Logical Late-Term Abortions (Final CPAA)
Abortion was legalized in 1973 after the Roe vs. Wade case and ever since, millions of babies have been aborted in the United States alone. I have gone to a private school my whole life and have heard a lot about abortion. I hear all these facts about how bad it is and why it should be illegal but never really did anything to learn on my own. I decided to look more into late-term abortions. About 1.3% of abortions have been performed in the third trimester of pregnancy but that is still a big number. To help in regulating them, we have certain laws that protect the unborn child when it is too late into the pregnancy. I want to look at these laws and learn more about the regulation of late-term abortions.
An article I found on Live Action News talks about how common third trimester abortions are in the United States despite our laws. The article was written by Rebecca Downs who is a stay at home mother and is also getting her Master's degree from Regent University Robertson School of Government, adding to her credibility of experiencing motherhood and pregnancy. She is also pro-life which shows throughout her writings. The article is laid out using three main bullet points and many small paragraphs under them to support her claim. She also uses a video under the first bullet point to help support her claims. She talks about how often late-term abortions are really performed and about the legality of them when most think they aren’t allowed to happen at all. “While some states have restrictions on abortion, all states permit abortion into the ninth month for certain exceptions. Seven states and Washington, D.C., allow abortion until birth for any reason”. She says many people will claim that late term abortions are rare but also points out the fact that even though only 1.3 percent of abortions are performed in the late term. That small percentage can equate to a lot of abortions when there are over a million performed each year.
Downs likes to use a strong emotional appeal to the audience when she talks about the life of the baby. In her article she argues against studies claiming that a baby doesn’t feel pain until almost 26 weeks into the pregnancy. Using this as her support she says things like “Would that baby be born alive? We won’t know, thanks to our permissive laws leaving us to be a horrifying minority in the world we live in.” She says things like this to make people feel sympathy for the unborn child. She also writes this article using a strong logical standpoint, claiming many things as myths or facts often in her article such as the headers for most of her points. However, many of the points she makes are based off of how loose the laws are in our country.
After looking it up, I discovered a statistic claiming that a majority of late term abortions are performed without a serious health reason. If this statistic is true it would make sense why people want stricter laws for them. Our laws shouldn’t be so easy to get around in the first place to the point where most late-term abortions don’t need or have a health reason behind it. The main thing I got from this article was statistics and information showing me that our laws are faulty. The sources she gets her information from seem to be quite credible but I’ve also heard the opposite from pro-choice people.
The information in this article coincides with what I always believed but I doesn’t include the the pro-choice view at all. I want to know both sides to fully understand why people believe what they believe and what influences them to believe it. I decided to search for the opposite opinion and compare the information they had to what Downs wrote about to help me understand more about this issue.
The source that I found on “Everyday Feminism” has almost exactly what I am looking for which is someone supporting women’s rights and more specifically late-term abortions. The author, Laura Kacere, has written many articles on this site about different women’s rights topics but there are quite a bit about abortions in general. The article is titled “The Truth About Late-Term Abortions” and most of what she writes about is information from her point of view, making many truth claims like Downs did which doesn’t really add to their credibility or the logos of her argument. Her main belief is that late-term abortion laws aren’t any help at all, but make it too hard for mothers to get them. She says “Obtaining a late term abortion is made even more difficult financially, physically, and emotionally.” when talking about the different things women have to go through to get them. She also talks about how many people make assumptions about the reasons to get late-term abortions such as the mother being lazy or the abortions being cruel which can end up hurting the mothers who need to get them. Most of the rest of the article talks about why mothers want and get late term abortions such as, unknown pregnancy, price chasing, health of the mother, and deformities in the child.
In her article, Kacere uses an emotional appeal when she makes many statements that make you feel bad for the mothers. She is using the same persuasive techniques that Downs, but instead she is trying to get you to look from the point of view of the mother carrying this baby. She stated she would talk about the false reasons why mothers are getting late-term abortions but really only mentioned one which is that it is not a form of birth control. She goes into more detail when she talks about how most late-term abortions are performed on mothers who want to have the baby, but there are fetal anomalies or risk to the mother discovered late in the pregnancy. These claims are the complete opposite of what I read in the first article when Downs claimed most aren’t for these types of health reasons. When she talks about the late-term abortions that occur due to unknown pregnancy or denial of being pregnant, these can fit into the category of non-health related but they are still serious reasons to get one.
From what Kacere wrote in this article it seems like most of the late-term abortions are for logical reasons and the laws stopping them are only burdens on the mother’s life but like I talked about before, she is using mostly emotion and opinion in her article which is also what Downs did. This article really only made me look from the perspective from the mother more which should always be done when considering women’s rights. It is hard to make sense of all this information when the first two articles I looked at are complete opposites and have conflicting evidence. I want to find one more article that can maybe shed some more light on the actual statistics and studies done about late-term abortion.
The final article I found on LiveStrong gives a lot more information than the last two sources. The page is quite short but seems to really give the facts over opinion and emotion. The article is called “Facts on Late-Term Abortions” The first thing you see on the page is a big picture of parents seeming to get bad news from a doctor. I’m not sure what it is supposed to do with the article but it makes you thinks something is going to be bad. The article is written by Meg Brannaagan who is a nurse that specializes in women’s and children’s health which adds to her overall credibility in this specific topic. She only makes 5 main points in the article which are Identification, Statistics, Reasons, Viability, and Laws. There isn’t any opinion included, just the facts about the topic.
In the article it confirms and puts down most of the arguments made in the last few articles. In the section about laws it tells us what we already know which is that late-term abortions are illegal in most states with some exceptions. The section that gives me the information I wanted most was the one about statistics. This section talked about how only 1.5% of abortions are done in the late-term of the pregnancy which is slightly higher than both of the other sources said. The other thing talked about is the risk for the mother. She said “ The possibility of a woman's death associated with abortion increases with the length of gestation” which does show that the laws are also for the mothers, not just the babies, but doesn’t say much past that. When she talks about viability in the article, the main point is that most babies can survive past a certain point which is a big argument in the debate on whether or not it should be illegal. She writes that it is around 23-25 weeks into a pregnancy where it becomes past that point which makes sense because that is where most laws put the deadline.
This article made some more sense than the last two but still leaves holes in the debate. I learned that all we really have are some statistics and facts but many people are making decisions based on only opinion. Reading these articles taught me a lot about both sides of the argument but ended up leaving me with even more questions. Should late term abortions really illegal and if so why are laws we have to protect the mother and the child so easy to avoid?
https://www.liveaction.org/news/there-is-no-federal-law-protecting-the-preborn-from-abortion-at-any-time/
https://everydayfeminism.com/2014/06/truth-late-term-abortions/
https://www.livestrong.com/article/181997-facts-about-adoption-instead-of-abortion/