abortion
Abortion: Whose choice? Abortion in today's society has become very political. You are either pro-choice or pro-life, and there doesn't seem to be a happy medium. As we look at abortion and research its history, should it remain legal in the United States, or should it be outlawed to reduce the ever growing rate of abortion. A choice should continue to exist but the emphasis needs to be placed on education of the parties involved. James C. Mohr takes a good look at abortion in his book Abortion in America. He takes us back in history to the 1800s so we can understand how the practice and legalization of abortion has changed over the year. In the absence of any legislation whatsoever on the subject of abortion in the U.S. in 1800, the legal status of the practice was governed by the traditional British common law as interpreted by the local courts of new American states. For centuries prior to 1800 the key to the common law's attitude towards abortion had been a phenomenon asso!ciated with normal gestation as quickening. Quickening was the first perception of fetal movement by the pregnant woman herself. Quickening generally occurred during the mid-point of gestation, late in the fourth or early in the fifth month, though it woul
The second overwhelming incident of abortion, according to the commentary observers began to rise in the early 1840's and !remained at high levels through the 1870's. Consequently, after four decades of rapid change, American abortion policy re-estabilized during the final two decades of the nineteenth century while legislative responses typical to the 1860s and 1870s wove themselves deeply into the fabric of American law. Public opinion is turned to make abortion illegal the popular press and church had joined with the leaders of the charge the physicians. The two groups of regulars most vulnerable to proffered bonuses for abortions were young men struggling to break into the viciously competitive laissez faire medical market of the 1840s and the 1850s and older practitioners losing their skills and their reputatio!ns during the 1860s and 1870s, when modern medicine took long strides forward and physicians unfamiliar with the new breakthroughs began to fall behind (95). Jesse Boring of the Atlanta Medical School, who was at the AMA meeting in 1857, when Storer called for action, came out publicly against the " prevalent laxity of moral sentiment of this subject, as evidenced by the increasing frequency of induced abortions"(155). In 1834 legislators there made attempted abortion a misdemeanor without specifying any stage of gestation, and they made the death of either the woman or the fetus after quickening a felony (39,40), Alabama enacted a major code revision during the 1840/1841 session of its legislature that made the abortion of "any pregnant woman" a statuate crime for the first time in that state, but pregnant meant quickened (40). As late as 1834 it was axiomatic to a medical student at the University of Maryland, who wrote his dissertation on spontaneous abortion, that woman who feigned dysmenorrhea in order to obtain abortions from physicians were woman who had been involved in illicit intercourse. Could offer temptations that were worth the risk to a regular of being found out by his colleagues. Morally, the question of whether or not the fetus was "alive" had been the subject of philosophical and religious debate among honest people for 5,000 years. We must stop, because if we don't, then indeed the very type of theological argument being used! against abortion can be turned around and used to proclaim that abortion is biblical (18). Some 13 jurisdictions formally outlawed abortion for the first time, and at least 21 states revised their already existing statutes on the subject. Not until the obstruction moved would either a physician or a woman regardless of their suspicions be completely certain that it was a "natural" !blockage-a pregnancy-rather than a potentially dangerous situation.
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Acceptance Essays
