice of ideas is virtually endless.

Don’t know where to start? Check out the prompts and creative titles below.

Should Abortion Be Legal: Research Paper Prompt 

You can approach this question from several perspectives. For example, propose a new legal framework for regulating eligibility for abortion. Some states allow the procedure under certain circumstances, such as a threat to a woman’s health. Should it be made legal in less extreme situations, too?

Anti-Abortion Research Paper Prompt

The legal status of abortions is still disputed in many countries. The procedure’s most ardent opponents are Catholic religious groups. In an anti-abortion paper, you may list ethical or faith-based claims. Focus on the right-to-life arguments and give scientific evidence regarding embryo’s rights.

Abortion and Embryonic Stem Cell Research Prompt   

Stem cell research is a dubious issue that faces strong opposition from ethical and religious activists. Here are some great ideas for an essay on this topic:

• Start by explaining what stem cells are.
• Outline the arguments for and against their use in research.
• Link this discussion to the status of abortion.

Abortion Law Research Paper Prompt

If you get an abortion-related assignment in your Legal Studies class, it’s better to take a legislative approach to this issue. Here’s what you can do:

• Study the evolution of abortion laws in the US or other countries.
• Pinpoint legal gaps.
• Focus on the laws’ strengths and weaknesses.

Abortion Breast Cancer Research Prompt

Increasing research evidence shows the link between abortion and breast cancer development . Find scholarly articles proving or refuting this idea and formulate a strong argument on this subject. Argue it with credible external evidence.

Abortion Ethics Research Paper Prompt 

Here, you can focus on the significance of the discussion’s ethical dimension. People who are against abortion often cite the ethics of killing an embryo. You can discuss this issue by quoting famous thinkers and the latest medical research. Be sure to support your argument with sound evidence.

👨‍⚕️ Questions about Abortion for Research Paper

• How does technology reframe the abortion debate?
• Is there new ethics of abortion in the 21 st century?
• How did the abortion debate progress before the Roe v. Wade decision?
• How is the abortion debate currently being shaped on social media?
• How do abortion rights advocates conceptualize the meaning of life ?
• Can the abortion debate be called a culture war?
• What are women’s constitutional abortion rights?
• How does abortion reshape the concept of a person?
• How does the abortion debate fit in the post-Socialist transition framework of the European community?
• Where does the abortion debate stand in the politics of sexuality?

📚 Abortion Topics for Research Paper

• The changing legal rhetoric of abortion in the US.
• Constructing abortion as a legal problem.
• Regendering of the US’ abortion problem.
• Evolution of public attitudes to abortion in the US.
• Choice vs. coercion in the abortion debate.
• Abortion and sin in Catholicism.
• Artificial wombs as an innovative solution to the abortion debate.
• Religious belief vs. reason in the abortion debate.
• Introduction of pregnant women’s perspectives into the abortion debate: dealing with fetal abnormalities.
• The role of ultrasound images in the evolution of women’s abortion intentions.

🔬 Research Papers on Abortions: Before You Start

Before discussing how to write an abortion paper, let’s focus on the pre-writing steps necessary for a stellar work. Here are the main points to consider.

Abortion Research Design 

Before you start exploring your topic, you need to choose between a qualitative and quantitative research design:

💬 Qualitative studies focus on words and present the attitudes and subjective meanings assigned to the concept of abortion by respondents.

🧪 Quantitative studies , in turn, focus on numbers and statistics. They analyze objective evidence and avoid subjective interpretations.  

Pick a research design based on your research skills and the data you’re planning to analyze:

• If you plan to gain insight into people’s opinions, attitudes, and life experiences related to abortion, it’s better to go for an interview and qualitative analysis.
• If you have a survey and want to focus on descriptive statistics, it’s better to stick to quantitative methods .

Abortion Research Paper Outline Format

Next, it’s time to choose the format of your paper’s outline. As a rule, students use one of the 3 approaches:

You can learn more about these formats from our article on how to write an outline .

Choosing Headings & Subheadings

A strong title can save your paper, while a poor one can immediately kill the readers’ interest. That’s why we recommend you not to underestimate the importance of formulating an attention-grabbing, exciting heading for your text.

Here are our best tips to make your title and subheadings effective:

• A good title needs to be brief. It’s up to 5 words, as a rule. Subheadings can be longer, as they give a more extended explanation of the content.
• Don’t be redundant. Make sure the subheadings are not duplicating each other.
• Mind the format. For instance, if your paper is in the APA format, you need to use proper font size and indentation. No numbering of headings and subheadings is necessary as in the outline. Ensure the reader understands the hierarchy with the help of heading level distinctions.

Components of an Effective Outline

According to academic writing conventions, a good outline should follow 4 essential principles:

• Parallelism . All components of your outline need to have a similar grammatical structure. For example, if you choose infinitives to denote actions, stick to them and don’t mix them with nouns and gerunds.
• Coordination . Divide your work into chunks with equal importance. This way, you will allocate as much weight to one point as to all the others. Your outline’s sections of similar hierarchy should have equal significance.
• Subordination . The subheadings contained within one heading of a higher order should all be connected to the paper’s title.
• Division . The minimum number of subheadings in each outline heading should be 2. If you have only one point under a heading, it’s worth adding another one.

Use this list of principles as a cheat sheet while creating your outline, and you’re sure to end up with well-organized and structured research!

Abortion Research Paper Outline Example

To recap and illustrate everything we’ve just discussed, let’s have a look at this sample abortion outline. We’ve made it in the decimal format following all effective outlining principles—check it out!

• History of abortion laws in the USA.
• Problem: recent legal changes challenge Roe vs. Wade .
• Thesis statement: the right to abortion should be preserved as a constitutional right
• The fundamental human right to decide what to do with their body.
• Legal abortions are safer.
• Fetuses don’t feel pain at the early stages of development.
• Abortion is murder.
• Fetuses are unborn people who feel pain at later stages.
• Abortion causes lifelong psychological trauma for the woman.
• Roe vs. Wade is a pro-choice case.
• The constitutional right to privacy and bodily integrity.
• Conclusion.

✍️ Abortion Research Paper: How to Write

Now, let’s proceed to write the paper itself. We will cover all the steps, starting with introduction writing rules and ending with the body and conclusion essentials.

Abortion Introduction: Research Paper Tips  

When you begin writing an abortion paper, it’s vital to introduce the reader to the debate and key terminology. Start by describing a broader issue and steadily narrow the argument to the scope of your paper. The intro typically contains the key figures or facts that would show your topic’s significance.

For example, suppose you plan to discuss the ethical side of abortion. In this case, it’s better to structure the paper like this:

• Start by outlining the issue of abortion as a whole.
• Introduce the arguments of pro-choice advocates, saying that this side of the debate focuses on the woman’s right to remove the fetus from her body or leave it.
• Cite the latest research evidence about fetuses as living organisms, proceeding to debate abortion ethics.
• End your introduction with a concise thesis statement .

Thesis on Abortion for a Research Paper

The final part of your introduction is a thesis—a single claim that formulates your paper’s main idea. Experienced readers and college professors often focus on the thesis statement’s quality to decide whether the text is worth reading further. So, make sure you dedicate enough effort to formulate the abortion research paper thesis well!

Don’t know how to do it? These pro tips will surely help you write a great thesis:

Abortion Research Paper Body

Now, it’s time to proceed to the main body of your paper. It should expand on the main idea in more detail, explaining the details and weighing the evidence for and against your argument.

The secret of effective writing is to go paragraph by paragraph . Your essay’s body will have around 2-5 of them, and the quality of each one determines the value of the whole text.

Here are the 4 easy steps that can help you excel in writing the main part of your essay:

• Start each paragraph with a topic sentence. It functions as a mini-thesis statement and communicates the paragraph’s main idea.
• Then, expand it with additional facts and evidence. It’s better to back that information with external sources, showing that it’s not your guesswork. Make sure you properly analyze the citations and show how they fit into your broader research.
• A paragraph should end with a concise wrap-up. Write a concluding sentence restating the topic sentence or a transition linking to the next section.

Research Papers on Abortions: Conclusion

The conclusion of an abortion paper also plays a major role in the overall impression that your paper will produce. So, how do you make it interesting?

Instead of simply restating the thesis and enumerating your points, it’s better to do the following:

• Focus on the broader implications of the issue you’ve just discussed.
• Mention your study’s limitations and point out some directions for further research.
• It’s also a good idea to include a call to action , which can help create a sense of urgency in the readers.

Abortion Articles for Research Paper & Other Sources

Every research paper ends with “works cited” or a reference page enumerating the sources used for the assignment. A rule of thumb is to cite credible, authoritative publications from governmental organizations and NGOs and academic articles from peer-reviewed journals. These sources will make your research more competent and professional, supporting your viewpoint with objective scientific information.

Here are some databases that can supply top-quality data to back the abortion-related claims in a research paper:

Feel free to check these databases for studies related to your subject. It’s best to conduct preliminary research to see whether your topic has enough supporting evidence. Also, make sure there are plenty of new studies to back your arguments! Abortion is a fast-changing field of research, so it’s best only to use publications no more than 5 years old.

To learn more about credible research sources, check out our guide on choosing reliable websites .

We’ve taught you all you need to write a well-researched and thoughtful abortion paper. Finally, we want to give you an example of an essay on the topic “ Should Abortion Rights Be Preserved? ” Check it out to gain inspiration.

Now you know all the details of abortion paper writing. Use our tips to choose a topic, develop sound arguments, and impress your professor with a stellar piece on this debatable subject!

❓ Abortion Research Paper FAQs

• First, you need to pick a debatable topic about abortion and develop a thesis statement on that subject.
• Next, choose the arguments to support your claim and use external evidence to back them up.
• End the paper with a concise wrap-up.
• Begin your introduction with a catchy fact or shocking statistics on the issue of abortion.
• Ask a rhetorical question to boost your readers’ interest.
• Cite a famous person’s words about the pros and cons of legal abortion.

To compose a strong opening for your abortion essay, make sure to provide some background and context for further discussion. Explain why the debate about abortions is so acute and what the roots of the problem are.

There are many interesting topics related to abortion, spanning the areas of sociology, ethics, and medicine. You can focus on the progression of the abortion debate along with civil rights or discuss abortion from a feminist perspective.

You can choose between qualitative and quantitative approaches for your abortion research. Hold a survey among women and report the findings of your qualitative study in a short report. Or, you can measure factual information in numbers and conduct quantitative research.

• The Ultimate Guide to Writing a Research Paper: Grammarly
• Scholarly Articles on Abortion: Gale
• Unintended Pregnancy and Abortion Worldwide: Guttmacher Institute
• Why Abortion Should Be Legal: News 24
• Pro and Con: Abortion: Britannica
• Organizing Academic Research Papers: The Introduction: Sacred Heart University
• How to Write a Thesis Statement for a Research Paper: Steps and Examples: Research.com
• Abortion: American Psychological Association
• Writing a Research Paper: University of Wisconsin-Madison
• Writing a Research Paper: Purdue University
• A Process Approach to Writing Research Papers: University of California, Berkeley
• What Is Qualitative vs. Quantitative Study?: Grand Canyon University
• Decimal Outlines: Texas A&M University
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Abortion Essay Example

05 January, 2020

11 minutes read

Author:  Elizabeth Brown

Composing essays is a must during your college studies. Sometimes, you might get a topic that you aren’t fully aware of. Or, you can fail to grasp the idea of what a particular essay topic requires you to reveal in your essay. An abortion essay, for example, has become one of the very on-going issues these days. Professors believe that elaborating an essay on such a topic can help a student learn how to develop appropriate arguments and ideas, even in the most sensitive essays. If you experience any difficulty with the abortion essay writing, you just need to take a few points into account. Regardless of your title, which can be either why abortion should be supported or why abortion should be illegal essay, you can master your writing just by acknowledging several essential facts about it.

Abortion Essay: Definitions, Goals & Topics

An abortion argumentative essay reveals the arguments for or against pregnancy termination. The main peculiarity of such an essay is that one can write it from different points of view. While one may strongly feel like composing an abortion arguments essay and advancing their positioning in terms of healthcare and research, others may think of this essay in terms of psychology and sociology. Regardless of the stance, it is necessary to carry out some preliminary research and make sure you operate on both your arguments and data accurately. 

Abortion essays require the essay writer to stay tolerant and open-minded. The topic, the selection of arguments, vocabulary – all of these indicators should not offend people who are sensitive to the outlined topic. 

All in all, the ultimate goal of an argumentative essay on abortion is to present the topic and provide arguments for and against it. It is likewise essential to give an insight into the subject, reveal its current state, and include most recent findings. 

Abortion Essay Titles 

When composing a title for an abortion essay, the first critical thing to keep in mind is transparency. The title should not create confusion or offend the reader. To select a title you would like to develop in your essay, decide whether you know why abortion is wrong essay, or if you favor supporting the topic. Here are some of the topics that will be easy to elaborate on in your essay about abortion:

• Reasons why women in underdeveloped countries are inclined to abortions
• Potential health hazard as a consequence of abortion
• How different countries approach abortions 
• The reasons why calling abortion murder is inappropriate
• Depriving a woman of the right to make an abortion is equal to depriving a woman of her freedom

Abortion Essay Structure  

As you have already learned, a classical essay comprises three parts: an introduction, several body paragraphs (3-5), and concluding remarks. The abortion essay isn’t an exception. But a structure of an abortion essay should be very specific as it contains several fundamental points that differ from other essay types. 

Introduction 

First, you need to define abortion as soon as you start writing an abortion essay. Even though almost everyone in the world knows what abortion is, it is essential to state its interpretation. Later, you can mention recent findings or events that fairly make an abortion a topic of heated debate. At the end of an introduction, your primary task is to demonstrate your attitude to the topic. Namely, you need to write a short thesis statement that will mention your opinion. For instance, a thesis statement can be: “Should society decide for women what to do with their lives and bodies?”. 

If you decide to support abortion in the essay, you may write the body part in the following way: 2-3 paragraphs supporting abortion + one counter-argument against abortion. Remember to provide arguments and support them, not just admit that abortion is good or bad. 

Conclusion 

When writing a conclusion, briefly summarize everything you mentioned in the text. You should come back to the thesis you mentioned in the introduction while writing it. Don’t forget to mention your own vision and attitude to a problem. 

Best Tips For Writing Abortion Essay 

Research comes first.

First of all, explore what is already said and written on the topic of abortions. Namely, don’t just read what people say and don’t make conclusions based on what image abortion has in the media. Instead, you may refer to recent research, speeches, and scientific papers by people whose findings are objective and not based on their subjective, emotional perception. Afterward, try to figure out what your attitude on the topic of abortions is. Are you an opponent of the topic, or would you rather support it? 

Pay attention to introduction

An introduction is the most fundamental part of the whole paper. If writing an introduction seems to be too complicated, just refer to scientific papers. Find an attention-grabbing statement and feel free to use it in your paper. If possible, try to paraphrase it. 

Think of the implications

Suppose you decided to write an essay as an opponent of abortions. Think of some possible implications that termination of pregnancy may have. Also, consider the hazard of continuing an unwanted pregnancy. Doing so is essential if you want to strengthen your arguments. 

Be flexible

Since such a topic might be extremely sensitive, it is vital not to be critical. It isn’t a good idea to get emotional or, what is worse, judgemental in your paper. Demonstrate that even though you support a particular argument, you don’t exclude that the opposite argument may also hold true. 

Abortion Essay Examples  

Abortion implies a termination of pregnancy by removing the embryo from a woman’s uterus prior to its birth. Uncountable controversies and criticism have increasingly surrounded the topic of abortion. Even though most developed countries officially carry out a lot of abortions annually, this medical procedure is actively discussed in many countries. Today, a lot of people believe that pregnancies are terminated by women who are either underaged, poor, or promiscuous. A woman who terminates her pregnancy can also be mature, having kids already, married, happy, and wealthy. Women make this step due to multiple reasons. Should society take control over a female body and decide her and her kid’s fate, and does the prohibition of abortion indeed decrease the abortion rate?

Official prohibition of abortions isn’t likely to reduce the abortion rate. For example, gambling and prostitution have long ago been prohibited in many countries in the world. However, this doesn’t mean that the people don’t gamble and that particular women don’t make their living by engaging in prostitution. The same concerns abortions. Once abortions are prohibited on a state level, women will be left with nothing but a decision to find a person who will carry out an abortion illegally. Or, what is worse, women might induce a miscarriage on their own if they can’t find a specialist. While a medical abortion procedure is a safe way to terminate  pregnancy, the latter is not. The risk of terminating pregnancy elsewhere or even at home might be incompatible with life. A lot of women die because of an unsuccessful pregnancy termination, which is way worse than a safe abortion in a medical institution.  

A lot of infants in the US die during the first years, months, if not days of their life. This happens as a result of an inborn pathology. Pathology is usually diagnosed during pregnancy screenings. Since such screenings are performed at an early pregnancy phase, a woman can terminate pregnancy once such pathology is identified. The fact of the matter is that many pathologies are incompatible with life too. For each mother, watching her kid dying and knowing that she cannot help, even if she had all the money in the world, is devastating. And that’s even worse for a suffering child. This leads to the conclusion that terminating a pregnancy is the most humane decision in such a situation. 

Prohibiting abortions often equals to forcing a woman to give birth to a child she does not want. The reasons for such an unwillingness are uncountable. First, a woman might not be mature enough, she might have kids already and no money to afford this child. Besides, her pregnancy might be a mistake not because of her fault. Indeed, 2 in 1000 women in the US are raped annually. Why should a woman be judged by her decision to terminate pregnancy which is a result of a sexual assault? Even in cases when no sexual assault took place, it is still irrelevant to shame a woman and criticize her for knowing what will be better for her. It is better to terminate a pregnancy than to give life to a child who will never be loved and secure and be an unsuitable fit for a woman at the same time. 

Terminating pregnancy, on the other hand, is not just depriving an unborn child of a right to live a life he or she deserves. Regardless of the woman’s motives, she imposes risks on her health. First of all, an abortion undermines a woman’s emotional and mental health. Additionally, it might set risks for her physical health. Indeed, she might reduce her chances of getting pregnant again or increase further pregnancy complications. Besides, 7 in every 100 women face a risk of having parts of a fetus remaining in her womb. 

Overall, abortion is solely a woman’s issue. It should not have anything to do with politics, religion, and disgrace. Bringing a child to the world is the responsibility of a woman who has enough grounds for making an appropriate decision. Although terminating a pregnancy might bring severe health risks, it erases the problems that might be even more severe, such as watching a child suffer and not being able  to give them a childhood they deserve. 

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Thesis: The Dynamic Landscape of Abortion Law in the United States

Editor's note:

Victoria Higginbotham defended her thesis titled “The Dynamic Landscape of Abortion Law in the United States” in May 2018 in front of committee members Jane Maienschein, Carolina Abboud, and Alexis Abboud, earning her a Bachelor’s degree from Barrett, the Honors College. https://repository.asu.edu/items/48020

The Dynamic Landscape of Abortion Law in the United States explores the ways abortion laws have changed in the United States over the course of US history. Abortion laws in the US have historically been fluid, changing in ways both big and small. Those changes can occur after advances in science, changes in understanding, or changes in public opinion. And there have been various periods in the history of the US where tolerance abortion waxed or waned, and common law reflected those attitudes.

Roe v. Wade was a pivotal moment in the history of abortion law that accomplished much in the way of broadening women's access to abortions. But Roe v. Wade was not the beginning or the end of the fight for abortion rights in the US. There were legal abortions prior to Roe v. Wade and illegal abortions after. Roe v. Wade granted that women had a constitutional right to have an abortion but the ruling left the boundaries of that right somewhat undefined and most courtroom battles over abortion laws are fought over where a woman's right to an abortion ends and a States right to regulate and protect fetal life begin.

Much change has occurred in abortion laws over the past 50 years, this thesis tracks those changes principally through Supreme Court Cases, such as United States v. Milan Vuitch, Roe v. Wade, and Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood among others. The landscape of abortion law in the US continues to shift today, as recently as 2017 with Plowman v. FMCH cases were being heard in courts that wrought subtle yet important changes in abortion law.

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Princeton Legal Journal

The First Amendment and the Abortion Rights Debate

Sofia Cipriano

4 Prin.L.J.F. 12

Following Dobbs v. Jackson ’s (2022) reversal of Roe v. Wade (1973) — and the subsequent revocation of federal abortion protection — activists and scholars have begun to reconsider how to best ground abortion rights in the Constitution. In the past year, numerous Jewish rights groups have attempted to overturn state abortion bans by arguing that abortion rights are protected by various state constitutions’ free exercise clauses — and, by extension, the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. While reframing the abortion rights debate as a question of religious freedom is undoubtedly strategic, the Free Exercise Clause is not the only place to locate abortion rights: the Establishment Clause also warrants further investigation. 

Roe anchored abortion rights in the right to privacy — an unenumerated right with a long history of legal recognition. In various cases spanning the past two centuries, t he Supreme Court located the right to privacy in the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments . Roe classified abortion as a fundamental right protected by strict scrutiny, meaning that states could only regulate abortion in the face of a “compelling government interest” and must narrowly tailor legislation to that end. As such, Roe ’s trimester framework prevented states from placing burdens on abortion access in the first few months of pregnancy. After the fetus crosses the viability line — the point at which the fetus can survive outside the womb  — states could pass laws regulating abortion, as the Court found that   “the potentiality of human life”  constitutes a “compelling” interest. Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (1992) later replaced strict scrutiny with the weaker “undue burden” standard, giving states greater leeway to restrict abortion access. Dobbs v. Jackson overturned both Roe and Casey , leaving abortion regulations up to individual states. 

While Roe constituted an essential step forward in terms of abortion rights, weaknesses in its argumentation made it more susceptible to attacks by skeptics of substantive due process. Roe argues that the unenumerated right to abortion is implied by the unenumerated right to privacy — a chain of logic which twice removes abortion rights from the Constitution’s language. Moreover, Roe’s trimester framework was unclear and flawed from the beginning, lacking substantial scientific rationale. As medicine becomes more and more advanced, the arbitrariness of the viability line has grown increasingly apparent.  

As abortion rights supporters have looked for alternative constitutional justifications for abortion rights, the First Amendment has become increasingly more visible. Certain religious groups — particularly Jewish groups — have argued that they have a right to abortion care. In Generation to Generation Inc v. Florida , a religious rights group argued that Florida’s abortion ban (HB 5) constituted a violation of the Florida State Constitution: “In Jewish law, abortion is required if necessary to protect the health, mental or physical well-being of the woman, or for many other reasons not permitted under the Act. As such, the Act prohibits Jewish women from practicing their faith free of government intrusion and thus violates their privacy rights and religious freedom.” Similar cases have arisen in Indiana and Texas. Absent constitutional protection of abortion rights, the Christian religious majorities in many states may unjustly impose their moral and ethical code on other groups, implying an unconstitutional religious hierarchy. 

Cases like Generation to Generation Inc v. Florida may also trigger heightened scrutiny status in higher courts; The Religious Freedom Restoration Act (1993) places strict scrutiny on cases which “burden any aspect of religious observance or practice.”

But framing the issue as one of Free Exercise does not interact with major objections to abortion rights. Anti-abortion advocates contend that abortion is tantamount to murder. An anti-abortion advocate may argue that just as religious rituals involving human sacrifice are illegal, so abortion ought to be illegal. Anti-abortion advocates may be able to argue that abortion bans hold up against strict scrutiny since “preserving potential life” constitutes a “compelling interest.”

The question of when life begins—which is fundamentally a moral and religious question—is both essential to the abortion debate and often ignored by left-leaning activists. For select Christian advocacy groups (as well as other anti-abortion groups) who believe that life begins at conception, abortion bans are a deeply moral issue. Abortion bans which operate under the logic that abortion is murder essentially legislate a definition of when life begins, which is problematic from a First Amendment perspective; the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment prevents the government from intervening in religious debates. While numerous legal thinkers have associated the abortion debate with the First Amendment, this argument has not been fully litigated. As an amicus brief filed in Dobbs by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Center for Inquiry, and American Atheists  points out, anti-abortion rhetoric is explicitly religious: “There is hardly a secular veil to the religious intent and positions of individuals, churches, and state actors in their attempts to limit access to abortion.” Justice Stevens located a similar issue with anti-abortion rhetoric in his concurring opinion in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989) , stating: “I am persuaded that the absence of any secular purpose for the legislative declarations that life begins at conception and that conception occurs at fertilization makes the relevant portion of the preamble invalid under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Federal Constitution.” Judges who justify their judicial decisions on abortion using similar rhetoric blur the line between church and state. 

Framing the abortion debate around religious freedom would thus address the two main categories of arguments made by anti-abortion activists: arguments centered around issues with substantive due process and moral objections to abortion. 

Conservatives may maintain, however, that legalizing abortion on the federal level is an Establishment Clause violation to begin with, since the government would essentially be imposing a federal position on abortion. Many anti-abortion advocates favor leaving abortion rights up to individual states. However, in the absence of recognized federal, constitutional protection of abortion rights, states will ban abortion. Protecting religious freedom of the individual is of the utmost importance  — the United States government must actively intervene in order to uphold the line between church and state. Protecting abortion rights would allow everyone in the United States to act in accordance with their own moral and religious perspectives on abortion. 

Reframing the abortion rights debate as a question of religious freedom is the most viable path forward. Anchoring abortion rights in the Establishment Clause would ensure Americans have the right to maintain their own personal and religious beliefs regarding the question of when life begins. In the short term, however, litigants could take advantage of Establishment Clauses in state constitutions. Yet, given the swing of the Court towards expanding religious freedom protections at the time of writing, Free Exercise arguments may prove better at securing citizens a right to an abortion. 

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Home > School, College, or Department > Honors > Honors Theses > 1183

University Honors Theses

An exploration of the wide-reaching effects of the repeal of roe v. wade on women's access to abortion.

Mitchell J. Foster , Portland State University Follow

First Advisor

Christopher Shortell

Date of Award

Spring 6-16-2022

Document Type

Degree name.

Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Political Science and University Honors

Political Science

Abortion -- Government policy -- United States -- History, Abortion services -- United States -- History, Reproductive rights -- United States, Civil rights -- United States

10.15760/honors.1223

Since 1973, the federal government, through the Supreme Court of the United States, has acted to protect, the rights of women in their ability to choose to have an abortion without excessive governmental restriction. This thesis analyzes how and why access to abortion will shift in the face of the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade (1973), likely to occur this June. This thesis begins with an in-depth description of how and why abortion became illegal, how and why abortion became legal, and how the opposition has developed against legal abortion. Through the last few decades, though especially in the last few years, most states have signed into law statutes that greatly limit a woman's access to abortion, and several have signed into law statutes that will act to ban abortion in nearly all cases if Roe is repealed. This thesis examines what precisely state law, as well as lasting precedents, put forth by the Supreme Court in other cases related to abortion, and the response of the other branches of the federal government to the issue of abortion will mean for a woman's access to abortion throughout the United States. I found, in the course of this project, that access to abortion will shift most substantially in states which do not, by constitutional interpretation or statute, protect one's fundamental right to acquire an abortion. This shift will, also, be felt most by impoverished persons, as these persons are less likely to be able to travel for abortions.

In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/37695

Recommended Citation

Foster, Mitchell J., "An Exploration of the Wide-Reaching Effects of The Repeal of Roe v. Wade on Women's Access to Abortion" (2022). University Honors Theses. Paper 1183. https://doi.org/10.15760/honors.1223

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Ross Douthat

The Case Against Abortion

By Ross Douthat

Opinion Columnist

A striking thing about the American abortion debate is how little abortion itself is actually debated. The sensitivity and intimacy of the issue, the mixed feelings of so many Americans, mean that most politicians and even many pundits really don’t like to talk about it.

The mental habits of polarization, the assumption that the other side is always acting with hidden motives or in bad faith, mean that accusations of hypocrisy or simple evil are more commonplace than direct engagement with the pro-choice or pro-life argument.

And the Supreme Court’s outsize role in abortion policy means that the most politically important arguments are carried on by lawyers arguing constitutional theory, at one remove from the real heart of the debate.

But with the court set this week to hear Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade, it seems worth letting the lawyers handle the meta-arguments and writing about the thing itself. So this essay will offer no political or constitutional analysis. It will simply try to state the pro-life case.

At the core of our legal system, you will find a promise that human beings should be protected from lethal violence. That promise is made in different ways by the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence; it’s there in English common law, the Ten Commandments and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We dispute how the promise should be enforced, what penalties should be involved if it is broken and what crimes might deprive someone of the right to life. But the existence of the basic right, and a fundamental duty not to kill, is pretty close to bedrock.

There is no way to seriously deny that abortion is a form of killing. At a less advanced stage of scientific understanding, it was possible to believe that the embryo or fetus was somehow inert or vegetative until so-called quickening, months into pregnancy. But we now know the embryo is not merely a cell with potential, like a sperm or ovum, or a constituent part of human tissue, like a skin cell. Rather, a distinct human organism comes into existence at conception, and every stage of your biological life, from infancy and childhood to middle age and beyond, is part of a single continuous process that began when you were just a zygote.

We know from embryology, in other words, not Scripture or philosophy, that abortion kills a unique member of the species Homo sapiens, an act that in almost every other context is forbidden by the law.

This means that the affirmative case for abortion rights is inherently exceptionalist, demanding a suspension of a principle that prevails in practically every other case. This does not automatically tell against it; exceptions as well as rules are part of law. But it means that there is a burden of proof on the pro-choice side to explain why in this case taking another human life is acceptable, indeed a protected right itself.

One way to clear this threshold would be to identify some quality that makes the unborn different in kind from other forms of human life — adult, infant, geriatric. You need an argument that acknowledges that the embryo is a distinct human organism but draws a credible distinction between human organisms and human persons , between the unborn lives you’ve excluded from the law’s protection and the rest of the human race.

In this kind of pro-choice argument and theory, personhood is often associated with some property that’s acquired well after conception: cognition, reason, self-awareness, the capacity to survive outside the womb. And a version of this idea, that human life is there in utero but human personhood develops later, fits intuitively with how many people react to a photo of an extremely early embryo ( It doesn’t look human, does it? ) — though less so to a second-trimester fetus, where the physical resemblance to a newborn is more palpable.

But the problem with this position is that it’s hard to identify exactly what property is supposed to do the work of excluding the unborn from the ranks of humans whom it is wrong to kill. If full personhood is somehow rooted in reasoning capacity or self-consciousness, then all manner of adult human beings lack it or lose it at some point or another in their lives. If the capacity for survival and self-direction is essential, then every infant would lack personhood — to say nothing of the premature babies who are unviable without extreme medical interventions but regarded, rightly, as no less human for all that.

At its most rigorous, the organism-but-not-person argument seeks to identify some stage of neurological development that supposedly marks personhood’s arrival — a transition equivalent in reverse to brain death at the end of life. But even setting aside the practical difficulties involved in identifying this point, we draw a legal line at brain death because it’s understood to be irreversible, the moment at which the human organism’s healthy function can never be restored. This is obviously not the case for an embryo on the cusp of higher brain functioning — and if you knew that a brain-dead but otherwise physically healthy person would spontaneously regain consciousness in two weeks, everyone would understand that the caregivers had an obligation to let those processes play out.

Or almost everyone, I should say. There are true rigorists who follow the logic of fetal nonpersonhood toward repugnant conclusions — for instance, that we ought to permit the euthanizing of severely disabled newborns, as the philosopher Peter Singer has argued. This is why abortion opponents have warned of a slippery slope from abortion to infanticide and involuntary euthanasia; as pure logic, the position that unborn human beings aren’t human persons can really tend that way.

But to their credit, only a small minority of abortion-rights supporters are willing to be so ruthlessly consistent. Instead, most people on the pro-choice side are content to leave their rules of personhood a little hazy, and combine them with the second potent argument for abortion rights: namely, that regardless of the precise moral status of unborn human organisms, they cannot enjoy a legal right to life because that would strip away too many rights from women.

A world without legal abortion, in this view, effectively consigns women to second-class citizenship — their ambitions limited, their privacy compromised, their bodies conscripted, their claims to full equality a lie. These kind of arguments often imply that birth is the most relevant milestone for defining legal personhood — not because of anything that happens to the child but because it’s the moment when its life ceases to impinge so dramatically on its mother.

There is a powerful case for some kind of feminism embedded in these claims. The question is whether that case requires abortion itself.

Certain goods that should be common to men and women cannot be achieved, it’s true, if the law simply declares the sexes equal without giving weight to the disproportionate burdens that pregnancy imposes on women. Justice requires redistributing those burdens, through means both traditional and modern — holding men legally and financially responsible for all the children that they father and providing stronger financial and social support for motherhood at every stage.

But does this kind of justice for women require legal indifference to the claims of the unborn? Is it really necessary to found equality for one group of human beings on legal violence toward another, entirely voiceless group?

We have a certain amount of practical evidence that suggests the answer is no. Consider, for instance, that between the early 1980s and the later 2010s the abortion rate in the United States fell by more than half . The reasons for this decline are disputed, but it seems reasonable to assume that it reflects a mix of cultural change, increased contraception use and the effects of anti-abortion legal strategies, which have made abortion somewhat less available in many states, as pro-choice advocates often lament.

If there were an integral and unavoidable relationship between abortion and female equality, you would expect these declines — fewer abortions, diminished abortion access — to track with a general female retreat from education and the workplace. But no such thing has happened: Whether measured by educational attainment, managerial and professional positions, breadwinner status or even political office holding, the status of women has risen in the same America where the pro-life movement has (modestly) gained ground.

Of course, it’s always possible that female advancement would have been even more rapid, the equality of the sexes more fully and perfectly established, if the pro-life movement did not exist. Certainly in the individual female life trajectory, having an abortion rather than a baby can offer economic and educational advantages.

On a collective level, though, it’s also possible that the default to abortion as the solution to an unplanned pregnancy actually discourages other adaptations that would make American life friendlier to women. As Erika Bachiochi wrote recently in National Review , if our society assumes that “abortion is what enables women to participate in the workplace,” then corporations may prefer the abortion default to more substantial accommodations like flexible work schedules and better pay for part-time jobs — relying on the logic of abortion rights, in other words, as a reason not to adapt to the realities of childbearing and motherhood.

At the very least, I think an honest look at the patterns of the past four decades reveals a multitude of different ways to offer women greater opportunities, a multitude of paths to equality and dignity — a multitude of ways to be a feminist, in other words, that do not require yoking its idealistic vision to hundreds of thousands of acts of violence every year.

It’s also true, though, that nothing in all that multitude of policies will lift the irreducible burden of childbearing, the biological realities that simply cannot be redistributed to fathers, governments or adoptive parents. And here, too, a portion of the pro-choice argument is correct: The unique nature of pregnancy means that there has to be some limit on what state or society asks of women and some zone of privacy where the legal system fears to tread.

This is one reason the wisest anti-abortion legislation — and yes, pro-life legislation is not always wise — criminalizes the provision of abortion by third parties, rather than prosecuting the women who seek one. It’s why anti-abortion laws are rightly deemed invasive and abusive when they lead to the investigation of suspicious-seeming miscarriages. It’s why the general principle of legal protection for human life in utero may or must understandably give way in extreme cases, extreme burdens: the conception by rape, the life-threatening pregnancy.

At the same time, though, the pro-choice stress on the burden of the ordinary pregnancy can become detached from the way that actual human beings experience the world. In a famous thought experiment, the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson once analogized an unplanned pregnancy to waking up with a famous violinist hooked up to your body, who will die if he’s disconnected before nine months have passed. It’s a vivid science-fiction image but one that only distantly resembles the actual thing that it describes — a new life that usually exists because of a freely chosen sexual encounter, a reproductive experience that if material circumstances were changed might be desired and celebrated, a “disconnection” of the new life that cannot happen without lethal violence and a victim who is not some adult stranger but the woman’s child.

One can accept pro-choice logic, then, insofar as it demands a sphere of female privacy and warns constantly against the potential for abuse, without following that logic all the way to a general right to abort an unborn human life. Indeed, this is how most people approach similar arguments in other contexts. In the name of privacy and civil liberties we impose limits on how the justice system polices and imprisons, and we may celebrate activists who try to curb that system’s manifest abuses. But we don’t (with, yes, some anarchist exceptions) believe that we should remove all legal protections for people’s property or lives.

That removal of protection would be unjust no matter what its consequences, but in reality we know that those consequences would include more crime, more violence and more death. And the anti-abortion side can give the same answer when it’s asked why we can’t be content with doing all the other things that may reduce abortion rates and leaving legal protection out of it: Because while legal restrictions aren’t sufficient to end abortion, there really are a lot of unborn human lives they might protect.

Consider that when the State of Texas put into effect this year a ban on most abortions after about six weeks, the state’s abortions immediately fell by half. I think the Texas law, which tries to evade the requirements of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey by using private lawsuits for enforcement, is vulnerable to obvious critiques and liable to be abused. It’s not a model I would ever cite for pro-life legislation.

But that immediate effect, that sharp drop in abortions, is why the pro-life movement makes legal protection its paramount goal.

According to researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, who surveyed the facilities that provide about 93 percent of all abortions in the state, there were 2,149 fewer legal abortions in Texas in the month the law went into effect than in the same month in 2020.

About half that number may end up still taking place, some estimates suggest, many of them in other states. But that still means that in a matter of months, more than a thousand human beings will exist as legal persons, rights-bearing Texans — despite still being helpless, unreasoning and utterly dependent — who would not have existed had this law not given them protection.

But, in fact, they exist already. They existed, at our mercy, all along.

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Home > Student Scholarship > THESES > 1033

Senior Theses and Projects

Abortion in america after roe: an examination of the impact of dobbs v. jackson women’s health organization on women’s reproductive health access.

Natalie Maria Caffrey Follow

Date of Award

Spring 5-12-2023

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Public Policy and Law

First Advisor

Professor Adrienne Fulco

Second Advisor

Professor Glenn Falk

This thesis will examine the limitations in access to abortion and other necessary reproductive healthcare in states that are hostile to abortion rights, as well as discuss the ongoing litigation within those states between pro-choice and pro-life advocates. After analyzing the legal landscape and the different abortion laws within these states, this thesis will focus on the practical consequences of Dobbs on women’s lives, with particular attention to its impact on women of color and poor women in states with the most restrictive laws. The effect of these restrictive laws on poor women will be felt disproportionately due to their lack of ability to travel to obtain care from other states that might offer abortion services. And even if these women find a way to obtain access to abortions, there is now the real possibility of criminal prosecution for those who seek or assist women who obtain abortions post- Dobbs . To compound the problem, the Court made clear in Dobbs that its decision to revisit the privacy rights issue signals the possibility of new limitations on protections previously taken for granted in the areas of In vitro fertilization, birth control, emergency contraception, and other civil rights such as gay marriage. Finally, this thesis will examine the political and legal efforts of liberal states, private companies, and grassroots organizations attempting to mitigate Dobbs ’s effects. These pro-choice actors have, to some extent, joined forces to protect access for women in the United States through protective legislation and expanding access in all facets of reproductive healthcare, particularly for minority women who will be disproportionately affected by abortion bans in conservative states. The current efforts to mitigate the legal and medical implications of Dobbs will determine the future of women’s rights in America, not only regarding abortion but more broadly in terms of adequate reproductive care access.

Senior thesis completed at Trinity College, Hartford CT for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Public Policy & Law.

Recommended Citation

Caffrey, Natalie Maria, "Abortion in America After Roe: An Examination of the Impact of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization on Women’s Reproductive Health Access". Senior Theses, Trinity College, Hartford, CT 2023. Trinity College Digital Repository, https://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/theses/1033

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• America’s Abortion Quandary

1. Americans’ views on whether, and in what circumstances, abortion should be legal

Table of contents.

• Abortion at various stages of pregnancy 
• Abortion and circumstances of pregnancy 
• Parental notification for minors seeking abortion
• Penalties for abortions performed illegally 
• Public views of what would change the number of abortions in the U.S.
• A majority of Americans say women should have more say in setting abortion policy in the U.S.
• How do certain arguments about abortion resonate with Americans?
• In their own words: How Americans feel about abortion 
• Personal connections to abortion 
• Religion’s impact on views about abortion
• Acknowledgments
• The American Trends Panel survey methodology

As the long-running debate over abortion reaches another  key moment at the Supreme Court  and in  state legislatures across the country , a majority of U.S. adults continue to say that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. About six-in-ten Americans (61%) say abortion should be legal in “all” or “most” cases, while 37% think abortion should be  illegal  in all or most cases. These views have changed little over the past several years: In 2019, for example, 61% of adults said abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while 38% said it should be illegal in all or most cases.    Most respondents in the new survey took one of the middle options when first asked about their views on abortion, saying either that abortion should be legal in  most  cases (36%) or illegal in  most  cases (27%). 

Respondents who said abortion should either be legal in  all  cases or illegal in  all  cases received a follow-up question asking whether there should be any exceptions to such laws. Overall, 25% of adults initially said abortion should be legal in all cases, but about a quarter of this group (6% of all U.S. adults) went on to say that there should be some exceptions when abortion should be against the law.

One-in-ten adults initially answered that abortion should be illegal in all cases, but about one-in-five of these respondents (2% of all U.S. adults) followed up by saying that there are some exceptions when abortion should be permitted. 

Altogether, seven-in-ten Americans say abortion should be legal in some cases and illegal in others, including 42% who say abortion should be generally legal, but with some exceptions, and 29% who say it should be generally illegal, except in certain cases. Much smaller shares take absolutist views when it comes to the legality of abortion in the U.S., maintaining that abortion should be legal in all cases with no exceptions (19%) or illegal in all circumstances (8%). 

There is a modest gender gap in views of whether abortion should be legal, with women slightly more likely than men to say abortion should be legal in all cases or in all cases but with some exceptions (63% vs. 58%). 

Younger adults are considerably more likely than older adults to say abortion should be legal: Three-quarters of adults under 30 (74%) say abortion should be generally legal, including 30% who say it should be legal in all cases without exception. 

But there is an even larger gap in views toward abortion by partisanship: 80% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, compared with 38% of Republicans and GOP leaners.  Previous Center research  has shown this gap widening over the past 15 years. 

Still, while partisans diverge in views of whether abortion should mostly be legal or illegal, most Democrats and Republicans do not view abortion in absolutist terms. Just 13% of Republicans say abortion should be against the law in all cases without exception; 47% say it should be illegal with some exceptions. And while three-in-ten Democrats say abortion should be permitted in all circumstances, half say it should mostly be legal – but with some exceptions. 

There also are sizable divisions within both partisan coalitions by ideology. For instance, while a majority of moderate and liberal Republicans say abortion should mostly be legal (60%), just 27% of conservative Republicans say the same. Among Democrats, self-described liberals are twice as apt as moderates and conservatives to say abortion should be legal in all cases without exception (42% vs. 20%).

Regardless of partisan affiliation, adults who say they personally know someone who has had an abortion – such as a friend, relative or themselves – are more likely to say abortion should be legal than those who say they do not know anyone who had an abortion.

Views toward abortion also vary considerably by religious affiliation – specifically among large Christian subgroups and religiously unaffiliated Americans. 

For example, roughly three-quarters of White evangelical Protestants say abortion should be illegal in all or most cases. This is far higher than the share of White non-evangelical Protestants (38%) or Black Protestants (28%) who say the same. 

Despite  Catholic teaching on abortion , a slim majority of U.S. Catholics (56%) say abortion should be legal. This includes 13% who say it should be legal in all cases without exception, and 43% who say it should be legal, but with some exceptions. 

Compared with Christians, religiously unaffiliated adults are far more likely to say abortion should be legal overall – and significantly more inclined to say it should be legal in all cases without exception. Within this group, atheists stand out: 97% say abortion should be legal, including 53% who say it should be legal in all cases without exception. Agnostics and those who describe their religion as “nothing in particular” also overwhelmingly say that abortion should be legal, but they are more likely than atheists to say there are some circumstances when abortion should be against the law.

Although the survey was conducted among Americans of many religious backgrounds, including Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus, it did not obtain enough respondents from non-Christian groups to report separately on their responses.

As a  growing number of states  debate legislation to restrict abortion – often after a certain stage of pregnancy – Americans express complex views about when   abortion should generally be legal and when it should be against the law. Overall, a majority of adults (56%) say that how long a woman has been pregnant should matter in determining when abortion should be legal, while far fewer (14%) say that this should  not  be a factor. An additional one-quarter of the public says that abortion should either be legal (19%) or illegal (8%) in all circumstances without exception; these respondents did not receive this question.

Among men and women, Republicans and Democrats, and Christians and religious “nones” who do not take absolutist positions about abortion on either side of the debate, the prevailing view is that the stage of the pregnancy should be a factor in determining whether abortion should be legal.

Americans broadly are more likely to favor restrictions on abortion later in pregnancy than earlier in pregnancy. Many adults also say the legality of abortion depends on other factors at every stage of pregnancy. 

Overall, a plurality of adults (44%) say that abortion should be legal six weeks into a pregnancy, which is about when cardiac activity (sometimes called a fetal heartbeat) may be detected and before many women know they are pregnant; this includes 19% of adults who say abortion should be legal in all cases without exception, as well as 25% of adults who say it should be legal at that point in a pregnancy. An additional 7% say abortion generally should be legal in most cases, but that the stage of the pregnancy should not matter in determining legality. 1

One-in-five Americans (21%) say abortion should be  illegal  at six weeks. This includes 8% of adults who say abortion should be illegal in all cases without exception as well as 12% of adults who say that abortion should be illegal at this point. Additionally, 6% say abortion should be illegal in most cases and how long a woman has been pregnant should not matter in determining abortion’s legality. Nearly one-in-five respondents, when asked whether abortion should be legal six weeks into a pregnancy, say “it depends.” 

Americans are more divided about what should be permitted 14 weeks into a pregnancy – roughly at the end of the first trimester – although still, more people say abortion should be legal at this stage (34%) than illegal (27%), and about one-in-five say “it depends.”

Fewer adults say abortion should be legal 24 weeks into a pregnancy – about when a healthy fetus could survive outside the womb with medical care. At this stage, 22% of adults say abortion should be legal, while nearly twice as many (43%) say it should be  illegal . Again, about one-in-five adults (18%) say whether abortion should be legal at 24 weeks depends on other factors. 

Respondents who said that abortion should be illegal 24 weeks into a pregnancy or that “it depends” were asked a follow-up question about whether abortion at that point should be legal if the pregnant woman’s life is in danger or the baby would be born with severe disabilities. Most who received this question say abortion in these circumstances should be legal (54%) or that it depends on other factors (40%). Just 4% of this group maintained that abortion should be illegal in this case.

This pattern in views of abortion – whereby more favor greater restrictions on abortion as a pregnancy progresses – is evident across a variety of demographic and political groups. 

Democrats are far more likely than Republicans to say that abortion should be legal at each of the three stages of pregnancy asked about on the survey. For example, while 26% of Republicans say abortion should be legal at six weeks of pregnancy, more than twice as many Democrats say the same (61%). Similarly, while about a third of Democrats say abortion should be legal at 24 weeks of pregnancy, just 8% of Republicans say the same. 

However, neither Republicans nor Democrats uniformly express absolutist views about abortion throughout a pregnancy. Republicans are divided on abortion at six weeks: Roughly a quarter say it should be legal (26%), while a similar share say it depends (24%). A third say it should be illegal. 

Democrats are divided about whether abortion should be legal or illegal at 24 weeks, with 34% saying it should be legal, 29% saying it should be illegal, and 21% saying it depends. 

There also is considerable division among each partisan group by ideology. At six weeks of pregnancy, just one-in-five conservative Republicans (19%) say that abortion should be legal; moderate and liberal Republicans are twice as likely as their conservative counterparts to say this (39%). 

At the same time, about half of liberal Democrats (48%) say abortion at 24 weeks should be legal, while 17% say it should be illegal. Among conservative and moderate Democrats, the pattern is reversed: A plurality (39%) say abortion at this stage should be illegal, while 24% say it should be legal. 

Christian adults are far less likely than religiously unaffiliated Americans to say abortion should be legal at each stage of pregnancy.  

Among Protestants, White evangelicals stand out for their opposition to abortion. At six weeks of pregnancy, for example, 44% say abortion should be illegal, compared with 17% of White non-evangelical Protestants and 15% of Black Protestants. This pattern also is evident at 14 and 24 weeks of pregnancy, when half or more of White evangelicals say abortion should be illegal.

At six weeks, a plurality of Catholics (41%) say abortion should be legal, while smaller shares say it depends or it should be illegal. But by 24 weeks, about half of Catholics (49%) say abortion should be illegal. 

Among adults who are religiously unaffiliated, atheists stand out for their views. They are the only group in which a sizable majority says abortion should be  legal  at each point in a pregnancy. Even at 24 weeks, 62% of self-described atheists say abortion should be legal, compared with smaller shares of agnostics (43%) and those who say their religion is “nothing in particular” (31%). 

As is the case with adults overall, most religiously affiliated and religiously unaffiliated adults who originally say that abortion should be illegal or “it depends” at 24 weeks go on to say either it should be legal or it depends if the pregnant woman’s life is in danger or the baby would be born with severe disabilities. Few (4% and 5%, respectively) say abortion should be illegal at 24 weeks in these situations.

The stage of the pregnancy is not the only factor that shapes people’s views of when abortion should be legal. Sizable majorities of U.S. adults say that abortion should be legal if the pregnancy threatens the life or health of the pregnant woman (73%) or if pregnancy is the result of rape (69%). 

There is less consensus when it comes to circumstances in which a baby may be born with severe disabilities or health problems: 53% of Americans overall say abortion should be legal in such circumstances, including 19% who say abortion should be legal in all cases and 35% who say there are some situations where abortions should be illegal, but that it should be legal in this specific type of case. A quarter of adults say “it depends” in this situation, and about one-in-five say it should be illegal (10% who say illegal in this specific circumstance and 8% who say illegal in all circumstances). 

There are sizable divides between and among partisans when it comes to views of abortion in these situations. Overall, Republicans are less likely than Democrats to say abortion should be legal in each of the three circumstances outlined in the survey. However, both partisan groups are less likely to say abortion should be legal when the baby may be born with severe disabilities or health problems than when the woman’s life is in danger or the pregnancy is the result of rape. 

Just as there are wide gaps among Republicans by ideology on whether how long a woman has been pregnant should be a factor in determining abortion’s legality, there are large gaps when it comes to circumstances in which abortions should be legal. For example, while a clear majority of moderate and liberal Republicans (71%) say abortion should be permitted when the pregnancy is the result of rape, conservative Republicans are more divided. About half (48%) say it should be legal in this situation, while 29% say it should be illegal and 21% say it depends.

The ideological gaps among Democrats are slightly less pronounced. Most Democrats say abortion should be legal in each of the three circumstances – just to varying degrees. While 77% of liberal Democrats say abortion should be legal if a baby will be born with severe disabilities or health problems, for example, a smaller majority of conservative and moderate Democrats (60%) say the same. 

White evangelical Protestants again stand out for their views on abortion in various circumstances; they are far less likely than White non-evangelical or Black Protestants to say abortion should be legal across each of the three circumstances described in the survey. 

While about half of White evangelical Protestants (51%) say abortion should be legal if a pregnancy threatens the woman’s life or health, clear majorities of other Protestant groups and Catholics say this should be the case. The same pattern holds in views of whether abortion should be legal if the pregnancy is the result of rape. Most White non-evangelical Protestants (75%), Black Protestants (71%) and Catholics (66%) say abortion should be permitted in this instance, while White evangelicals are more divided: 40% say it should be legal, while 34% say it should be  illegal  and about a quarter say it depends. 

Mirroring the pattern seen among adults overall, opinions are more varied about a situation where a baby might be born with severe disabilities or health issues. For instance, half of Catholics say abortion should be legal in such cases, while 21% say it should be illegal and 27% say it depends on the situation. 

Most religiously unaffiliated adults – including overwhelming majorities of self-described atheists – say abortion should be legal in each of the three circumstances. 

Seven-in-ten U.S. adults say that doctors or other health care providers should be required to notify a parent or legal guardian if the pregnant woman seeking an abortion is under 18, while 28% say they should not be required to do so.  

Women are slightly less likely than men to say this should be a requirement (67% vs. 74%). And younger adults are far less likely than those who are older to say a parent or guardian should be notified before a doctor performs an abortion on a pregnant woman who is under 18. In fact, about half of adults ages 18 to 24 (53%) say a doctor should  not  be required to notify a parent. By contrast, 64% of adults ages 25 to 29 say doctors  should  be required to notify parents of minors seeking an abortion, as do 68% of adults ages 30 to 49 and 78% of those 50 and older. 

A large majority of Republicans (85%) say that a doctor should be required to notify the parents of a minor before an abortion, though conservative Republicans are somewhat more likely than moderate and liberal Republicans to take this position (90% vs. 77%). 

The ideological divide is even more pronounced among Democrats. Overall, a slim majority of Democrats (57%) say a parent should be notified in this circumstance, but while 72% of conservative and moderate Democrats hold this view, just 39% of liberal Democrats agree. 

By and large, most Protestant (81%) and Catholic (78%) adults say doctors should be required to notify parents of minors before an abortion. But religiously unaffiliated Americans are more divided. Majorities of both atheists (71%) and agnostics (58%) say doctors should  not  be required to notify parents of minors seeking an abortion, while six-in-ten of those who describe their religion as “nothing in particular” say such notification should be required. 

Americans are divided over who should be penalized – and what that penalty should be – in a situation where an abortion occurs illegally. 

Overall, a 60% majority of adults say that if a doctor or provider performs an abortion in a situation where it is illegal, they should face a penalty. But there is less agreement when it comes to others who may have been involved in the procedure. 

While about half of the public (47%) says a woman who has an illegal abortion should face a penalty, a nearly identical share (50%) says she should not. And adults are more likely to say people who help find and schedule or pay for an abortion in a situation where it is illegal should  not  face a penalty than they are to say they should.

Views about penalties are closely correlated with overall attitudes about whether abortion should be legal or illegal. For example, just 20% of adults who say abortion should be legal in all cases without exception think doctors or providers should face a penalty if an abortion were carried out in a situation where it was illegal. This compares with 91% of those who think abortion should be illegal in all cases without exceptions. Still, regardless of how they feel about whether abortion should be legal or not, Americans are more likely to say a doctor or provider should face a penalty compared with others involved in the procedure. 

Among those who say medical providers and/or women should face penalties for illegal abortions, there is no consensus about whether they should get jail time or a less severe punishment. Among U.S. adults overall, 14% say women should serve jail time if they have an abortion in a situation where it is illegal, while 16% say they should receive a fine or community service and 17% say they are not sure what the penalty should be. 

A somewhat larger share of Americans (25%) say doctors or other medical providers should face jail time for providing illegal abortion services, while 18% say they should face fines or community service and 17% are not sure. About three-in-ten U.S. adults (31%) say doctors should lose their medical license if they perform an abortion in a situation where it is illegal.

Men are more likely than women to favor penalties for the woman or doctor in situations where abortion is illegal. About half of men (52%) say women should face a penalty, while just 43% of women say the same. Similarly, about two-thirds of men (64%) say a doctor should face a penalty, while 56% of women agree.

Republicans are considerably more likely than Democrats to say both women and doctors should face penalties – including jail time. For example, 21% of Republicans say the woman who had the abortion should face jail time, and 40% say this about the doctor who performed the abortion. Among Democrats, far smaller shares say the woman (8%) or doctor (13%) should serve jail time.  

White evangelical Protestants are more likely than other Protestant groups to favor penalties for abortions in situations where they are illegal. Fully 24% say the woman who had the abortion should serve time in jail, compared with just 12% of White non-evangelical Protestants or Black Protestants. And while about half of White evangelicals (48%) say doctors who perform illegal abortions should serve jail time, just 26% of White non-evangelical Protestants and 18% of Black Protestants share this view.

• Only respondents who said that abortion should be legal in some cases but not others and that how long a woman has been pregnant should matter in determining whether abortion should be legal received questions about abortion’s legality at specific points in the pregnancy.  ↩

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Support for legal abortion is widespread in many places, especially in europe, public opinion on abortion, americans overwhelmingly say access to ivf is a good thing, broad public support for legal abortion persists 2 years after dobbs, most popular, report materials.

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• v.61(1); Jan-Mar 2020

A research on abortion: ethics, legislation and socio-medical outcomes. Case study: Romania

Andreea mihaela niţă.

1 Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Craiova, Romania

Cristina Ilie Goga

This article presents a research study on abortion from a theoretical and empirical point of view. The theoretical part is based on the method of social documents analysis, and presents a complex perspective on abortion, highlighting items of medical, ethical, moral, religious, social, economic and legal elements. The empirical part presents the results of a sociological survey, based on the opinion survey method through the application of the enquiry technique, conducted in Romania, on a sample of 1260 women. The purpose of the survey is to identify Romanians perception on the decision to voluntary interrupt pregnancy, and to determine the core reasons in carrying out an abortion.

The analysis of abortion by means of medical and social documents

Abortion means a pregnancy interruption “before the fetus is viable” [ 1 ] or “before the fetus is able to live independently in the extrauterine environment, usually before the 20 th week of pregnancy” [ 2 ]. “Clinical miscarriage is both a common and distressing complication of early pregnancy with many etiological factors like genetic factors, immune factors, infection factors but also psychological factors” [ 3 ]. Induced abortion is a practice found in all countries, but the decision to interrupt the pregnancy involves a multitude of aspects of medical, ethical, moral, religious, social, economic, and legal order.

In a more simplistic manner, Winston Nagan has classified opinions which have as central element “abortion”, in two major categories: the opinion that the priority element is represented by fetus and his entitlement to life and the second opinion, which focuses around women’s rights [ 4 ].

From the medical point of view, since ancient times there have been four moments, generally accepted, which determine the embryo’s life: ( i ) conception; ( ii ) period of formation; ( iii ) detection moment of fetal movement; ( iv ) time of birth [ 5 ]. Contemporary medicine found the following moments in the evolution of intrauterine fetal: “ 1 . At 18 days of pregnancy, the fetal heartbeat can be perceived and it starts running the circulatory system; 2 . At 5 weeks, they become more clear: the nose, cheeks and fingers of the fetus; 3 . At 6 weeks, they start to function: the nervous system, stomach, kidneys and liver of the fetus, and its skeleton is clearly distinguished; 4 . At 7 weeks (50 days), brain waves are felt. The fetus has all the internal and external organs definitively outlined. 5 . At 10 weeks (70 days), the unborn child has all the features clearly defined as a child after birth (9 months); 6 . At 12 weeks (92 days, 3 months), the fetus has all organs definitely shaped, managing to move, lacking only the breath” [ 6 ]. Even if most of the laws that allow abortion consider the period up to 12 weeks acceptable for such an intervention, according to the above-mentioned steps, there can be defined different moments, which can represent the beginning of life. Nowadays, “abortion is one of the most common gynecological experiences and perhaps the majority of women will undergo an abortion in their lifetimes” [ 7 ]. “Safe abortions carry few health risks, but « every year, close to 20 million women risk their lives and health by undergoing unsafe abortions » and 25% will face a complication with permanent consequences” [ 8 , 9 ].

From the ethical point of view, most of the times, the interruption of pregnancy is on the border between woman’s right over her own body and the child’s (fetus) entitlement to life. Judith Jarvis Thomson supported the supremacy of woman’s right over her own body as a premise of freedom, arguing that we cannot force a person to bear in her womb and give birth to an unwanted child, if for different circumstances, she does not want to do this [ 10 ]. To support his position, the author uses an imaginary experiment, that of a violinist to which we are connected for nine months, in order to save his life. However, Thomson debates the problem of the differentiation between the fetus and the human being, by carrying out a debate on the timing which makes this difference (period of conception, 10 weeks of pregnancy, etc.) and highlighting that for people who support abortion, the fetus is not an alive human being [ 10 ].

Carol Gilligan noted that women undergo a true “moral dilemma”, a “moral conflict” with regards to voluntary interruption of pregnancy, such a decision often takes into account the human relationships, the possibility of not hurting the others, the responsibility towards others [ 11 ]. Gilligan applied qualitative interviews to a number of 29 women from different social classes, which were put in a position to decide whether or not to commit abortion. The interview focused on the woman’s choice, on alternative options, on individuals and existing conflicts. The conclusion was that the central moral issue was the conflict between the self (the pregnant woman) and others who may be hurt as a result of the potential pregnancy [ 12 ].

From the religious point of view, abortion is unacceptable for all religions and a small number of abortions can be seen in deeply religious societies and families. Christianity considers the beginning of human life from conception, and abortion is considered to be a form of homicide [ 13 ]. For Christians, “at the same time, abortion is giving up their faith”, riot and murder, which means that by an abortion we attack Jesus Christ himself and God [ 14 ]. Islam does not approve abortion, relying on the sacral life belief as specified in Chapter 6, Verse 151 of the Koran: “Do not kill a soul which Allah has made sacred (inviolable)” [ 15 ]. Buddhism considers abortion as a negative act, but nevertheless supports for medical reasons [ 16 ]. Judaism disapproves abortion, Tanah considering it to be a mortal sin. Hinduism considers abortion as a crime and also the greatest sin [ 17 ].

From the socio-economic point of view, the decision to carry out an abortion is many times determined by the relations within the social, family or financial frame. Moreover, studies have been conducted, which have linked the legalization of abortions and the decrease of the crime rate: “legalized abortion may lead to reduced crime either through reductions in cohort sizes or through lower per capita offending rates for affected cohorts” [ 18 ].

Legal regulation on abortion establishes conditions of the abortion in every state. In Europe and America, only in the XVIIth century abortion was incriminated and was considered an insignificant misdemeanor or a felony, depending on when was happening. Due to the large number of illegal abortions and deaths, two centuries later, many states have changed legislation within the meaning of legalizing voluntary interruption of pregnancy [ 6 ]. In contemporary society, international organizations like the United Nations or the European Union consider sexual and reproductive rights as fundamental rights [ 19 , 20 ], and promotes the acceptance of abortion as part of those rights. However, not all states have developed permissive legislation in the field of voluntary interruption of pregnancy.

Currently, at national level were established four categories of legislation on pregnancy interruption area:

( i )  Prohibitive legislations , ones that do not allow abortion, most often outlining exceptions in abortion in cases where the pregnant woman’s life is endangered. In some countries, there is a prohibition of abortion in all circumstances, however, resorting to an abortion in the case of an imminent threat to the mother’s life. Same regulation is also found in some countries where abortion is allowed in cases like rape, incest, fetal problems, etc. In this category are 66 states, with 25.5% of world population [ 21 ].

( ii )  Restrictive legislation that allow abortion in cases of health preservation . Loosely, the term “health” should be interpreted according to the World Health Organization (WHO) definition as: “health is a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity” [ 22 ]. This type of legislation is adopted in 59 states populated by 13.8% of the world population [ 21 ].

( iii )  Legislation allowing abortion on a socio-economic motivation . This category includes items such as the woman’s age or ability to care for a child, fetal problems, cases of rape or incest, etc. In this category are 13 countries, where we have 21.3% of the world population [ 21 ].

( iv )  Legislation which do not impose restrictions on abortion . In the case of this legislation, abortion is permitted for any reason up to 12 weeks of pregnancy, with some exceptions (Romania – 14 weeks, Slovenia – 10 weeks, Sweden – 18 weeks), the interruption of pregnancy after this period has some restrictions. This type of legislation is adopted in 61 countries with 39.5% of the world population [21].

The Centre for Reproductive Rights has carried out from 1998 a map of the world’s states, based on the legislation typology of each country (Figure ​ (Figure1 1 ).

The analysis of states according to the legislation regarding abortion. Source: Centre for Reproductive Rights. The World’s Abortion Laws, 2018 [ 23 ]

An unplanned pregnancy, socio-economic context or various medical problems [ 24 ], lead many times to the decision of interrupting pregnancy, regardless the legislative restrictions. In the study “Unsafe abortion: global and regional estimates of the incidence of unsafe abortion and associated mortality in 2008” issued in 2011 by the WHO , it was determined that within the states with restrictive legislation on abortion, we may also encounter a large number of illegal abortions. The illegal abortions may also be resulting in an increased risk of woman’s health and life considering that most of the times inappropriate techniques are being used, the hygienic conditions are precarious and the medical treatments are incorrectly administered [ 25 ]. Although abortions done according to medical guidelines carry very low risk of complications, 1–3 unsafe abortions contribute substantially to maternal morbidity and death worldwide [ 26 ].

WHO has estimated for the year 2008, the fact that worldwide women between the ages of 15 and 44 years carried out 21.6 million “unsafe” abortions, which involved a high degree of risk and were distributed as follows: 0.4 million in the developed regions and a number of 21.2 million in the states in course of development [ 25 ].

Case study: Romania

Legal perspective on abortion

In Romania, abortion was brought under regulation by the first Criminal Code of the United Principalities, from 1864.

The Criminal Code from 1864, provided the abortion infringement in Article 246, on which was regulated as follows: “Any person, who, using means such as food, drinks, pills or any other means, which will consciously help a pregnant woman to commit abortion, will be punished to a minimum reclusion (three years).

The woman who by herself shall use the means of abortion, or would accept to use means of abortion which were shown or given to her for this purpose, will be punished with imprisonment from six months to two years, if the result would be an abortion. In a situation where abortion was carried out on an illegitimate baby by his mother, the punishment will be imprisonment from six months to one year.

Doctors, surgeons, health officers, pharmacists (apothecary) and midwives who will indicate, will give or will facilitate these means, shall be punished with reclusion of at least four years, if the abortion took place. If abortion will cause the death of the mother, the punishment will be much austere of four years” (Art. 246) [ 27 ].

The Criminal Code from 1864, reissued in 1912, amended in part the Article 246 for the purposes of eliminating the abortion of an illegitimate baby case. Furthermore, it was no longer specified the minimum of four years of reclusion, in case of abortion carried out with the help of the medical staff, leaving the punishment to the discretion of the Court (Art. 246) [ 28 ].

The Criminal Code from 1936 regulated abortion in the Articles 482–485. Abortion was defined as an interruption of the normal course of pregnancy, being punished as follows:

“ 1 . When the crime is committed without the consent of the pregnant woman, the punishment was reformatory imprisonment from 2 to 5 years. If it caused the pregnant woman any health injury or a serious infirmity, the punishment was reformatory imprisonment from 3 to 6 years, and if it has caused her death, reformatory imprisonment from 7 to 10 years;

2 . When the crime was committed by the unmarried pregnant woman by herself, or when she agreed that someone else should provoke the abortion, the punishment is reformatory imprisonment from 3 to 6 months, and if the woman is married, the punishment is reformatory imprisonment from 6 months to one year. Same penalty applies also to the person who commits the crime with the woman’s consent. If abortion was committed for the purpose of obtaining a benefit, the punishment increases with another 2 years of reformatory imprisonment.

If it caused the pregnant woman any health injuries or a severe disablement, the punishment will be reformatory imprisonment from one to 3 years, and if it has caused her death, the punishment is reformatory imprisonment from 3 to 5 years” (Art. 482) [ 29 ].

The criminal legislation from 1936 specifies that it is not considered as an abortion the interruption from the normal course of pregnancy, if it was carried out by a doctor “when woman’s life was in imminent danger or when the pregnancy aggravates a woman’s disease, putting her life in danger, which could not be removed by other means and it is obvious that the intervention wasn’t performed with another purpose than that of saving the woman’s life” and “when one of the parents has reached a permanent alienation and it is certain that the child will bear serious mental flaws” (Art. 484, Par. 1 and Par. 2) [ 29 ].

In the event of an imminent danger, the doctor was obliged to notify prosecutor’s office in writing, within 48 hours after the intervention, on the performance of the abortion. “In the other cases, the doctor was able to intervene only with the authorization of the prosecutor’s office, given on the basis of a medical certificate from hospital or a notice given as a result of a consultation between the doctor who will intervene and at least a professor doctor in the disease which caused the intervention. General’s Office Prosecutor, in all cases provided by this Article, shall be obliged to maintain the confidentiality of all communications or authorizations, up to the intercession of any possible complaints” (Art. 484) [ 29 ].

The legislation of 1936 provided a reformatory injunction from one to three years for the abortions committed by doctors, sanitary agents, pharmacists, apothecary or midwives (Art. 485) [ 29 ].

Abortion on demand has been legalized for the first time in Romania in the year 1957 by the Decree No. 463, under the condition that it had to be carried out in a hospital and to be carried out in the first quarter of the pregnancy [ 30 ]. In the year 1966, demographic policy of Romania has dramatically changed by introducing the Decree No. 770 from September 29 th , which prohibited abortion. Thus, the voluntary interruption of pregnancy became a crime, with certain exceptions, namely: endangering the mother’s life, physical or mental serious disability; serious or heritable illness, mother’s age over 45 years, if the pregnancy was a result of rape or incest or if the woman gave birth to at least four children who were still in her care (Art. 2) [ 31 ].

In the Criminal Code from 1968, the abortion crime was governed by Articles 185–188.

The Article 185, “the illegal induced abortion”, stipulated that “the interruption of pregnancy by any means, outside the conditions permitted by law, with the consent of the pregnant woman will be punished with imprisonment from one to 3 years”. The act referred to above, without the prior consent from the pregnant woman, was punished with prison from two to five years. If the abortion carried out with the consent of the pregnant woman caused any serious body injury, the punishment was imprisonment from two to five years, and when it caused the death of the woman, the prison sentence was from five to 10 years. When abortion was carried out without the prior consent of the woman, if it caused her a serious physical injury, the punishment was imprisonment from three to six years, and if it caused the woman’s death, the punishment was imprisonment from seven to 12 years (Art. 185) [ 32 ].

“When abortion was carried out in order to obtain a material benefit, the maximum punishment was increased by two years, and if the abortion was made by a doctor, in addition to the prison punishment could also be applied the prohibition to no longer practice the profession of doctor”.

Article 186, “abortion caused by the woman”, stipulated that “the interruption of the pregnancy course, committed by the pregnant woman, was punished with imprisonment from 6 months to 2 years”, quoting the fact that by the same punishment was also sanctioned “the pregnant woman’s act to consent in interrupting the pregnancy course made out by another person” (Art. 186) [ 26 ].

The Regulations of the Criminal Code in 1968, also provided the crime of “ownership of tools or materials that can cause abortion”, the conditions of this holding being met when these types of instruments were held outside the hospital’s specialized institutions, the infringement shall be punished with imprisonment from three months to one year (Art. 187) [ 32 ].

Furthermore, the doctors who performed an abortion in the event of extreme urgency, without prior legal authorization and if they did not announce the competent authority within the legal deadline, they were punished by imprisonment from one month to three months (Art. 188) [ 32 ].

In the year 1985, it has been issued the Decree No. 411 of December 26 th , by which the conditions imposed by the Decree No. 770 of 1966 have been hardened, meaning that it has increased the number of children, that a woman could have in order to request an abortion, from four to five children [ 33 ].

The Articles 185–188 of the Criminal Code and the Decree No. 770/1966 on the interruption of the pregnancy course have been abrogated by Decree-Law No. 1 from December 26 th , 1989, which was published in the Official Gazette No. 4 of December 27 th , 1989 (Par. 8 and Par. 12) [ 34 ].

The Criminal Code from 1968, reissued in 1997, maintained Article 185 about “the illegal induced abortion”, but drastically modified. Thus, in this case of the Criminal Code, we identify abortion as “the interruption of pregnancy course, by any means, committed in any of the following circumstances: ( a ) outside medical institutions or authorized medical practices for this purpose; ( b ) by a person who does not have the capacity of specialized doctor; ( c ) if age pregnancy has exceeded 14 weeks”, the punishment laid down was the imprisonment from 6 months to 3 years” (Art. 185, Par. 1) [ 35 ]. For the abortion committed without the prior consent of the pregnant woman, the punishment consisted in strict prison conditions from two to seven years and with the prohibition of certain rights (Art. 185, Par. 2) [ 35 ].

For the situation of causing serious physical injury to the pregnant woman, the punishment was strict prison from three to 10 years and the removal of certain rights, and if it had as a result the death of the pregnant woman, the punishment was strict prison from five to 15 years and the prohibition of certain rights (Art. 185, Par. 3) [ 35 ].

The attempt was punished for the crimes specified in the various cases of abortion.

Consideration should also be given in the Criminal Code reissued in 1997 for not punishing the interruption of the pregnancy course carried out by the doctor, if this interruption “was necessary to save the life, health or the physical integrity of the pregnant woman from a grave and imminent danger and that it could not be removed otherwise; in the case of a over fourteen weeks pregnancy, when the interruption of the pregnancy course should take place from therapeutic reasons” and even in a situation of a woman’s lack of consent, when it has not been given the opportunity to express her will, and abortion “was imposed by therapeutic reasons” (Art. 185, Par. 4) [ 35 ].

Criminal Code from 2004 covers abortion in Article 190, defined in the same way as in the prior Criminal Code, with the difference that it affects the limits of the punishment. So, in the event of pregnancy interruption, in accordance with the conditions specified in Paragraph 1, “the penalty provided was prison time from 6 months to one year or days-fine” (Art. 190, Par. 1) [ 36 ].

Nowadays, in Romania, abortion is governed by the criminal law of 2009, which entered into force in 2014, by the section called “aggression against an unborn child”. It should be specified that current criminal law does not punish the woman responsible for carrying out abortion, but only the person who is involved in carrying out the abortion. There is no punishment for the pregnant woman who injures her fetus during pregnancy.

In Article 201, we can find the details on the pregnancy interruption infringement. Thus, the pregnancy interruption can be performed in one of the following circumstances: “outside of medical institutions or medical practices authorized for this purpose; by a person who does not have the capacity of specialist doctor in Obstetrics and Gynecology and the right of free medical practice in this specialty; if gestational age has exceeded 14 weeks”, the punishment is the imprisonment for six months to three years, or fine and the prohibition to exercise certain rights (Art. 201, Par. 1) [ 37 ].

Article 201, Paragraph 2 specifies that “the interruption of the pregnancy committed under any circumstances, without the prior consent of the pregnant woman, can be punished with imprisonment from 2 to 7 years and with the prohibition to exercise some rights” (Art. 201, Par. 1) [ 37 ].

If by facts referred to above (Art. 201, Par. 1 and Par. 2) [ 37 ] “it has caused the pregnant woman’s physical injury, the punishment is the imprisonment from 3 to 10 years and the prohibition to exercise some rights, and if it has had as a result the pregnant woman’s death, the punishment is the imprisonment from 6 to 12 years and the prohibition to exercise some rights” (Art. 201, Par. 3) [ 37 ]. When the facts have been committed by a doctor, “in addition to the imprisonment punishment, it will also be applied the prohibition to exercise the profession of doctor (Art. 201, Par. 4) [ 37 ].

Criminal legislation specifies that “the interruption of pregnancy does not constitute an infringement with the purpose of a treatment carried out by a specialist doctor in Obstetrics and Gynecology, until the pregnancy age of twenty-four weeks is reached, or the subsequent pregnancy interruption, for the purpose of treatment, is in the interests of the mother or the fetus” (Art. 201, Par. 6) [ 37 ]. However, it can all be found in the phrases “therapeutic purposes” and “the interest of the mother and of the unborn child”, which predisposes the text of law to an interpretation, finally the doctors are the only ones in the position to decide what should be done in such cases, assuming direct responsibility [ 38 ].

Article 202 of the Criminal Code defines the crime of harming an unborn child, pointing out the punishments for the various types of injuries that can occur during pregnancy or in the childbirth period and which can be caused by the mother or by the persons who assist the birth, with the specification that the mother who harms her fetus during pregnancy is not punished and does not constitute an infringement if the injury has been committed during pregnancy or during childbirth period if the facts have been “committed by a doctor or by an authorized person to assist the birth or to follow the pregnancy, if they have been committed in the course of the medical act, complying with the specific provisions of his profession and have been made in the interest of the pregnant woman or fetus, as a result of the exercise of an inherent risk in the medical act” (Art. 202, Par. 6) [ 37 ].

The fact situation in Romania

During the period 1948–1955, called “the small baby boom” [ 39 ], Romania registered an average fertility rate of 3.23 children for a woman. Between 1955 and 1962, the fertility rate has been less than three children for a woman, and in 1962, fertility has reached an average of two children for a woman. This phenomenon occurred because of the Decree No. 463/1957 on liberalization of abortion. After the liberalization from 1957, the abortion rate has increased from 220 abortions per 100 born-alive children in the year 1960, to 400 abortions per 100 born-alive children, in the year 1965 [ 40 ].

The application of provisions of Decrees No. 770 of 1966 and No. 411 of 1985 has led to an increase of the birth rate in the first three years (an average of 3.7 children in 1967, and 3.6 children in 1968), followed by a regression until 1989, when it was recorded an average of 2.2 children, but also a maternal death rate caused by illegal abortions, raising up to 85 deaths of 100 000 births in the year of 1965, and 170 deaths in 1983. It was estimated that more than 80% of maternal deaths between 1980–1989 was caused by legal constraints [ 30 ].

After the Romanian Revolution in December 1989 and after the communism fall, with the abrogation of Articles 185–188 of the Criminal Code and of the Decree No. 770/1966, by the Decree of Law No. 1 of December 26 th , 1989, abortion has become legal in Romania and so, in the following years, it has reached the highest rate of abortion in Europe. Subsequently, the number of abortion has dropped gradually, with increasing use of birth control [ 41 ].

Statistical data issued by the Ministry of Health and by the National Institute of Statistics (INS) in Romania show corresponding figures to a legally carried out abortion. The abortion number is much higher, if it would take into account the number of illegal abortion, especially those carried out before 1989, and those carried out in private clinics, after the year 1990. Summing the declared abortions in the period 1958–2014, it is to be noted the number of them, 22 037 747 exceeds the current Romanian population. A detailed statistical research of abortion rate, in terms of years we have exposed in Table ​ Table1 1 .

The number of abortions declared in Romania in the period 1958–2016

Source: Pro Vita Association (Bucharest, Romania), National Institute of Statistics (INS – Romania), EUROSTAT [ 42 , 43 , 44 ]

Data issued by the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) in June 2016, for the period 1989–2014, in matters of reproductive behavior, indicates a fertility rate for Romania with a continuous decrease, in proportion to the decrease of the number of births, but also a lower number of abortion rate reported to 100 deliveries (Table ​ (Table2 2 ).

Reproductive behavior in Romania in 1989–2014

Source: United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), Transformative Monitoring for Enhanced Equity (TransMonEE) Data. Country profiles: Romania, 1989–2015 [ 45 ].

By analyzing data issued for the period 1990–2015 by the International Organization of Health , UNICEF , United Nations Fund for Population Activity (UNFPA), The World Bank and the United Nations Population Division, it is noticed that maternal mortality rate has currently dropped as compared with 1990 (Table ​ (Table3 3 ).

Maternal mortality estimation in Romania in 1990–2015

Source: World Health Organization (WHO), Global Health Observatory Data. Maternal mortality country profiles: Romania, 2015 [ 46 ].

Opinion survey: women’s opinion on abortion

Argument for choosing the research theme

Although the problematic on abortion in Romania has been extensively investigated and debated, it has not been carried out in an ample sociological study, covering Romanian women’s perception on abortion. We have assumed making a study at national level, in order to identify the opinion on abortion, on the motivation to carry out an abortion, and to identify the correlation between religious convictions and the attitude toward abortion.

Examining the literature field of study

In the conceptual register of the research, we have highlighted items, such as the specialized literature, legislation, statistical documents.

Formulation of hypotheses and objectives

The first hypothesis was that Romanian women accept abortion, having an open attitude towards this act. Thus, the first objective of the research was to identify Romanian women’s attitude towards abortion.

The second hypothesis, from which we started, was that high religious beliefs generate a lower tolerance towards abortion. Thus, the second objective of our research has been to identify the correlation between the religious beliefs and the attitude towards abortion.

The third hypothesis of the survey was that, the main motivation in carrying out an abortion is the fact that a woman does not want a baby, and the main motivation for keeping the pregnancy is that the person wants a baby. In this context, the third objective of the research was to identify main motivation in carrying out an abortion and in maintaining a pregnancy.

Another hypothesis was that modern Romanian legislation on the abortion is considered fair. Based on this hypothesis, we have assumed the fourth objective, which is to identify the degree of satisfaction towards the current regulatory provisions governing the abortion.

Research methodology

The research method is that of a sociological survey by the application of the questionnaire technique. We used the sampling by age and residence looking at representative numbers of population from more developed as well as underdeveloped areas.

Determination of the sample to be studied

Because abortion is a typical women’s experience, we have chosen to make the quantitative research only among women. We have constructed the sample by selecting a number of 1260 women between the ages of 15 and 44 years (the most frequently encountered age among women who give birth to a child). We also used the quota sampling techniques, taking into account the following variables: age group and the residence (urban/rural), so that the persons included in the sample could retain characteristic of the general population.

By the sample of 1260 women, we have made a percentage of investigation of 0.03% of the total population.

The Questionnaires number applied was distributed as follows (Table ​ (Table4 4 ).

The sampling rates based on the age, and the region of residence

Source: Sample built, based on the population data issued by the National Institute of Statistics (INS – Romania) based on population census conducted in 2011 [ 47 ].

Data collection

Data collection was carried out by questionnaires administered by 32 field operators between May 1 st –May 31 st , 2018.

The analysis of the research results

In the next section, we will present the main results of the quantitative research carried out at national level.

Almost three-quarters of women included in the sample agree with carrying out an abortion in certain circumstances (70%) and only 24% have chosen to support the answer “ No, never ”. In modern contemporary society, abortion is the first solution of women for which a pregnancy is not desired. Even if advanced medical techniques are a lot safer, an abortion still carries a health risk. However, 6% of respondents agree with carrying out abortion regardless of circumstances (Table ​ (Table5 5 ).

Opinion on the possibility of carrying out an abortion

Although abortions carried out after 14 weeks are illegal, except for medical reasons, more than half of the surveyed women stated they would agree with abortion in certain circumstances. At the opposite pole, 31% have mentioned they would never agree on abortions after 14 weeks. Five percent were totally accepting the idea of abortion made to a pregnancy that has exceeded 14 weeks (Table ​ (Table6 6 ).

Opinion on the possibility of carrying out an abortion after the period of 14 weeks of pregnancy

For 53% of respondents, abortion is considered a crime as well as the right of a women. On the other hand, 28% of the women considered abortion as a crime and 16% associate abortion with a woman’s right (Table ​ (Table7 7 ).

Opinion on abortion: at the border between crime and a woman’s right

Opinions on what women abort at the time of the voluntary pregnancy interruption are split in two: 59% consider that it depends on the time of the abortion, and more specifically on the pregnancy development stage, 24% consider that regardless of the period in which it is carried out, women abort a child, and 14% have opted a fetus (Table ​ (Table8 8 ).

Abortion of a child vs. abortion of a fetus

Among respondents who consider that women abort a child or a fetus related to the time of abortion, 37.5% have considered that the difference between a baby and a fetus appears after 14 weeks of pregnancy (the period legally accepted for abortion). Thirty-three percent of them have mentioned that the distinction should be performed at the first few heartbeats; 18.1% think it is about when the child has all the features definitively outlined and can move by himself; 2.8% consider that the difference appears when the first encephalopathy traces are being felt and the child has formed all internal and external organs. A percentage of 1.7% of respondents consider that this difference occurs at the beginning of the central nervous system, and 1.4% when the unborn child has all the features that we can clearly see to a newborn child (Table ​ (Table9 9 ).

The opinion on the moment that makes the difference between a fetus and a child

We noticed that highly religious people make a clear association between abortion and crime. They also consider that at the time of pregnancy interruption it is aborted a child and not a fetus. However, unexpectedly, we noticed that 27% of the women, who declare themselves to be very religious, have also stated that they see abortion as a crime but also as a woman’s right. Thirty-one percent of the women, who also claimed profound religious beliefs, consider that abortion may be associated with the abortion of a child but also of a fetus, this depending on the time of abortion (Tables ​ (Tables10 10 and ​ and11 11 ).

The correlation between the level of religious beliefs and the perspective on abortion seen as a crime or a right

The correlation between the level of religious beliefs and the perspective on abortion procedure conducted on a fetus or a child

More than half of the respondents have opted for the main reason for abortion the appearance of medical problems to the child. Baby’s health represents the main concern of future mothers, and of each parent, and the birth of a child with serious health issues, is a factor which frightens any future parent, being many times, at least theoretically, one good reason for opting for abortion. At the opposite side, 12% of respondents would not choose abortion under any circumstances. Other reasons for which women would opt for an abortion are: if the woman would have a medical problem (22%) or would not want the child (10%) (Table ​ (Table12 12 ).

Potential reasons for carrying out an abortion

Most of the women want to give birth to a child, 56% of the respondents, representing also the reason that would determine them to keep the child. Morality (26%), faith (10%) or legal restrictions (4%), are the three other reasons for which women would not interrupt a pregnancy. Only 2% of the respondents have mentioned other reasons such as health or age.

A percentage of 23% of the surveyed people said that they have done an abortion so far, and 77% did not opted for a surgical intervention either because there was no need, or because they have kept the pregnancy (Table ​ (Table13 13 ).

Rate of abortion among women in the sample

Most respondents, 87% specified that they have carried out an abortion during the first 14 weeks – legally accepted limit for abortion: 43.6% have made abortion in the first four weeks, 39.1% between weeks 4–8, and 4.3% between weeks 8–14. It should be noted that 8.7% could not appreciate the pregnancy period in which they carried out abortion, by opting to answer with the option “ I don’t know ”, and a percentage of 4.3% refused to answer to this question.

Performing an abortion is based on many reasons, but the fact that the women have not wanted a child is the main reason mentioned by 47.8% of people surveyed, who have done minimum an abortion so far. Among the reasons for the interruption of pregnancy, it is also included: women with medical problems (13.3%), not the right time to be a mother (10.7%), age motivation (8.7%), due to medical problems of the child (4.3%), the lack of money (4.3%), family pressure (4.3%), partner/spouse did not wanted. A percentage of 3.3% of women had different reasons for abortion, as follows: age difference too large between children, career, marital status, etc. Asked later whether they regretted the abortion, a rate of 69.6% of women who said they had at least one abortion regret it (34.8% opted for “ Yes ”, and 34.8% said “ Yes, partially ”). 26.1% of surveyed women do not regret the choice to interrupted the pregnancy, and 4.3% chose to not answer this question. We noted that, for women who have already experienced abortion, the causes were more diverse than the grounds on which the previous question was asked: “What are the reasons that determined you to have an abortion?” (Table ​ (Table14 14 ).

The reasons that led the women in the sample to have an abortion

The majority of the respondents (37.5%) considered that “nervous depression” is the main consequence of abortion, followed by “insomnia and nightmares” (24.6%), “disorders in alimentation” and “affective disorders” (each for 7.7% of respondents), “deterioration of interpersonal relationships” and “the feeling of guilt”(for 6.3% of the respondents), “sexual disorders” and “panic attacks” (for 6.3% of the respondents) (Table ​ (Table15 15 ).

Opinion on the consequences of abortion

Over half of the respondents believe that abortion should be legal in certain circumstances, as currently provided by law, 39% say it should be always legal, and only 6% opted for the illegal option (Table ​ (Table16 16 ).

Opinion on the legal regulation of abortion

Although the current legislation does not punish pregnant women who interrupt pregnancy or intentionally injured their fetus, survey results indicate that 61% of women surveyed believe that the national law should punish the woman and only 28% agree with the current legislation (Table ​ (Table17 17 ).

Opinion on the possibility of punishing the woman who interrupts the course of pregnancy or injures the fetus

For the majority of the respondents (40.6%), the penalty provided by the current legislation, the imprisonment between six months and three years or a fine and deprivation of certain rights for the illegal abortion is considered fair, for a percentage of 39.6% the punishment is too small for 9.5% of the respondents is too high. Imprisonment between two and seven years and deprivation of certain rights for an abortion performed without the consent of the pregnant woman is considered too small for 65% of interviewees. Fourteen percent of them think it is fair and only 19% of respondents consider that Romanian legislation is too severe with people who commit such an act considering the punishment as too much. The imprisonment from three to 10 years and deprivation of certain rights for the facts described above, if an injury was caused to the woman, is considered to be too small for more than half of those included in the survey, 64% and almost 22% for nearly a quarter of them. Only 9% of the respondents mentioned that this legislative measure is too severe for such actions (Table ​ (Table18 18 ).

Opinion on the regulation of abortion of the Romanian Criminal Code (Art. 201)

Conclusions

After analyzing the results of the sociological research regarding abortion undertaken at national level, we see that 76% of the Romanian women accept abortion, indicating that the majority accepts only certain circumstances (a certain period after conception, for medical reasons, etc.). A percentage of 64% of the respondents indicated that they accept the idea of abortion after 14 weeks of pregnancy (for solid reasons or regardless the reason). This study shows that over 50% of Romanian women see abortion as a right of women but also a woman’s crime and believe that in the moment of interruption of a pregnancy, a fetus is aborted. Mostly, the association of abortion with crime and with the idea that a child is aborted is frequently found within very religious people. The main motivation for Romanian women in taking the decision not to perform an abortion is that they would want the child, and the main reason to perform an abortion is the child’s medical problems. However, it is noted that, in real situations, in which women have already done at least one abortion, most women resort to abortion because they did not want the child towards the hypothetical situation in which women felt that the main reason of abortion is a medical problem. Regarding the satisfaction with the current national legislation of the abortion, the situation is rather surprising. A significant percentage (61%) of respondents felt as necessary to punish the woman who performs an illegal abortion, although the legislation does not provide a punishment. On the other hand, satisfaction level to the penalties provided by law for various violations of the legal conditions for conducting abortion is low, on average only 25.5% of respondents are being satisfied with these, the majority (average 56.2%) considering the penalties as unsatisfactory. Understood as a social phenomenon, intensified by human vulnerabilities, of which the most obvious is accepting the comfort [ 48 ], abortion today is no longer, in Romanian society, from a legal or religious perspective, a problem. Perceptions on the legislative sanction, moral and religious will perpetual vary depending on beliefs, environment, education, etc. The only and the biggest social problem of Romania is truly represented by the steadily falling birth rate.

Conflict of interests

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interests.

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Are you about to write a persuasive essay on abortion but wondering how to begin?

Writing an effective persuasive essay on the topic of abortion can be a difficult task for many students. 

It is important to understand both sides of the issue and form an argument based on facts and logical reasoning. This requires research and understanding, which takes time and effort.

In this blog, we will provide you with some easy steps to craft a persuasive essay about abortion that is compelling and convincing. Moreover, we have included some example essays and interesting facts to read and get inspired by. 

So let's start!

• 1. How To Write a Persuasive Essay About Abortion?
• 2. Persuasive Essay About Abortion Examples
• 3. Examples of Argumentative Essay About Abortion
• 4. Abortion Persuasive Essay Topics
• 5. Facts About Abortion You Need to Know

How To Write a Persuasive Essay About Abortion?

Abortion is a controversial topic, with people having differing points of view and opinions on the matter. There are those who oppose abortion, while some people endorse pro-choice arguments. 

It is also an emotionally charged subject, so you need to be extra careful when crafting your persuasive essay .

Before you start writing your persuasive essay, you need to understand the following steps.

Step 1: Choose Your Position

The first step to writing a persuasive essay on abortion is to decide your position. Do you support the practice or are you against it? You need to make sure that you have a clear opinion before you begin writing. 

Once you have decided, research and find evidence that supports your position. This will help strengthen your argument. 

Check out the video below to get more insights into this topic:

Step 2: Choose Your Audience

The next step is to decide who your audience will be. Will you write for pro-life or pro-choice individuals? Or both? 

Knowing who you are writing for will guide your writing and help you include the most relevant facts and information.

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Step 3: Define Your Argument

Now that you have chosen your position and audience, it is time to craft your argument. 

Start by defining what you believe and why, making sure to use evidence to support your claims. You also need to consider the opposing arguments and come up with counter arguments. This helps make your essay more balanced and convincing.

Step 4: Format Your Essay

Once you have the argument ready, it is time to craft your persuasive essay. Follow a standard format for the essay, with an introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion. 

Make sure that each paragraph is organized and flows smoothly. Use clear and concise language, getting straight to the point.

Step 5: Proofread and Edit

The last step in writing your persuasive essay is to make sure that you proofread and edit it carefully. Look for spelling, grammar, punctuation, or factual errors and correct them. This will help make your essay more professional and convincing.

These are the steps you need to follow when writing a persuasive essay on abortion. It is a good idea to read some examples before you start so you can know how they should be written.

Continue reading to find helpful examples.

Persuasive Essay About Abortion Examples

To help you get started, here are some example persuasive essays on abortion that may be useful for your own paper.

Short Persuasive Essay About Abortion

Persuasive Essay About No To Abortion

What Is Abortion? - Essay Example

Persuasive Speech on Abortion

Legal Abortion Persuasive Essay

Persuasive Essay About Abortion in the Philippines

Persuasive Essay about legalizing abortion

You can also read m ore persuasive essay examples to imp rove your persuasive skills.

Examples of Argumentative Essay About Abortion

An argumentative essay is a type of essay that presents both sides of an argument. These essays rely heavily on logic and evidence.

Here are some examples of argumentative essay with introduction, body and conclusion that you can use as a reference in writing your own argumentative essay. 

Abortion Persuasive Essay Introduction

Argumentative Essay About Abortion Conclusion

Argumentative Essay About Abortion Pdf

Argumentative Essay About Abortion in the Philippines

Argumentative Essay About Abortion - Introduction

Abortion Persuasive Essay Topics

If you are looking for some topics to write your persuasive essay on abortion, here are some examples:

• Should abortion be legal in the United States?
• Is it ethical to perform abortions, considering its pros and cons?
• What should be done to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies that lead to abortions?
• Is there a connection between abortion and psychological trauma?
• What are the ethical implications of abortion on demand?
• How has the debate over abortion changed over time?
• Should there be legal restrictions on late-term abortions?
• Does gender play a role in how people view abortion rights?
• Is it possible to reduce poverty and unwanted pregnancies through better sex education?
• How is the anti-abortion point of view affected by religious beliefs and values? 

These are just some of the potential topics that you can use for your persuasive essay on abortion. Think carefully about the topic you want to write about and make sure it is something that interests you. 

Check out m ore persuasive essay topics that will help you explore other things that you can write about!

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Facts About Abortion You Need to Know

Here are some facts about abortion that will help you formulate better arguments.

• According to the Guttmacher Institute , 1 in 4 pregnancies end in abortion.
• The majority of abortions are performed in the first trimester.
• Abortion is one of the safest medical procedures, with less than a 0.5% risk of major complications.
• In the United States, 14 states have laws that restrict or ban most forms of abortion after 20 weeks gestation.
• Seven out of 198 nations allow elective abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy.
• In places where abortion is illegal, more women die during childbirth and due to complications resulting from pregnancy.
• A majority of pregnant women who opt for abortions do so for financial and social reasons.
• According to estimates, 56 million abortions occur annually.

In conclusion, these are some of the examples, steps, and topics that you can use to write a persuasive essay. Make sure to do your research thoroughly and back up your arguments with evidence. This will make your essay more professional and convincing. 

Need the services of a persuasive essay writing service ? We've got your back!

MyPerfectWords.com that provides help to students in the form of professionally written essays. Our persuasive essay writer can craft quality persuasive essays on any topic, including abortion. 

So, just ask our experts ' do my essay ' and get professional help.

Frequently Asked Questions

What should i talk about in an essay about abortion.

When writing an essay about abortion, it is important to cover all the aspects of the subject. This includes discussing both sides of the argument, providing facts and evidence to support your claims, and exploring potential solutions.

What is a good argument for abortion?

A good argument for abortion could be that it is a woman’s choice to choose whether or not to have an abortion. It is also important to consider the potential risks of carrying a pregnancy to term.

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How to Write Abortion Research Paper Homework?

Table of Contents

Looking for easy tips on how to write a research paper on abortion? We’ve got you covered!

Abortion is probably the most controversial subject in modern society. It includes a number of complex questions concerning ethical, moral, legal, medical, philosophical, and religious issues related to the deliberate ending of pregnancy before normal childbirth.

Public opinions are polarized; they have strong feelings for or against this subject. That’s why writing a good abortion research paper with work cited requires in-depth research of existing literature. Students have to find a decent amount of relevant arguments (statistics, facts) about positive and negative aspects of the problem and create a convincing piece.

Abortion research paper specifics

Abortion research paper is a piece of academic writing based on original research performed by a writer. The author’s task is to analyze and interpret research findings on a particular topic.

Although research paper assignments may vary widely, there are two common types – analytical and argumentative.

• In argumentative essay students have to establish their position in a thesis statement and convince their audience to adopt this point of view.
• In analytical essay students state a research question, take a neutral stance on a topic, presenting information in a form of well-supported critical analysis without persuading the audience to adopt any particular point of view.

Thorough writing a college research paper on the subject is critical – it can help students develop their own opinions and build a strong argument.

Research paper on abortion: writing hints & tips

Abortion is among political and moral issues on which Americans are genuinely split. Their opinions on this controversial issue remain unchanged since 1995. There are two primary moral and legal questions related to the abortion debate, which divides public opinion for generations:

• Are abortions morally wrong?
• Should they be legal or banned?

Although these questions seem straightforward, they are more complex than students think. There are two separate camps. People who favor the “pro-choice” stance support the right of women to choose whether she carries a pregnancy to term or not. They think that abortions are acceptable.

People who take the strict religious “pro-life” stance think that abortions are always wrong because the fetus has rights and we should treat it the same way as any other human being.

If you have to write an argumentative research paper, you must choose either “pro-life” or “pro-choice” stance and develop a convincing argument to persuade readers.

If your research paper is analytical, you should examine both sides of the issue, evaluate the most important arguments, provide a balanced overview of both approaches, analyzing their weak and strong points.

Religion plays a great role in the debate but there are a lot of non-religious issues. Here are the most important ethical and legal issues, involving the rights of women and the rights of a fetus.

• Is fetus a human being and does it have the basic legal right to live?
• Does life begin at conception?
• Should we consider the fetus a separate being or is it a part of its mother?
• Does the fetus’ right to life have a priority over the woman’s right to control her body?
• Under what circumstances is it acceptable to terminate the fetus’ life?
• Can the removing of a fetus be considered as a murder?
• Is it better to abort an unwanted child or allow it to be neglected by parents?
• Can adoption be alternative to termination of pregnancy?
• Is it possible to find a balance between the rights of a mother and those of a fetus?

A lot of arguments in favor of this procedure are based on respect for women’s reproductive rights.

“Pro-choice” camp argues that a woman is a person with her own rights and not a fetus’ carrier.

They say that governmental or religious authorities shouldn’t limit a woman’s right to control her own body. Besides, the fetus can’t be regarded as a separate entity because it can’t exist outside a woman’s womb.

Opponents of this procedure speak about respect for all forms of life, fetus’ right to life, and argue that it is actually the kill of an innocent human being.

Best abortion research paper topics

The first step in writing a research paper is selecting a good manageable topic that interests you and defining a research question or a thesis statement.

Wondering where to find powerful abortion research paper topics? Here is a short list of interesting ideas. Feel free to pick any of them for creating your own writings. You may also use them as a source of inspiration and further research of a specific issue.

• Impact of legalizing abortions on the birth rate.
• How terminations of pregnancies are regulated around the world.
• How termination of pregnancy is considered within moral terms.
• Analyze regional differences in Americans’ attitude to termination of pregnancy.
• Examine the generation gap in abortion support.
• Feminist beliefs and abortion rights supporters.
• What is the future of abortion politics?
• Give an overview of the legislation on the termination of pregnancies around the world.
• The medical complications of pregnancy termination.
• Discuss the abortion debate and human rights.
• How having an abortion affects a woman’s life.
• Will the abortion debate ever end?
• How can we reduce the demand for termination of pregnancy?
• Moral aspects of pregnancy termination.
• Legal aspects of the abortion conflict.
• Should termination of pregnancy be treated as a health issue?
• Electoral politics and termination of pregnancy.
• Is the termination of pregnancy a human issue or a gender issue?
• Philosophical aspects of the abortion debate.
• Liberal views on the termination of pregnancy.
• Abortion demographics: race, poverty, and choice.
• Why does the public support for legal termination of pregnancy remains high?
• Should men be allowed to discuss the termination of pregnancy?
• Is the abortion a “women’s only” issue?
• Woman’s mental health after abortion.

How to write an abortion research paper outline?

Now let’s discuss how to write an abortion research paper outline. First, you have to write a thesis statement that summarizes the main point of your paper and outlines supporting points. The thesis will help you organize your structure and ensure that you stay focused while working on your project. Make a thesis statement strong, specific, and arguable.

After defining the thesis statement, you need to brainstorm ideas that are supporting the thesis in the best way. When it comes to the level of detail in an outline, you should take into account the length of a college project. You should choose the most suitable subtopics and arrange them logically. Decide which order is the most effective in arguing your thesis. Your paper should include at least 3 parts: an introduction, main body, and conclusion.

Have a look at simple abortion research paper outline example .

Introduction

• Hook sentence
• Thesis statement
• Transition to Main Body
• History of abortion
• Abortion demographics in countries where it is legal
• Impact of legal termination of pregnancy on women’s life and health
• Negative consequences of illegal termination of pregnancy
• What measures should be taken to reduce the number of abortions?
• Transition to Conclusion
• Unexpected twist or a final argument
• Food for thought

Academic writing is very challenging, especially if it involves complex controversial topics . Writing an abortion research paper is a time-consuming and arduous task, which involves a lot of researching, reading, writing, revising, rewriting, editing, and proofreading. Make sure you are ready to create several drafts and then improve the content and style to make your paper perfect.

We hope that our quick tips will help you get started. But if you are new to academic writing, a good idea is to find well-written abortion research paper examples. Read and analyze them to have a better idea about proper paper structure, academic writing style, references, and different approaches to organizing thoughts.

How about we take care of your abortion research paper, while you enjoy your free time? Several clicks and we’re on!

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Scripps Senior Theses

Beyond pro-life vs. pro-choice: reproductive rights for women of color and low-income women.

Sabrina Wu Follow

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W.M. Keck Science Department

Elise Ferree

Alyssa Newman

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In today’s debate over abortion, there are a multitude of additional factors to consider when restricting abortion for women of color and low-income women. The binary pro-life vs. pro-choice debate may seem like two clear-cut opposing sides, and many people find themselves agreeing firmly on one stance. However, these terms seek to implicitly portray the other stance unfavorably. Pro-life seems to imply that opponents are anti-life, or even “pro-death” and pro-choice insinuates that the opposition is “anti-choice” or favors coercion. The debate marginalizes women of color, poor women, and women from other marginalized communities because it does not take into account pre-existing conditions, such as financial incapability, harmful environmental factors and lack of social support, that restrict them from real choice to decide whether to have a child or have an abortion. Firstly, it is important to understand the complex issue of abortion in its procedure, its implications and its history in the United States, as well as the consequences upon denial of abortion and the effects of returning to a pre-Roe vs. Woe world. Abortion bans objectively affect low-income and women of color because of higher numbers of unwanted pregnancies, spatial inequalities to abortion access and its implicated costs, language barriers, financial difficulties and situational obstacles such as incarceration or environmental factors. In opposition to today’s abortion bans, it is important to get rid of the bans, prioritize women's health and work to create long-term solutions to combat economically and socially coerced abortions. We should work to reduce reasons for abortion, instead of criminalizing the procedure.

Recommended Citation

Wu, Sabrina, "Beyond Pro-Life vs. Pro-Choice: Reproductive Rights for Women of Color and Low-income Women" (2020). Scripps Senior Theses . 1516. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/1516

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Abortion Thesis Statement with Examples

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Abortion has been a complicated issue for many individuals, debating whether it should be illegal or not. Various medical and health situations have consequently supported the inhumane procedures used so that the act can be successful. This has therefore made it crucial for students to find out more about the practice despite the multiple opinions that people have towards it. In light of this, the guidelines below will be of great assistance as you write a thesis statement on abortion.

General Things to Consider When Writing an Abortion Thesis Statement

One should write their paper after collecting satisfying information and, understanding the topic. Always remember to:

Adhere to the instructions one is given

Give quality work

Avoid any spelling and grammatical mistakes

Follow the format specified by the teacher

Follow the word limits

At all costs avoid plagiarism

Examiners look at many things apart from the content that you give in your paper. To avoid any unnecessary penalties, you should follow the points given above strictly in the coming up of an abortion thesis statement.

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Writing an Excellent Abortion Thesis Statement

Your essay above should be divided into three key aspects that are: introduction, body and finally the conclusion.

Introduction

The introduction must be well written in such a way that keeps the reader glued to one’s essay. You can start the piece by phrasing a quote, a question or even a fact. Define the topic in the introduction in such a way that the reader can have an idea of what it is they are reading. You can get numerous definitions online, and an example can be the Merriam-Webstar Dictionary; which defines abortion as pregnancy termination, closely followed by the fetus’ death. A case such as this can occur during:

The removal of an induced fetus.

The removal of a human fetus within the first three months of the gestation period.

In the introduction, a person should inform the reader what their essay is constituted of. In such a case, you can state what the article may cover or in other words what it contains (your thesis statement`s general take on abortion). Therefore, it is essential to have a thesis statement about abortion as the introduction and make sure that it is not too long. It should either cover half a page or less unless otherwise stated.

When it comes to the body of your academic paper on abortion, there are some three tips that you should consider to come up with a masterpiece. They are as follows;

How to avoid plagiarism

How you can come up with arguments for your abortion thesis statement

Examples of the best abortion thesis statements

Always use the online WYSIWYG HTML Editor to compose the content for your website easily. This is a website that is worth using.

Tip 1: Avoidance of Plagiarism by Quoting Source Text and Page of Reference

The body which mostly contains the content that you have researched should have topics and subtopics that explain more of your content. Ensure that you can handle different issues in different paragraphs, for example, the reasons that pro abortion should be placed in separate articles from the sections used in giving more information about the procedure.

Always remember that there are personal reasons for abortions and some of these reasons may be financial woes, relationship issues, unwillingness to take up the responsibility of being a mother and health issues on the mother or the child. Ensure that you tell the difference between the two reasons so that the reader may be able to understand that some medical situations can convince a mother to abort.

Explain what the procedure entails; before, during and after the abortion. Elaborate more about pre-abortion procedures and what they are comprised of. Some of them include counseling, decision making about giving birth or aborting the child, staying with the child or giving it out for adoption.

One should not give the explicit details of the abortion procedure they should offer two options and explain them. Such options include medical abortion and surgical abortion. Post-abortion methods include; counseling and medical attention. Just in case the individual is faced with issues during the procedure, you can explain the risks associated with aborting right here.

In a paragraph, it is essential to state the document where the information used to come up with the thesis statement`s content was derived from. The references used will often come from published sources including books, electronic sources such as websites, e-books, articles and research papers, audio or video media.

Below is an example of your thesis statement`s reference paragraph

Sedgh, G., Finer, L. B., Bankole, A., Eilers, M. A., Singh, S. (2015). Adolescent pregnancy, birth, and abortion rates across countries: levels and recent trends. Journal of Adolescent Health , 56 (2), 223-230.

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

Tip 2: How to Come Up With Arguments for Your Abortion Thesis Statement

In a thesis statement for abortion, one needs to highlight the causes and effects of abortion. As the writer, you will need first to introduce the causes then describe implications that are possible. To start with, you should aim to be thorough on precisely what should be the result. If the termination of a pregnancy is the cause, then you will have to describe the possible outcome of the procedure.

One can also use advice concerning medicine to come up with pro abortion arguments. Below are some of the best examples of pro-life types of arguments that can apply for abortion thesis statements.

There are risks which occur numerously in the procedure. These include; infertility, damage of the cervix or that of the womb, and even excessive bleeding.

Abortion can easily result in depression since it is a stressful ordeal for a woman’s body and conscience. Many end up regretting as to why they did not give birth and more so, there`s a high chance of contracting breast cancer in a woman when the baby has been aborted.

Most families that are faced with the challenge of conceiving children still desire to have children of their own. A woman can get the chance of not aborting the child but giving it up for adoption.

The irresponsibility of some women who do not use contraceptives is a deplorable act, and in numerous cases, women tend to abort babies as a result of them not using modalities that shield them from getting pregnant.

The baby is a living being inside the womb of the mother, and therefore it has rights. Killing a baby or better yet hurting a woman who is pregnant is wrong, why then should it be okay to end the life of a child that is springing up with the help of its mother?

The baby experiences pain when it is aborted. There is no regular opinion as to when the baby experiences pain, and no doctor can give you the correct answer, but when it is aborted late, the baby certainly does experience pain.

Aborting babies can be a living proof that a human’s life does not mean and that is when one can turn to the inner person and think about this, but one should try and stay relevant to the topic at hand.

In most religions, abortion is a huge sin but this argument is weak when used on an atheist, but in significant cases, the evidence is pretty much effective.

The best approach to coming up with a thesis statement is by using the argument of your essay. For a perfect thesis statement, you need to tailor in a manner that will give the reader a feel of what to expect in the rest of your essay.

Here are other examples based on anti abortion arguments that can aid a person writing a thesis statement:

Abortion damages women

It violates feminist principles

It does not liberate women but enslaves them to guilt.

To some people, it is a plot by males as a way of dodging responsibilities.

Tip 3: Abortion Thesis Statement Examples

The psychological and physiological medical agencies dangers of unwanted pregnancies bring about legalization and the availability of abortion facilities.

Psychological and medical exigencies necessitate with the abortion associated with the consent of a parent, guardian before a minor can undergo the abortion.

The lack of harmony in understanding has convoluted the debate over the ethical and legal activity of abortion understanding if an embryo can be equalized.

Analysis of the actual debate about abortion without the including of religious objections to the practice is needed if we are to come to a concord over the ethical and legal existence majority of the people will view therapeutic abortions are relevant since they are pro-life.

Conclusion/Closing Sentence in an Essay for Abortion

The conclusion here is intended for the summary of the entire project. This is where you are supposed to revise your hook sentence, thesis, and significant ideas. There is a wide range of topics concerning abortion to choose from and here are some of the abortion thesis statement samples:

Should women be forced to resort to this procedure by law in some cases?

Should women have a restricted number of possible abortions throughout their lives?

Should grandparents discourage in the decision on termination of pregnancy?

As a person concludes, they should remember to express their stand and provide recommendations. Conclusions of the research paper should have a brief description of abortion, the reasons why it is practiced, the risks involved and the recommendations.

Writing of an essay can be made easier once the guidelines have been adhered to. Always remember that writing demands that one should express their stand to the readers hence making it crystal clear and brief. If you are well conversant with how to write an abortion thesis statement, feel free to share some additional tips that have worked for you.

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The meaning, history and political rhetoric surrounding the term abortion ‘ban’

Experts say ‘ban’ has emerged as shorthand for nearly all abortion prohibitions. the blunt term often leaves room for political spin..

Ban: Merriam-Webster  defines  it as “a legal or formal prohibition.”

But in the 2024 election cycle — the first general election since Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling that enshrined a constitutional right to an abortion, was  overturned  — the term has morphed into polarizing political rhetoric. “Ban” has become synonymous with abortion and the wave of anti-abortion laws enacted in states across the country.

For example, on President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign website, the  abortion policy page’s  title reads: “Donald Trump wants to ban abortion nationwide. Re-elect Joe Biden to stop him and protect reproductive freedom.”

Trump appointed three of the U.S. Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe. After years of inconsistency, Trump  most recently  has said that laws on abortion should be left to the states and that he wouldn’t sign a national abortion ban.

Many Democrats and abortion rights activists have also zeroed in on down-ballot Republicans, accusing them of supporting abortion “bans,” even if their position allows for some access.

“Yesterday, we celebrated Mother’s Day. Today, I remind you that politicians like Bernie Moreno, who supports a national abortion ban, don’t want moms making their own healthcare decisions. Abortion rights are on Ohio’s ballot again in 2024,” Ohio Democrat Allison Russo wrote May 13  on X .

Moreno, who has Trump’s support, is a Republican running for Senate in Ohio against Democratic incumbent Sen. Sherrod Brown. Moreno  has said  that he would vote for a 15-week national abortion ban.

Political discourse experts say “ban” has emerged as shorthand for nearly all abortion prohibitions. The blunt term, nuanced in its myriad interpretations, often leaves room for political spin.

What exactly is a ban?

“Ban” is not a medical term; people across the political spectrum on abortion define it differently.

The word has two main rhetorical functions, political discourse experts said. When people talk to like-minded people about a particular issue, it can reinforce the group’s beliefs. Or, it can label opponents as “extreme.”

“For example, when Joe Biden talks about an assault weapon ban, he’s not trying to convert skeptics — he’s signaling to people who already agree with them that they’re on the same team,” said Ryan Skinnell, an associate professor of rhetoric and writing at San Jose State University. “But the other way ‘ban’ works is to identify someone you disagree with as extreme. Groups who want to keep certain books out of libraries, for instance, rarely describe themselves as in support of book banning. Their opponents adopt that language.”

This dual usage reflects in the abortion fight. Abortion-rights activists use “ban” to signal an infringement on personal freedom and autonomy over medical decisions. Anti-abortion proponents may use “ban” to signal a protection of fetal life. For example, when introducing legislation that ban abortion at various stages,  Republican   politicians  have often framed the bills as moral imperatives that protect unborn life.

Peter Loge, a George Washington University professor who directs the school’s Project on Ethics in Political Communication, said ban has historically meant “to eliminate” or “not have,” but politicians employ a strategic ambiguity that allows listeners to assign their own meaning. Loge, who served as a senior adviser in former President Barack Obama’s Food and Drug Administration, said Obama did this with one of his campaign slogans: “Change We Can Believe In.”

“Well, what does ‘change’ mean? Clearly, it means whatever he thinks it means, but as a listener you will ascribe it to mean whatever you think it means,” Loge said. “So, if I think most abortions should be illegal and in some cases it’s OK, I can support a ban, because it’s a ban with exceptions. The listener plugs in whatever caveats they prefer and ascribes them to the speaker. This is a technique as far back as Aristotle, who wrote that the listener provides the reasoning for themselves.”

Loge, like Skinnell, said “ban” is often used in politics to showcase extremism and the threat of something being taken away.

“It’s the rhetoric of anger. ‘They want to take your rights from you. … Now it’s an ideological divide and it works because we’re going to be more motivated to vote,” Loge said. “People are more concerned about losing something they have than they are interested in getting something new. We are risk-averse.”

Nathan Stormer, a rhetoric professor at the University of Maine and an expert in abortion rhetoric, said the term usually shows up when people refer to making abortion illegal in pregnancy’s earlier stages. But, he added, although common usage typically refers to a first trimester threshold, there is “no set of rules.”

“Because it is not a consistently used term, I think when people do not specify what they are referring to, others may take them to mean at conception or very early, but one has to inquire about context,” Stormer wrote in an email.

How abortion ban rhetoric evolved

Before the 1970s, there was little discussion about abortion bans.

Although legal abortion existed in various states at various stages before the  Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade in 1973,  the ruling’s enshrinement of abortion rights across the country, helped galvanize opposition and mobilize anti-abortion groups.

“There were book bans, pornography bans, dancing bans, and so on. But even most conservative politicians and church groups weren’t especially concerned with abortion as an issue, and there was virtually no concerted political interest in bans,” Skinnell, from San Jose University, said. “That began to change with Richard Nixon.”

Skinnell said the former president’s advisers, in coordination with evangelical Christian church leaders, determined they could connect abortion to left-wing social movements, such as feminism, by linking them consistently in speeches and campaign materials.

“The idea of abortion bans came directly out of that partnership,” Skinnell said, “and it gathered steam in right-wing and conservative circles throughout the next few decades.”

Republicans further popularized the term in the mid-1990s, when they advocated for the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, which President George W. Bush  signed into law  in 2003. The campaign to pass that legislation, experts said, introduced the term “ban” as the abortion restriction’s “stated intent.”

Political rhetoric experts said much of the medical literature and media coverage before Roe v. Wade often used terms such as “illegal” because abortion was considered a criminal act in most states.

“Even in the early stages of criminalizing abortion in the U.S., I don’t think ban was a common term,” Stormer said. “When a restriction is being put in place where before there was not one, people tend to resort to the word ban.”

Emily Winderman, a University of Minnesota professor specializing in the rhetorical study of health and medicine, said that over time abortion “bans” have manifested  as “incremental” restrictions throughout gestational development to the complete prohibitions seen in multiple states today.

For instance, she said, “heartbeat bills,” which typically refer to laws that make abortion illegal as early as six weeks of pregnancy, were controversial when they emerged around 2010, but have become more prevalent since the Trump administration and Roe’s overturning.

Winderman also said bans can appear via code and ordinance restrictions, such as banning  the type of use for a particular piece of real estate — making abortion clinics impossible to place.

“It’s important to understand bans as a complex strategy that includes gestational limits as well as limitations on who can provide care and where,” she said.

Shifting abortion laws across the U.S. have made “ban” an increasingly common term.  Forty-one states  now ban abortion at different points in pregnancy — 14 enforce total bans, three enforce six-week bans and others restrict abortion before fetal viability.

Stormer, from the University of Maine, pointed to Arizona’s Supreme Court reinstating an 1864 law that completely banned abortion. (It  has since been repealed. ) At the time the law was written, conception was not well understood, and there was no clear sense of fertilization or how it worked.

“Reinstating that law was a great example of how the conflict over abortion has remained steady and largely recognizable, but its terms and understandings have been constantly moving, which says something,” Stormer said. “So, specific words do important work, but they do not capture what is happening rhetorically, in my opinion. The moving terminologies are the waves crashing, but the tides are the thing.”

This fact check was originally published by PolitiFact , which is part of the Poynter Institute. See the sources for this fact check here .

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