Ethics And Values: The Abortion Debate

Improved Essays
Hamblin 1
Dyllan Hamblin
Final Exam Essay
Ethics and Values
Abortion
An abortion is when the pregnancy is ended so that it does not result in the birth of a child. The pregnancy is taken away either by taking pills, which cause a miscarriage or by surgery to remove the pregnancy from the womb. The debate of whether abortion is right or wrong is a tough one. Out of all the research I’ve done on abortion, the prevalent theme among the two sides seem to be whether abortion is murder or not. What is murder exactly? Well, according to the Merriam Webster Dictionary the definition of murder is: The crime of unlawfully killing a person especially with maleficence aforethought. Is abortion murder? Is a fetus considered a human being? Each side has their opinions on whether a fetus is a human or not. The most important part of the debate is the reasons as to why women choose abortion.
The top three reasons women choose abortion are financial, relationship quandaries, and having a negative impact on the mother’s life. All three of these reasons tie into each other. Financially, babies are expensive. The hospital bills alone are roughly 10,000 dollars. Not to mention if you don’t have insurance you will be paying that out-of-pocket. The majority of women with unplanned pregnancies do not live with their partners, or have a committed relationship. The women who want to keep their child will do so as a single mother. The whole Hamblin 2 pregnancy is stressful enough for women, now integrate the debt, and the fact you are going to do it all alone, with no support from your partner. Things start to look a lot bleaker at that point. On the other end of the spectrum you have multiple reasons to have the child. You expunge the chance of getting hurt by an abortion by simply just having the child. If you are religious, most religions are against having abortions and will repremand you for having one. An example of that would be how a woman can’t take communion after having an abortion. Most of all it will be on the woman’s conscience sempiternally, she may go back to it thinking it was a mistake and she will have to deal with that. Both sides have their reasoning behind whether or not abortion is ethical. But, I would be intrigued in what John Stuart
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For Immanuel Kant another highly regarded philosopher it should. Kant believed that it is wrong to take a human life, especially if it’s not the human’s choice. Kant for the most part saw things in black and white. There is only good and bad. For abortion if it is in fact murder, murder is wrong. The abortion may be doing what is best
Hamblin 3 for everyone, but the act of killing is naturally wrong. It all depends on your viewpoint of what you consider life. This is the main point in the debates of pro-life and pro-choice. If you consider the fetus is not alive when it’s in the woman’s womb, then it isn’t unethical to abort it. If you believe it is alive and you abort it, you essentially just murdered an innocent child. Abortion is a very controversial issue. It’s understandable why people have moral conflicts over the topic, and that is their right. Is abortion moral or immoral? It all depends on your perspective, no matter how correct a perspective sounds, there will always be critiques and quandaries found in each

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