Abortion

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Abortion

“Abortion is a procedure, either surgical or medical, to end a pregnancy by removing the fetus and placenta from the uterus.” This definition (A.D.A.M., 2003) is a dry medical definition that lacks meaning. This paper attempts to apply meaning to this dry definition, and in doing so, will show the less known and less published side of abortion; the human side.

A Brief History

Archaeologists have recently uncovered Roman ruins that contain the evidence of aborted children, abandoned children, and children that were destroyed just after birth (infanticide); all of these bodies were recovered from a brothel. Fast forwarding a few hundred years, Thomas Aquinas wrote on the evils of abortion, and the moral implications of such a practice in a civilized society. These two examples of “ancient” history show that abortion has been around a long, long time, and has been used as a means of birth control, to end unwanted pregnancies, for some time now; it is not a recent development. The act of destroying the young before birth has been present in the world for a while, however, but it has been only in the last century that this problem has reached an epidemic proportion. In the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, the first abortion legislation in the United States was proposed, mainly concerned with the application of penalties for illegal abortions; outlines what abortions would be considered legal. It should be noted, that these early proposals wanted to legalize abortion for reasons including the mental or physical health of the mother, pregnancy due to rape and incest, and fetal deformity (NRLC, 2003). In the late 1960’s forms of the earlier abortion legislation was passed in a few states; the number of states...

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... of people out there that are able to think for themselves, based on the given facts and evidence. I would like to commend everyone in the class for giving me an opportunity to enjoy their views on life, for it helped me to better understand my own views.

Bibliography

The Boycott List. Life Decisions International. Washington. 2002

“Life and death before birth.” Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life 2003 Pro-life Resource Book. MCCL. Minneapolis. 2002

Heritage House 76. 2003. Arguments of Abortion. [Online].

http://www.abortionfacts.com/parsing_the_arguments/parsing_the_arguments.asp

[Dec 14, 2003]

Heritage House 76. 2003. History of Abortion. [Online].

http://www.abortionfacts.com/history/history.asp [Dec 14, 2003]

NRLC. 2003. Abortion: Some Medical Facts. [Online].

http://www.nrlc.org/abortion/ASMF/asmf.html [Dec 02, 2003]

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