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Abortion Is a Beneficial Choice
| Article
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20512 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1992 |
5,204 Words |
| Author
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Malcolm Potts
Malcolm Potts is a physician and embryologist. He is director
of International Family Health, a London-based family
planning and anti-AIDS organization. Dr. Potts was medical
director of the International Planned Parenthood Federation
for ten years and developed the handheld vacuum aspiration
syringe for early-term abortions. He has authored nine books
and over two hundred scientific papers. |
By all objectively observable parameters, legal abortion is an enormous boon to any society. Specifically,
1. It greatly reduces maternal mortality.
2. For women who have an abortion, it usually solves a social, emotional, or physical problem with little immediate or long-term risk.
3. The follow-up of children who were born "unwanted " suggests they may be at a social disadvantage.
4. Legal efforts to restrict abortion choices have little or no effect on the number of abortions taking place but undermine respect for the law and invite the exploitation of women.
5. Allowing free access to abortion affirms a government's respect for the individual citizen's conscience, a most important facet of any truly democratic state.
In all Western, industrialized countries, with the exception of Ireland, Malta, and the United States, democratically elected parliamentarians have drafted legislation to give women various levels of access to safe abortion. By contrast, some of the worst dictators of the twentieth century restricted a woman's freedom to choose abortion. Nicolae Ceausescu, Joseph Stalin, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Idi Amin, and Adolf Hitler were all opposed to the practice, and its denial to women in need contributed to the oppressiveness of those men's regimes.
When on January 22, 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down restrictive state abortion laws, the United States itself was relieved of a burden of oppression and by most measures became a "kinder, gentler nation."
Obviously, abortion is not a simple subject, and sincere and informed individuals continue to lobby against abortion choices. The Bush administration is working avidly to reverse Roe v. Wade, and in some parts of the United States the polarization of opinion on abortion has turned into a virtual civil war. In places, it has led to physical violence, with the firebombing of clinics and the physical obstruction of women seeking abortions. Can the two groups ever be brought into the same tent, however huge?
I am a physician who practiced obstetrics when abortion was
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