Should Abortion Remain Legal?

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Should Abortion Remain Legal
America is a land of choices and rights, a land of opportunities and freedom but where do we draw the line? On May 3, 1971, the United States Supreme Court agreed to consider the abortion cases Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. (American Life League, n.d., 1)
On January 22, 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court announced its decision in Roe v. Wade, a challenge to a Texas statute that made it a crime to perform an abortion unless a woman’s life was at stake. “Jane Roe,” an unmarried woman who wanted to safely and legally terminate her pregnancy, had filed the case. Siding with Roe, the court struck down the Texas law. In its ruling, the court recognized for the first time that the constitutional right to privacy “is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy” (Roe v. Wade, 1973). Before the Courts’ ruling, the majority of states banned abortion, although most allowed an exception when a pregnant woman’s medical condition threatened the woman’s life. The Court overturned these state prohibitions in Roe v. Wade. The Court ruled that states could restrict abortions only during the final three months of pregnancy, a stage when medical experts considered the fetus capable of “meaningful life” outside the womb. The abortion debate has become one of the most divisive political issues in the United States and the Pro-choice, Pro-life campaigns have dominated most of the political debates of this century.
“While Americans hold an enormous variety of opinions on the morality or propriety of abortions for particular reasons or stages of pregnancy or circumstances, a majority continues to agree that it is the individual woman and not government that should do the deciding...

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...ceholders are men who will never be pregnant and will never have to be faced with this difficult choice.
” It is a tremendously underappreciated part of the history of this issue how many just how many fully credentialed and well-respected doctors were, ’under the table’, so to speak, providing abortion services prior to 1967 to women patients whom they knew and who could pay” (Garrow.) Legalizing abortion has prevented a number of horrific coat hanger cases, which would have occurred, whether the court ruling existed or not. Now required abortions are performed in a safe and scientific way. I believe that all the states must strictly enforce the circumstances under which these abortions are considered legal. Freedom abused is freedom lost. Just as any other, right many should not take advantage of, especially, since the consequences are permanent and lasting.

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