Abortion/Pro-Choice

FEW WORDS IN THE HISTORY of the United States have caused more controversy than abortion. Abortion is an issue that encourages absolutist views on both sides. Pro-choice advocates argue that abortion rights deal with the right of women to control their own bodies. Anti-choice advocates claim that abortion is murder under all circumstances. Other views are more moderate. Some anti-choice may accept rape, incest, fetal deformity, and threats to maternal mortality as valid exceptions to a total ban on abortions. Some pro-choice advocates may oppose late-term abortions. The battle for control of the issue has been waged in homes, family-planning clinics, the streets, and in administrative offices, courts, and legislatures at both the state and national levels.

Conservatives who believe that government should uphold traditional sanctions against the taking of human life have asserted that the killing of any fetus at any age represents a violation of the inherent right to life. The anti-abortion position has attracted support from religious conservatives who believe that abortion represents only one symptom of moral decay in modern culture. On the other hand, liberals have been attracted to the pro-choice position precisely because they believe that the realm of personal moral choice includes control over reproduction. Furthermore, by freeing women from the obligation to have unwanted children, they see the extension of abortion rights as a step in the direction of the liberation of women. However, the division between conservatives and liberals on this issue often cuts across conservative-liberal alignments on other issues. Thus, for example, opposition to abortion can be found among both men and women who are active in labor union causes, while pro-abortion advocates can be found among otherwise conservative Republicans in the United States.

When the U.S. Constitution was written in 1787, abortion was accepted as a matter of course, and few people considered it a legal issue. Over the next few decades, newspapers regularly carried ads for various [Page 4]methods to induce abortion. During the mid-19th century, the medical profession led the move to limit abortion in order to gain control over women's health issues and to shut midwives out of the birthing process. As a result, many states banned abortions after “quickening,” the point at which the mother first felt the fetus move. In 1873, Congress passed the Comstock Law, which was designed to prevent the transfer of materials that Anthony Comstock viewed as obscene. This included not only ads related to abortion, but also all information concerning birth control.

In 1945, Alan Guttmacher, a physician and a birth control advocate, devised a plan to cut down on the number of botched abortions. Guttmacher developed the idea of therapeutic abortions that were performed in hospitals by licensed medical personnel to protect the physical and psychological health of pregnant women. Hundreds of hospitals responded by appointing committees to determine whether women requesting abortions met the “therapeutic” standard.

The national media drew attention to the abortion debate in 1962 when it was discovered that a number of American women who had participated in medical tests had received the drug Thalidomide. This drug, which had been used routinely in Europe, was responsible for an epidemic of birth deformities that ranged from babies born without arms and legs to serious internal deformities. In Europe, 5,000 such babies were born. Sherri Finkbine, the mother of four children and the host of the children's television show Romper Room, took the medication without knowing she was pregnant. Finkbine ultimately obtained an abortion in Switzerland after being harassed and threatened by local anti-abortion advocates and being vilified around the country. The abortion battle heated up again four years later during a German-measles epidemic in San Francisco, California. Ninety percent of babies born to mothers who had been exposed to measles were born with significant birth defects. Sates began to pass more liberal abortion laws.

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