Why Abortions are Legal?

Abortion is never an easy decision. But women have been making that choice for thousands of years, for many good reasons. Women today have the legal right to make their own decisions about abortion. Following are the reasons why our society thinks that each woman should make the abortion decision herself.

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• Laws against abortion might kill women: By prohibiting abortions one cannot stop women from opting for abortions. When women feel it is absolutely necessary, they will choose to have abortions, even in secret, without medical care, in dangerous circumstances. There have been instances before abortion was legal, that nearly a million women per year sought out illegal abortions and thousands died. Tens of thousands were mutilated. All were forced to behave as if they were criminals.
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• Legal abortions protect women's health: The availability of legal abortion has helped women to avert serious medical complications that could have resulted from childbirth. Legal abortion not only protects women's lives, but it also protects their health. It's helpful for tens of thousands of women with heart disease, kidney disease, severe hypertension, sickle-cell anemia and severe diabetes, and other illnesses that can be life threatening. Before legal abortion, such women's choices were limited to dangerous illegal abortion or dangerous childbirth.
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• A woman is more than a foetus: There's an argument these days that a foetus is a "person" that is "indistinguishable from the rest of us" and that it deserves rights equal to that of women. It's been argued for centuries. Fortunately, our society has recognised that each woman must be able to make this decision, based on her own conscience. To impose a law defining a foetus as a "person," granting it rights equal to or superior to a woman's (thinking, feeling, conscious human being) -how justified is it?
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• Outlawing abortion is discriminatory: Anti-abortion laws act as a discriminate against low-income women. They might be driven to dangerous self-induced or back-alley abortions because that is all they can afford while the rich have the option to travel wherever necessary to obtain a safe abortion
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• Compulsory pregnancy laws are incompatible with a free society: There can be no more extreme invasion of privacy than requiring a woman to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term.
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• Outlaw abortion, and more children will bear children: Forty percent of 14-year-old girls will become pregnant before they turn 20. Should the penalty for lack of knowledge or even for a moment's carelessness be enforced pregnancy and childrearing?
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• "Every child a wanted child.": If women are forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, the result is unwanted children. Often they are uncared-for, unloved, brutalized, and abandoned. Children need love and families who want and will care for them.
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Perhaps for all these choice is good for families. An unintended pregnancy can increase tensions, disrupt stability, and push people below the line of economic survival. Even when precautions are taken, accidents can and do happen. All options must be open.