ARGUMENTATIVE ESSAY: IS ABORTION IMMORAL?
Is it immoral for a person to live? Is it right for someone to deny another person the right to live? How does our society view the concept of abortion? Abortion involves deliberate termination or expulsion of a pregnancy closely followed by the death of the embryo or fetus. This implies that the pregnancy is ended so that it doesn’t result in the birth of a child. It is therefore immoral to carry out an abortion because of the following reasons:
First, the fetus is an innocent human being and it is morally wrong to kill an innocent human being simply because it impairs it more than exposing it to alcohol during pregnancy. Since abortion amounts to killing the fetus, this means that abortion is immoral. If killing fetuses is moral because they are not fully-fledged members of the moral community, then, killing newborns would be acceptable as well. Killing any non-human animal would also be acceptable. But this is not the case.
Secondly, every human being has a right to live. Someone should, therefore, exercise this right without infringing another individual his or her freedom to enjoy the same right. This is to the implication that whoever contravenes such a right is liable for conviction unless stated otherwise in any court of law.
Similarly, abortion encourages prostitution, a socially unacceptable practice. Most ladies who engage in pre-marital sex end up carrying abortion in cases of unwanted pregnancy. Married women who engage in sexual intercourse outside marriage are not excluded. In a study conducted in Teresina Piaui on induced abortion among prostitutes, it was found that most prostitutes performed 1 abortion (50.3%), but 16.5% of them reported carrying out 3 or more (Alberto Pereira Madeiro et al, 2012).
Even though abortion is immoral, it is advantageous in some circumstances. It is reasonable enough to emulate the practice when a pregnancy is as a result of rape, threatens the life of a pregnant woman or girl would result in the birth of a child with life-threatening malformations. In such instances, abortion is deemed to be of great importance in saving the pregnant women in question, stress, shame, and unnecessary medical expenditures for the unfit pregnancies. Similarly, the raped victims are freed from excessive mental torture. Moreover, the malformed fetuses are saved from future sufferings.
In conclusion, abortion is generally immoral. Going by the principle of morality as applied in the social and behavioral learning theories, there are many benefits of being right and good. Concurrently, several negative consequences result from being bad or wrong. The consequences of unsafe abortion are quite adverse and are worth avoiding. These are not limited to physical complications including sepsis, hemorrhage, genital trauma, and even death. The physical complications are more severe in adolescents than older women and this results in increased mortality and morbidity. Abortion practice should, therefore, be discouraged using all the possible means. Lodging anti-abortion campaigns to minimize it is priceless.