should abortion be legal essay body

There Are More Than Two Sides to the Abortion Debate

Readers share their perspectives.

Sign up for Conor’s newsletter here.

Earlier this week I curated some nuanced commentary on abortion and solicited your thoughts on the same subject. What follows includes perspectives from several different sides of the debate. I hope each one informs your thinking, even if only about how some other people think.

We begin with a personal reflection.

Cheryl was 16 when New York State passed a statute legalizing abortion and 19 when Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973. At the time she was opposed to the change, because “it just felt wrong.” Less than a year later, her mother got pregnant and announced she was getting an abortion.

She recalled:

My parents were still married to each other, and we were financially stable. Nonetheless, my mother’s announcement immediately made me a supporter of the legal right to abortion. My mother never loved me. My father was physically abusive and both parents were emotionally and psychologically abusive on a virtually daily basis. My home life was hellish. When my mother told me about the intended abortion, my first thought was, “Thank God that they won’t be given another life to destroy.” I don’t deny that there are reasons to oppose abortion. As a feminist and a lawyer, I can now articulate several reasons for my support of legal abortion: a woman’s right to privacy and autonomy and to the equal protection of the laws are near the top of the list. (I agree with Ruth Bader Ginsburg that equal protection is a better legal rationale for the right to abortion than privacy.) But my emotional reaction from 1971 still resonates with me. Most people who comment on the issue, on both sides, do not understand what it is to go through childhood unloved. It is horrific beyond my powers of description. To me, there is nothing more immoral than forcing that kind of life on any child. Anti-abortion activists often like to ask supporters of abortion rights: “Well, what if your mother had decided to abort you?” All I can say is that I have spent a great portion of my life wishing that my mother had done exactly that.

Steven had related thoughts:

I have respect for the idea that there should be some restrictions on abortion. But the most fundamental, and I believe flawed, unstated assumptions of the anti-choice are that A) they are acting on behalf of the fetus, and more importantly B) they know what the fetus would want. I would rather not have been born than to have been born to a mother who did not want me. All children should be wanted children—for the sake of all concerned. You can say that different fetuses would “want” different things—though it’s hard to say a clump of cells “wants” anything. How would we know? The argument lands, as it does generally, with the question of who should be making that decision. Who best speaks in the fetus’s interests? Who is better positioned morally or practically than the expectant mother?

Geoff self-describes as “pro-life” and guilty of some hypocrisy. He writes:

I’m pro-life because I have a hard time with the dehumanization that comes with the extremes of abortion on demand … Should it be okay to get an abortion when you find your child has Down syndrome? What of another abnormality? Or just that you didn’t want a girl? Any argument that these are legitimate reasons is disturbing. But so many of the pro-life just don’t seem to care about life unless it’s a fetus they can force a woman to carry. The hypocrisy is real. While you can argue that someone on death row made a choice that got them to that point, whereas a fetus had no say, I find it still hard to swallow that you can claim one life must be protected and the other must be taken. Life should be life. At least in the Catholic Church this is more consistent. I myself am guilty of a degree of hypocrisy. My wife and I used IVF to have our twins. There were other embryos created and not inserted. They were eventually destroyed. So did I support killing a life? Maybe? I didn’t want to donate them for someone else to give birth to—it felt wrong to think my twins may have brothers or sisters in the world they would never know about. Yet does that mean I was more willing to kill my embryos than to have them adopted? Sure seems like it. So I made a morality deal with myself and moved the goal post—the embryos were not yet in a womb and were so early in development that they couldn’t be considered fully human life. They were still potential life.

Colleen, a mother of three, describes why she ended her fourth pregnancy:

I was young when I first engaged this debate. Raised Catholic, anti-choice, and so committed to my position that I broke my parents’ hearts by giving birth during my junior year of college. At that time, my sense of my own rights in the matter was almost irrelevant. I was enslaved by my body. One husband and two babies later I heard a remarkable Jesuit theologian (I wish I could remember his name) speak on the matter and he, a Catholic priest, framed it most directly. We prioritize one life over another all the time. Most obviously, we justify the taking of life in war with all kinds of arguments that often turn out to be untrue. We also do so as we decide who merits access to health care or income support or other life-sustaining things. So the question of abortion then boils down to: Who gets to decide? Who gets to decide that the life of a human in gestation is actually more valuable than the life of the woman who serves as host—or vice versa? Who gets to decide when the load a woman is being asked to carry is more than she can bear? The state? Looking back over history, he argued that he certainly had more faith in the person most involved to make the best decision than in any formalized structure—church or state—created by men. Every form of birth control available failed me at one point or another, so when yet a 4th pregnancy threatened to interrupt the education I had finally been able to resume, I said “Enough.” And as I cried and struggled to come to that position, the question that haunted me was “Doesn’t MY life count?” And I decided it did.

Florence articulates what it would take to make her anti-abortion:

What people seem to miss is that depriving a woman of bodily autonomy is slavery. A person who does not control his/her own body is—what? A slave. At its simplest, this is the issue. I will be anti-abortion when men and women are equal in all facets of life—wages, chores, child-rearing responsibilities, registering for the draft, to name a few obvious ones. When there is birth control that is effective, where women do not bear most of the responsibility. We need to raise boys who are respectful to girls, who do not think that they are entitled to coerce a girl into having sex that she doesn’t really want or is unprepared for. We need for sex education to be provided in schools so young couples know what they are getting into when they have sex. Especially the repercussions of pregnancy. We need to raise girls who are confident and secure, who don’t believe they need a male to “complete” them. Who have enough agency to say “no” and to know why. We have to make abortion unnecessary … We have so far to go. If abortion is ruled illegal, or otherwise curtailed, we will never know if the solutions to women’s second-class status will work. We will be set back to the 50s or worse. I don’t want to go back. Women have fought from the beginning of time to own their bodies and their lives. To deprive us of all of the amazing strides forward will affect all future generations.

Similarly, Ben agrees that in our current environment, abortion is often the only way women can retain equal citizenship and participation in society, but also agrees with pro-lifers who critique the status quo, writing that he doesn’t want a world where a daughter’s equality depends on her right “to perform an act of violence on their potential descendents.” Here’s how he resolves his conflictedness:

Conservatives arguing for a more family-centered society, in which abortion is unnecessary to protect the equal rights of women, are like liberals who argue for defunding the police and relying on addiction, counselling, and other services, in that they argue for removing what offends them without clear, credible plans to replace the functions it serves. I sincerely hope we can move towards a world in which armed police are less necessary. But before we can remove the guardrails of the police, we need to make the rest of the changes so that the world works without them. Once liberal cities that have shown interest in defunding the police can prove that they can fund alternatives, and that those alternatives work, then I will throw my support behind defunding the police. Similarly, once conservative politicians demonstrate a credible commitment to an alternative vision of society in which women are supported, families are not taken for granted, and careers and short-term productivity are not the golden calves they are today, I will be willing to support further restrictions on abortion. But until I trust that they are interested in solving the underlying problem (not merely eliminating an aspect they find offensive), I will defend abortion, as terrible as it is, within reasonable legal limits.

Two readers objected to foregrounding gender equality. One emailed anonymously, writing in part:

A fetus either is or isn’t a person. The reason I’m pro-life is that I’ve never heard a coherent defense of the proposition that a fetus is not a person, and I’m not sure one can be made. I’ve read plenty of progressive commentary, and when it bothers to make an argument for abortion “rights” at all, it talks about “the importance of women’s healthcare” or something as if that were the issue.

Christopher expanded on that last argument:

Of the many competing ethical concerns, the one that trumps them all is the status of the fetus. It is the only organism that gets destroyed by the procedure. Whether that is permissible trumps all other concerns. Otherwise important ethical claims related to a woman’s bodily autonomy, less relevant social disparities caused by the differences in men’s and women’s reproductive functions, and even less relevant differences in partisan commitments to welfare that would make abortion less appealing––all of that is secondary. The relentless strategy by the pro-choice to sidestep this question and pretend that a woman’s right to bodily autonomy is the primary ethical concern is, to me, somewhere between shibboleth and mass delusion. We should spend more time, even if it’s unproductive, arguing about the status of the fetus, because that is the question, and we should spend less time indulging this assault-on-women’s-rights narrative pushed by the Left.

Jean is critical of the pro-life movement:

Long-acting reversible contraceptives, robust, science-based sex education for teens, and a stronger social safety net would all go a remarkable way toward decreasing the number of abortions sought. Yet all the emphasis seems to be on simply making abortion illegal. For many, overturning Roe v. Wade is not about reducing abortions so much as signalling that abortion is wrong. If so-called pro-lifers were as concerned about abortion as they seem to be, they would spend more time, effort, and money supporting efforts to reduce the need for abortion—not simply trying to make it illegal without addressing why women seek it out. Imagine, in other words, a world where women hardly needed to rely on abortion for their well-being and ability to thrive. Imagine a world where almost any woman who got pregnant had planned to do so, or was capable of caring for that child. What is the anti-abortion movement doing to promote that world?

Destiny has one relevant answer. She writes:

I run a pro-life feminist group and we often say that our goal is not to make abortion illegal, but rather unnecessary and unthinkable by supporting women and humanizing the unborn child so well.

Robert suggests a different focus:

Any well-reasoned discussion of abortion policy must include contraception because abortion is about unwanted children brought on by poorly reasoned choices about sex. Such choices will always be more emotional than rational. Leaving out contraception makes it an unrealistic, airy discussion of moral philosophy. In particular, we need to consider government-funded programs of long-acting reversible contraception which enable reasoned choices outside the emotional circumstances of having sexual intercourse.

Last but not least, if anyone can unite the pro-life and pro-choice movements, it’s Errol, whose thoughts would rankle majorities in both factions as well as a majority of Americans. He writes:

The decision to keep the child should not be left up solely to the woman. Yes, it is her body that the child grows in, however once that child is birthed it is now two people’s responsibility. That’s entirely unfair to the father when he desired the abortion but the mother couldn’t find it in her heart to do it. If a woman wants to abort and the man wants to keep it, she should abort. However I feel the same way if a man wants to abort. The next 18+ years of your life are on the line. I view that as a trade-off that warrants the male’s input. Abortion is a conversation that needs to be had by two people, because those two will be directly tied to the result for a majority of their life. No one else should be involved with that decision, but it should not be solely hers, either.

Thanks to all who contributed answers to this week’s question, whether or not they were among the ones published. What subjects would you like to see fellow readers address in future installments? Email [email protected].

By submitting an email, you’ve agreed to let us use it—in part or in full—in this newsletter and on our website. Published feedback includes a writer’s full name, city, and state, unless otherwise requested in your initial note.

Find anything you save across the site in your account

How the Right to Legal Abortion Changed the Arc of All Women’s Lives

By Katha Pollitt

I’ve never had an abortion. In this, I am like most American women. A frequently quoted statistic from a recent study by the Guttmacher Institute, which reports that one in four women will have an abortion before the age of forty-five, may strike you as high, but it means that a large majority of women never need to end a pregnancy. (Indeed, the abortion rate has been declining for decades, although it’s disputed how much of that decrease is due to better birth control, and wider use of it, and how much to restrictions that have made abortions much harder to get.) Now that the Supreme Court seems likely to overturn Roe v. Wade sometime in the next few years—Alabama has passed a near-total ban on abortion, and Ohio, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Missouri have passed “heartbeat” bills that, in effect, ban abortion later than six weeks of pregnancy, and any of these laws, or similar ones, could prove the catalyst—I wonder if women who have never needed to undergo the procedure, and perhaps believe that they never will, realize the many ways that the legal right to abortion has undergirded their lives.

Legal abortion means that the law recognizes a woman as a person. It says that she belongs to herself. Most obviously, it means that a woman has a safe recourse if she becomes pregnant as a result of being raped. (Believe it or not, in some states, the law allows a rapist to sue for custody or visitation rights.) It means that doctors no longer need to deny treatment to pregnant women with certain serious conditions—cancer, heart disease, kidney disease—until after they’ve given birth, by which time their health may have deteriorated irretrievably. And it means that non-Catholic hospitals can treat a woman promptly if she is having a miscarriage. (If she goes to a Catholic hospital, she may have to wait until the embryo or fetus dies. In one hospital, in Ireland, such a delay led to the death of a woman named Savita Halappanavar, who contracted septicemia. Her case spurred a movement to repeal that country’s constitutional amendment banning abortion.)

The legalization of abortion, though, has had broader and more subtle effects than limiting damage in these grave but relatively uncommon scenarios. The revolutionary advances made in the social status of American women during the nineteen-seventies are generally attributed to the availability of oral contraception, which came on the market in 1960. But, according to a 2017 study by the economist Caitlin Knowles Myers, “The Power of Abortion Policy: Re-Examining the Effects of Young Women’s Access to Reproductive Control,” published in the Journal of Political Economy , the effects of the Pill were offset by the fact that more teens and women were having sex, and so birth-control failure affected more people. Complicating the conventional wisdom that oral contraception made sex risk-free for all, the Pill was also not easy for many women to get. Restrictive laws in some states barred it for unmarried women and for women under the age of twenty-one. The Roe decision, in 1973, afforded thousands upon thousands of teen-agers a chance to avoid early marriage and motherhood. Myers writes, “Policies governing access to the pill had little if any effect on the average probabilities of marrying and giving birth at a young age. In contrast, policy environments in which abortion was legal and readily accessible by young women are estimated to have caused a 34 percent reduction in first births, a 19 percent reduction in first marriages, and a 63 percent reduction in ‘shotgun marriages’ prior to age 19.”

Access to legal abortion, whether as a backup to birth control or not, meant that women, like men, could have a sexual life without risking their future. A woman could plan her life without having to consider that it could be derailed by a single sperm. She could dream bigger dreams. Under the old rules, inculcated from girlhood, if a woman got pregnant at a young age, she married her boyfriend; and, expecting early marriage and kids, she wouldn’t have invested too heavily in her education in any case, and she would have chosen work that she could drop in and out of as family demands required.

In 1970, the average age of first-time American mothers was younger than twenty-two. Today, more women postpone marriage until they are ready for it. (Early marriages are notoriously unstable, so, if you’re glad that the divorce rate is down, you can, in part, thank Roe.) Women can also postpone childbearing until they are prepared for it, which takes some serious doing in a country that lacks paid parental leave and affordable childcare, and where discrimination against pregnant women and mothers is still widespread. For all the hand-wringing about lower birth rates, most women— eighty-six per cent of them —still become mothers. They just do it later, and have fewer children.

Most women don’t enter fields that require years of graduate-school education, but all women have benefitted from having larger numbers of women in those fields. It was female lawyers, for example, who brought cases that opened up good blue-collar jobs to women. Without more women obtaining law degrees, would men still be shaping all our legislation? Without the large numbers of women who have entered the medical professions, would psychiatrists still be telling women that they suffered from penis envy and were masochistic by nature? Would women still routinely undergo unnecessary hysterectomies? Without increased numbers of women in academia, and without the new field of women’s studies, would children still be taught, as I was, that, a hundred years ago this month, Woodrow Wilson “gave” women the vote? There has been a revolution in every field, and the women in those fields have led it.

It is frequently pointed out that the states passing abortion restrictions and bans are states where women’s status remains particularly low. Take Alabama. According to one study , by almost every index—pay, workforce participation, percentage of single mothers living in poverty, mortality due to conditions such as heart disease and stroke—the state scores among the worst for women. Children don’t fare much better: according to U.S. News rankings , Alabama is the worst state for education. It also has one of the nation’s highest rates of infant mortality (only half the counties have even one ob-gyn), and it has refused to expand Medicaid, either through the Affordable Care Act or on its own. Only four women sit in Alabama’s thirty-five-member State Senate, and none of them voted for the ban. Maybe that’s why an amendment to the bill proposed by State Senator Linda Coleman-Madison was voted down. It would have provided prenatal care and medical care for a woman and child in cases where the new law prevents the woman from obtaining an abortion. Interestingly, the law allows in-vitro fertilization, a procedure that often results in the discarding of fertilized eggs. As Clyde Chambliss, the bill’s chief sponsor in the state senate, put it, “The egg in the lab doesn’t apply. It’s not in a woman. She’s not pregnant.” In other words, life only begins at conception if there’s a woman’s body to control.

Indifference to women and children isn’t an oversight. This is why calls for better sex education and wider access to birth control are non-starters, even though they have helped lower the rate of unwanted pregnancies, which is the cause of abortion. The point isn’t to prevent unwanted pregnancy. (States with strong anti-abortion laws have some of the highest rates of teen pregnancy in the country; Alabama is among them.) The point is to roll back modernity for women.

So, if women who have never had an abortion, and don’t expect to, think that the new restrictions and bans won’t affect them, they are wrong. The new laws will fall most heavily on poor women, disproportionately on women of color, who have the highest abortion rates and will be hard-pressed to travel to distant clinics.

But without legal, accessible abortion, the assumptions that have shaped all women’s lives in the past few decades—including that they, not a torn condom or a missed pill or a rapist, will decide what happens to their bodies and their futures—will change. Women and their daughters will have a harder time, and there will be plenty of people who will say that they were foolish to think that it could be otherwise.

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

By Jia Tolentino

By Isaac Chotiner

By Rebecca Mead

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

As the Supreme Court considers Roe v. Wade, a look at how abortion became legal

Nina Totenberg

The future of abortion, always a contentious issue, is up at the Supreme Court on Dec. 1. Arguments are planned challenging Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey , the court's major decisions over the last half-century that guarantee a woman's right to an abortion nationwide. J. Scott Applewhite/AP hide caption

The future of abortion, always a contentious issue, is up at the Supreme Court on Dec. 1. Arguments are planned challenging Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey , the court's major decisions over the last half-century that guarantee a woman's right to an abortion nationwide.

For nearly a half-century, abortion has been a constitutional right in the United States. But this week, the U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments in a Mississippi case that directly challenges Roe v. Wade and subsequent decisions.

Those rulings consistently declared that a woman has a constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy in the first two trimesters of pregnancy when a fetus is unable to survive outside the womb. But with that abortion right now in doubt, it's worth looking back at its history.

Abortion did not become illegal in most states until the mid to late 1800s. But by the 1960s, abortion, like childbirth, had become a safe procedure when performed by a doctor, and women were entering the workforce in ever larger numbers.

Still, being pregnant out of wedlock was seen as scandalous, and women increasingly sought out abortions, even though they were illegal. What's more, to be pregnant often meant that women's educations were stunted, as were their chances for getting a good job. Because of these phenomena, illegal abortion began to skyrocket and became a public health problem. Estimates of numbers each year ranged from 200,000 to over a million, a range that was so wide precisely because illegal procedures often went undocumented.

At the time, young women could see the perils for themselves. Anyone who lived in a college dormitory back then might well have seen one or more women carried out of the dorm hemorrhaging from a botched illegal abortion.

George Frampton clerked for Justice Harry Blackmun the year that his boss authored Roe v. Wade , and he remembers that until Roe , "those abortions had to be obtained undercover if you had a sympathetic doctor" and you were "wealthy enough." But most abortions were illegal and mainly took place "in backrooms by abortion quacks" using "crude tools" and "no hygiene."

By the early to mid-1960s, Frampton notes, thousands of women in large cities were arriving at hospitals, bleeding and often maimed.

One woman, in an interview with NPR, recalled "the excruciatingly painful [illegal] procedure," describing it as "the equivalent of having a hot poker stuck up your uterus and scraping the walls." She remembered that the attendant had to "hold her down on the table."

The result, says Frampton, was that by the mid-1960s, a reform movement had begun, aimed at decriminalizing abortion and treating it more like other medical procedures. Driving the reform movement were doctors, who were concerned about the effect that illegal abortions were having on women's health. Soon, the American Law Institute — a highly respected group of lawyers, judges and scholars — published a model abortion reform law supported by major medical groups, including the American Medical Association.

Many states then began to loosen their abortion restrictions. Four states legalized abortion, and a dozen or so adopted some form of the model law, which permitted abortion in cases of rape, incest and fetal abnormality, as well as to save the life or health of the mother.

By the early 1970s, when nearly half the states had adopted reform laws, there was a small backlash. Still, as Frampton observes, "it wasn't a big political or ideological issue at all."

In fact, the justices in 1973 were mainly establishment conservatives. Six were Republican appointees, including the court's only Catholic. And five were generally conservative, as defined at the time, including four appointed by President Richard Nixon. Ultimately, the court voted 7-to-2 that abortion is a private matter to be decided by a woman during the first two trimesters of her pregnancy.

That framework has remained in place ever since, with the court repeatedly upholding that standard. In 1992, it reiterated the framework yet again, though it said that states could enact some limited restrictions — for example, a 24-hour waiting period — as long as the restrictions didn't impose an "undue burden" on a woman's right to abortion.

Frampton says that the court established the viability framework because of the medical consensus that a fetus could not survive outside the womb until the last trimester. He explains that "the justices thought that this was going to dispose of the constitutional issues about abortion forever."

Although many had thought that fetal viability might change substantially, that has not happened. But in the years that followed, the backlash to the court's abortion decisions grew louder and louder, until the Republican Party, which had earlier supported Roe , officially abandoned it in 1984.

Looking at the politicization of the Supreme Court nomination and confirmation process in recent years, one can't help but wonder whether Roe played a part in that polarization. What does Frampton think?

"I'm afraid," he concedes, "that analysis is absolutely spot on. I think they [the justices] saw it as a very important landmark constitutional decision but had no idea that it would become so politicized and so much a subject of turmoil."

Just why is abortion such a controversial issue in the United States but not in so many other countries where abortion is now legal? Florida State University law professor Mary Ziegler, author of Abortion and the Law in America , points out that in many countries, the abortion question has been resolved through democratic means — in some countries by national referendum, in others by parliamentary votes and, in some, by the courts. In most of those countries, however, abortions, with some exceptions, must be performed earlier, by week 12, 15 or 18.

But — and it is a big but — in most of those countries, unlike in the U.S., national health insurance guarantees easy access to abortions.

Lastly, Ziegler observes, "there are a lot of people in the United States who have a stake in our polarized politics. ... It's a way to raise money. It's a way to get people out to the polls."

And it's striking, she adds, how little our politics resemble what most people say they want. Public opinion polls consistently show that large majorities of Americans support the right to abortion in all or most cases. A poll conducted last May by the Pew Research Center found 6 in 10 Americans say that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. And a Washington Post -ABC poll conducted last month found that Americans by a roughly 2-to-1 margin say the Supreme Court should uphold its landmark Roe v. Wade decision.

But an NPR poll conducted in 2019 shows just how complex — and even contradictory — opinions are about abortion. The poll found that 77% of Americans support Roe . But that figure dropped to 34% in the second trimester. Other polls had significantly higher support for second trimester abortions. A Reuters poll pegged the figure at 47% in 2021. And an Associated Press poll found that 49% of poll respondents supported legal abortion for anyone who wants one "for any reason," while 50% believed that this should not be the case. And 86% said they would support abortion at any time during a pregnancy to protect the life or health of the woman.

All this would seem to suggest that there is overwhelming support for abortion rights earlier in pregnancy, but less support later in pregnancy, and overwhelming support for abortions at any time to protect the life or, importantly, the health of the mother. That, however, is not where the abortion debate is in the 25 or so states that have enacted very strict anti-abortion laws, including outright bans, in hopes that the Supreme Court will overturn Roe .

The negative health implications of restricting abortion access

December 13, 2021— Ana Langer is professor of the practice of public health and coordinator of the Women and Health Initiative at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Q:  Roe v. Wade may soon be overturned by the Supreme Court, while at the same time other countries are loosening restrictions around abortion rights. What are your thoughts on the current climate around this issue?

A: The trend over the past several decades is clear: Safe and legal abortion has become more widely accessible to women globally, with nearly 50 countries including Mexico, Argentina, New Zealand, Thailand, and Ireland liberalizing their abortion laws. During the same period, however, a few countries have made abortion more restricted or totally illegal, including El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Poland.

In the U.S., legal frameworks are increasingly limiting access to abortion. Even while Roe is in place, many people are currently unable to receive abortion care.

If the Supreme Court were to limit or overturn Roe, abortion would remain legal in 21 states and could immediately be prohibited in 24 states and three territories. Millions of people would be forced to travel to receive legal abortion care, something that would be impossible for many due to a range of financial and logistical reasons.

This situation does not surprise me because of the deep polarization that characterizes public views on abortion, and the growing power and relentless efforts of anti-choice groups. Furthermore, it does not surprise me because of the important gender gap that exists in this country, which is to a great extent due to the lack of strong and consistent policies and legal frameworks to support women in their efforts to better integrate their reproductive and professional roles and responsibilities.

The U.S. legalized abortion nearly 50 years ago, at a time when it was legally restricted in many countries around the world, setting an important international precedent and example. It disappoints me to see that while important progress has been made towards equality in other culturally polarized areas such as same-sex marriage, women’s right to terminate an unwanted or mistimed pregnancy is now severely threatened.

Q:  How do laws that restrict abortion access impact women’s health? 

A: Restricting women’s access to safe and legal abortion services has important negative health implications. We’ve seen that these laws do not result in fewer abortions. Instead, they compel women to risk their lives and health by seeking out unsafe abortion care.

According to the World Health Organization, 23,000 women die from unsafe abortions each year and tens of thousands more experience significant health complications globally. A recent study estimated that banning abortion in the U.S. would lead to a 21% increase in the number of pregnancy-related deaths overall and a 33% increase among Black women, simply because staying pregnant is more dangerous than having an abortion. Increased deaths due to unsafe abortions or attempted abortions would be in addition to these estimates.

If the current trend in the U.S. persists, “back alley” abortions will be the last resource for women with no access to safe and legal services, and the horrific consequences of such abortions will become a major cause of death and severe health complications for some of the most vulnerable women in this country.

The legal status of abortion also defines whether girls will be able to complete their educations and whether women will be able to participate in the workforce, and in public and political life.

Improving social safety net programs for women reduces gender gaps and improves girls’ and women’s health and chances to fulfill their potential, and could help reduce the number of abortions over time. Women who are better educated, have better access to comprehensive reproductive health care , and are employed and fairly remunerated will be better positioned to avoid a mistimed and unwanted pregnancy, hence the need for termination will become less common.

Q: Should abortion be considered a human right?

A: Numerous international and regional human rights treaties and national-level constitutions around the world protect the right to safe and legal abortion as a fundamental human right. Access to safe abortion is included in a constellation of rights, including the rights to life, liberty, privacy, equality and non-discrimination, and freedom from cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. Human rights bodies have repeatedly condemned restrictive abortion laws as being incompatible with human rights norms.

While a supportive legal framework for abortion care is critical, it is not enough to ensure access for everyone who seeks the service. For universal access to become a reality, policies that cover the cost of abortion care and its integration into the health care system, in addition to societal measures that destigmatize the procedure, are needed.

— Amy Roeder

clock This article was published more than  1 year ago

The one point abortion rights activists need to keep making

Nobody should be forced to sacrifice their body..

Last month, in Atlanta, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams told the audience attending her panel discussion that “there is no such thing as a heartbeat at six weeks. It is a manufactured sound designed to convince people that men have the right to take control of a woman’s body.”

Her remark became a thing, and it’s not hard to see why. Abortion arguments often coalesce around the question of heartbeats. If you’re antiabortion, then you might be deeply invested in the idea that embryos have signs of life at a few weeks’ development. Conversely, if you support abortion rights, then you’ll want to make Abrams’s argument: Embryos at this stage might show “cardiac activity” but not a heartbeat. What a patient hears at the doctor’s office is actually the electrical impulses of pre-heart infrastructure, translated into sound by a sonography machine. A genuine heartbeat doesn’t appear until around week 10.

And this is where the abortion debates have landed, three months after the fall of Roe v. Wade . Quibbling over terminology, hairsplitting the medicine and trying to litigate when life begins, a question that science and spirituality haven’t even begun to sort out. We’re in the weeds.

We need to get out of the weeds.

I will happily accept any sound science that keeps abortion legal, but “embryos don’t technically have heartbeats” is not the most compelling point to make in discussions about abortion rights. (When I had my emotional seven-week sonogram for my now-daughter, after multiple early miscarriages, I did not tearfully exclaim, “listen to that pre-heart infrastructure!”) Nor is “can we at least agree on rape and incest exceptions?” Nor the arguments about whether abortion patients regret ending their pregnancies (even though, overwhelmingly, they don’t ), or about whether abortion is dangerous (even though, overwhelmingly, it isn’t ).

The point to begin with is this: Regardless of when life begins, in the United States, nobody can force you to donate your own body to save another person. Even if you are physically capable of doing so. Even if that person will die.

The United States does not require you to donate your kidney or liver to a person in need of a transplant, even if you are a perfect match. If the president himself was going to perish unless he was surgically attached to a citizen’s abdomen for nine months, nobody could force that citizen to agree to this assignment. You might argue that agreeing would be the noble thing or the moral thing or the humane thing, but it would not be a compulsory thing.

It wouldn’t be compulsory even if we were talking not about a president but about a child. The philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson, in 1971, put forth the most famous version of this argument as it related to abortion: Imagine that a woman woke in bed intravenously hooked up to a famous violinist, Thomson wrote in her seminal and controversial essay, “ A Defense of Abortion .” The musician in this scenario suffered from a rare medical ailment, and only this woman’s circulatory system could keep him alive. His survival requires her to sacrifice her own bodily autonomy. Must she? Is she a murderer if she does not?

Detractors of Thomson’s argument pointed out the obvious differences between a famous violinist and an unborn fetus: The woman did not choose to be hooked up to the violinist, whereas she did choose to have sex, and pregnancy is a possible outcome of sex. Thus, she must now see the pregnancy through. She asked for it.

Over the years, philosophers have found more nuanced ways to express their disagreement. In the New York Times , Anglican priest Tish Harrison Warren recently wrote, eloquently and poetically, that “no human has complete bodily autonomy from birth to death. The natural state of human beings is to be deeply and irrevocably interdependent on one another.” (Of course the burden of “interdependence” placed on a pregnant person is, as Warren does acknowledge, vastly greater than pretty much any other example we might find in the real world. There is a difference between an elderly person needing help getting into the bathtub and a woman being required to donate her body, 24/7, to a pregnancy.)

Warren aside, even the most poetic phrasings often end up concealing an unpoetic argument: that a woman should be forced to birth a child because she asked for it. She asked for it by slipping up on birth control, or she asked for it by not immediately knowing to get the morning-after pill, or she asked for it simply by daring to be a sexual being. And “she asked for it” is the unofficial slogan of misogyny.

It’s worthwhile to note that even the folks arguing that heartbeats do exist at six weeks often support rape and incest exceptions. Meaning, they’re making one of two incoherent arguments: 1) Life begins when there’s a heartbeat except in cases of rape, or 2) Life does begin when there’s a heartbeat but if a woman was raped then murdering the fetus is fine.

Does personhood begin with a heartbeat? If your answer is yes, as many antiabortion activists say it does, then Thomson’s argument follows that the six-week-old “person” inside a woman’s uterus should have the same claim to that woman’s body as does any other person, which is to say, limited claim, even if, in your opinion, she asked for it. In Thomson’s view, a pregnant individual’s right to bodily autonomy permits them to unhook from the violinist, so to speak, no matter anyone else’s view of what is noble or moral or humane. Therefore they should be allowed to terminate the pregnancy if they wish.

If your answer is no, personhood does not begin with a heartbeat, then an embryo at six weeks of pregnancy is not a person yet. Therefore the pregnant person should be allowed to terminate the pregnancy if they wish.

Of course, it’s more complicated than that. Pregnancy is the most liminal of states, a nine-month-long transition into existence. A growing of bones, of fingernails, of the lungs whose first cry of life comes during a mother’s last cry of labor, the moment at which the two beings are, at last, fully two beings . For centuries, before we knew of Dopplers and ultrasounds, a pregnancy became real only at the point of “quickening,” the moment when an expectant mother first felt her baby move, somewhere in the second trimester. “Quick,” in old English, used to mean “alive.” I am not exaggerating when I tell you that experiencing that first movement is, for a person who wants a baby, a lightning bolt to the soul.

But the starting places for discussions about abortion should not be the weeds. The starting place should be above the weeds, at eye level with the person who owns the body where these mysteries are meant to unfold. The debate about the legality of abortion should begin with that person’s right to bodily autonomy even in the face of decisions that others might personally disagree with, or believe they would make differently.

As I started writing this column, I thought I should try to interview Judith Jarvis Thomson, to see how she felt her argument had aged, to see what she would make of this current era in which the potential lives of fetuses are increasingly (if certain lawmakers and legislative bodies have their way) viewed as more important than the actual lives of women. It turns out she died in 2020, at the age of 91, leaving behind a staggeringly important body of work related to what it means to make moral decisions.

I would have loved her guidance on how to think through this moment: when heartbeats become heartbeats, or when a heartbeat constitutes life, or when embryos might become people with rights. I would have loved her guidance on what you do when so many politicians are so good at making the argument that six-week pregnancies are people, but so bad at making the argument that women are people, too.

Share of US Catholics backing legal abortion rises as adherents remain at odds with church

A solid and growing majority of U.S. Catholics say abortion should be legal in most cases despite the church’s staunch opposition to the practice, an issue many believe could play a crucial role in the November elections.

Additionally, while the portion of U.S. adults who are Catholic remains steady at about 20%, Hispanic Catholics are largely younger and on the rise while white Catholics are older and falling as a portion of the population.

Both findings were among those recently published by the Pew Research Center in Washington in a report drawing on data from national surveys.

Start the day smarter. Get all the news you need in your inbox each morning.

“The Pew statistics confirm what is obvious on the ground,” said Jonathan Tan, professor of Catholic studies at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland: The U.S. Catholic Church once predominantly Irish, Italian and German and shaped by 19 th - and early-20 th -century immigration has become increasingly diverse and pluralistic.

The Pew center also reported support for Pope Francis has dipped slightly: 75% viewed the pope favorably, compared with earlier levels of about 80%.

But it was Catholics’ continuing support for abortion that stood out among the findings . About 6 in 10 Catholics say abortion should be legal, up from 56% in 2019 .

Nearly 4 in 10 said abortion should be legal in most cases, and 22% said it should be legal in all cases. Support was split largely along party lines; 78% of Catholic Democrats said abortion should be legal in most or all cases, compared with 43% of Catholic Republicans.

Support was slightly higher among Hispanic Catholics (63%) than white Catholics (59%). That’s one reason Jamie Manson, president of the advocacy organization Catholics for Choice, said her group has been gearing up to mobilize voters in Hispanic-heavy states like Arizona and Florida that have highly restricted reproductive rights and where measures are either on the ballot or pending sufficient signatures.

“We are prioritizing those regions and putting organizers on the ground, and all our materials are available in Spanish,” Manson said. “I think Catholics are going to win this, specifically Hispanic Catholics.”

Catholics are older than most Americans

About 57% of the nation’s approximately 52 million Catholics are white, falling from 65% in 2021. Meanwhile, Hispanics now comprise a third of all Catholics, a bump of 4 percentage points.

Catholics tend to be older than most Americans, the survey found: About 6 in 10 Catholic adults are ages 50 or older, compared with 48% of the overall U.S. population. White Catholics comprise the majority of that group, with more than two-thirds of white Catholics falling in that age range compared with just 43% of Hispanic Catholics.

Nearly 4 in 10 white Catholics are 65 and older, compared with just 14% of Hispanic Catholics, the study found.

But Hispanics aren’t a demographic the Catholic Church can take for granted, said Michele Dillon, a professor of sociology at the University of New Hampshire. Though people with roots in South and Latin America were once considered staunchly Catholic, she pointed out that many are shifting to evangelical Christian churches or no religious affiliation.

“Given the marketplace for religions, there’s a lot more choice,” Dillon said. “The church is stable and even in a strong position, but it has to do the work of energizing new generations. The big challenge is maintaining relevance.”

The number of U.S. Latinos who identify as Catholic has dropped sharply in the past dozen years. Pew research published last year showed that just 43% of Latinos identified as Catholic, down from 67% in 2010.

Dillon said white Catholics tend to be more economically and educationally established than Hispanic Catholics. Should that gap continue, she said, it could produce internal segregation within Catholicism and individual churches.

“You already see that to some extent in cities and where there are mixed populations, churches where there are mostly white masses and Spanish-language masses,” she said. “But it can lead to tensions at the local level over issues of language or liturgical style. For a church community that wants to have a sense of community and cohesion, those divisions might make it harder for people to meet one another.”

White and Hispanic differences continued among political party lines as well, the Pew data showed: Among registered voters, about 6 in 10 white Catholics identify with or lean toward the Republican Party, with the same percentage of Hispanic Catholics identifying with or leaning toward the Democratic Party.

Overall, 52% of Catholic registered voters identify with or lean Republican, and 44% identify with or lean Democrat. Catholic voters were split in the 2020 presidential election, with 49% voting for Trump and 50% supporting Biden.

Pope Francis' favorability dips but remains high

A majority (3 in 4) of U.S. Catholics have favorable opinions of Francis, still down from 83% in 2021, with support falling among those who rate the pontiff highly: Just 26% of Catholics rated the pope “very favorable” in the latest survey, compared with 34% in 2021.

Views of the pope also varied along party lines; 89% of Catholics who identify as or lean Democrat held positive views compared with 63% of those who lean Republican.

“The ebb and flow in his ratings is because he’s trying to tackle a lot of issues, like climate change and gender ideology,” Dillon said. “These are important issues for how people live and how the world survives but around which there is not unified consensus. Raising questions is actually a positive thing and one of the strengths of his papacy.”

Overall, 72% of Catholics said Francis represents a change in direction for the church: 4 in 10 said he marks a major change.

The report also found Catholics largely differ with the church on a number of questions involving sex and gender. Among all Catholics, 83% say the church should allow use of contraception, 69% say priests should be allowed to marry, 64% say women should be allowed to become priests, and 54% say the church should recognize same-sex marriage.

Manson, of Catholics for Choice, noted that in addition to the high number of aging Catholics, fewer than 3 in 10 attend service weekly, and many are choosing to leave the faith altogether.

“That should be a real wake-up call for bishops,” she said. “One of the reasons people leave is because of rigid instruction on sexuality. An all-male celibate hierarchy is making the rules, and there’s this chasm between what Catholics believe in practice and what the church is teaching. They are leaving the people behind.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Share of US Catholics backing legal abortion rises as adherents remain at odds with church

Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World

Read our research on:

Full Topic List

Regions & Countries

• Publications
• Our Methods
• Short Reads
• Tools & Resources

Read Our Research On:

By more than two-to-one, Americans say medication abortion should be legal in their state

With the future of abortion pills in legal jeopardy, more Americans say medication abortion should be legal than illegal in their state, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. The survey – conducted in the days before the conflicting court rulings on medication abortion by federal judges in Texas and Washington state – also finds stark divides by age and partisanship in Americans’ views of the issue.

Pew Research Center conducted this survey to assess the public’s attitudes about medication abortion. For this analysis, we surveyed 5,079 adults from March 27 to April 2, 2023. Everyone who took part in this survey is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology .

Here are the questions used for the analysis and its methodology .

Overall, 53% of adults say medication abortion – that is, the use of a prescription pill or a series of pills to end a pregnancy – should be legal in their state, while fewer than half as many (22%) say it should be illegal. About a quarter (24%) say they aren’t sure.

As is the case with views about the legality of abortion overall, the Center survey, conducted from March 27 to April 2, finds that there are wide partisan divides in views of abortion pills.

A majority of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (73%) say medication abortion should be legal in their state, while fewer than half as many Republicans and GOP leaners (35%) say the same.

Americans’ perceptions about the prevalence of medication abortions in the U.S.

The survey also asked Americans, in an open-ended format, to estimate the percentage of all abortions in the U.S. that are medication abortions. In 2020, the most recent year with available data, medication abortions accounted for 53% of all facility-based abortions in the United States , according to data from both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Guttmacher Institute.

In the Center’s survey, about a third of adults estimate that 40% to 60% of abortions in the U.S. are medication abortions. About four-in-ten say medication abortions make up less than 40% of all abortions in the country. Roughly a quarter say they think medication abortions account for more than 60% of all abortions.

About a third of Republicans (32%) and Democrats (33%) alike estimate that medication abortions account for 40% to 60% of abortions in the country. However, Republicans are somewhat more likely than Democrats (46% vs. 36%) to estimate that medication abortions account for fewer than 40% all abortions. Democrats, in turn, are more likely than Republicans (29% vs. 19%) to say medication abortions account for 60% or more of all abortions in the U.S.

Demographic differences in views of whether medication abortion should be legal

Overall, younger adults are more likely than older Americans to say medication abortion should be legal in their state. Two-thirds (66%) of adults under 30 say abortion pills should be legal, compared with half of adults 30 and older.

Opinions also vary by race and ethnicity. While majorities of White, Black and Asian adults say abortion pills should be legal in their state, views among Hispanic adults are slightly more mixed: 46% say they should be legal, while 25% say they should be illegal and 29% are not sure.

While there are stark partisan divides on the legality of medication abortion, there are also sizable ideological gaps within the parties.

Among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, nearly half of conservatives (47%) say medication abortion should be illegal in their state, while 24% say it should be legal. But views among moderate and liberal Republicans are the reverse: Half say it should be legal, while 20% say it should be illegal.

While a majority of Democrats – regardless of ideology – say abortion pills should be legal, liberal Democrats are particularly likely to say this. Nearly nine-in-ten liberal Democrats (88%) say it should be legal, compared with 59% of conservative and moderate Democrats.

The survey, conducted prior to news of the court decisions issued April 7, finds that 22% of Americans say they have heard a lot about medication abortion. A majority (56%) have heard a little, while 21% say they have heard nothing at all.

Among adults who said they’d heard or read a lot about medication abortion, 72% say it should be legal. This compares with 55% of adults who said they’d heard a little about medication abortion, and 30% who said they had heard nothing at all about it.

Younger women are particularly likely to say medication abortion should be legal in their state: 71% of women under 30 say this, while just 12% say it should be illegal. By comparison, about half of women 30 and older (51%) say medication abortion should be legal in their state.

There is a more modest age gap among men on this issue: Six-in-ten men under 30 say medication abortion should be legal in their state, compared with half of those 30 and older.

As is true with views of the legality of abortion overall , there are large divides by religion in Americans’ views of abortion pills. While Protestants overall offer mixed views about whether medication abortion should be legal in their state, White evangelical Protestants are about twice as likely to say it should be illegal than legal (50% vs. 23%). In contrast, slight majorities of White non-evangelical Protestants and Black Protestants say abortion pills should be legal.

Catholics are more likely to say abortion medication should be legal than illegal in their state (46% vs. 26%). Religiously unaffiliated adults overwhelmingly say it should be legal (74%). (Note: This analysis cannot report the views of Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Orthodox Christians and other  smaller religious groups due to sample size limitations.)

Note: Here are the questions used for the analysis and its methodology .

• Health Care
• Health Policy
• Medicine & Health
• Political Issues

What the data says about abortion in the U.S.

Support for legal abortion is widespread in many countries, especially in europe, nearly a year after roe’s demise, americans’ views of abortion access increasingly vary by where they live, most latinos say democrats care about them and work hard for their vote, far fewer say so of gop, positive views of supreme court decline sharply following abortion ruling, most popular.

1615 L St. NW, Suite 800 Washington, DC 20036 USA (+1) 202-419-4300 | Main (+1) 202-857-8562 | Fax (+1) 202-419-4372 |  Media Inquiries

Research Topics

• Age & Generations
• Coronavirus (COVID-19)
• Economy & Work
• Family & Relationships
• Gender & LGBTQ
• Immigration & Migration
• International Affairs
• Internet & Technology
• Methodological Research
• News Habits & Media
• Non-U.S. Governments
• Other Topics
• Politics & Policy
• Race & Ethnicity
• Email Newsletters

ABOUT PEW RESEARCH CENTER  Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of  The Pew Charitable Trusts .

Copyright 2024 Pew Research Center

Terms & Conditions

Privacy Policy

Cookie Settings

Reprints, Permissions & Use Policy

• Share full article

For more audio journalism and storytelling, download New York Times Audio , a new iOS app available for news subscribers.

• April 22, 2024   •   24:30 The Evolving Danger of the New Bird Flu
• April 19, 2024   •   30:42 The Supreme Court Takes Up Homelessness
• April 18, 2024   •   30:07 The Opening Days of Trump’s First Criminal Trial
• April 17, 2024   •   24:52 Are ‘Forever Chemicals’ a Forever Problem?
• April 16, 2024   •   29:29 A.I.’s Original Sin
• April 15, 2024   •   24:07 Iran’s Unprecedented Attack on Israel
• April 14, 2024   •   46:17 The Sunday Read: ‘What I Saw Working at The National Enquirer During Donald Trump’s Rise’
• April 12, 2024   •   34:23 How One Family Lost $900,000 in a Timeshare Scam
• April 11, 2024   •   28:39 The Staggering Success of Trump’s Trial Delay Tactics
• April 10, 2024   •   22:49 Trump’s Abortion Dilemma
• April 9, 2024   •   30:48 How Tesla Planted the Seeds for Its Own Potential Downfall
• April 8, 2024   •   30:28 The Eclipse Chaser

The Sunday Read: ‘What I Saw Working at The National Enquirer During Donald Trump’s Rise’

Inside the notorious “catch and kill” campaign that now stands at the heart of the former president’s legal trial..

By Lachlan Cartwright

Read by David Linski

Produced by Jack D’Isidoro and Aaron Esposito

Narration produced by Anna Diamond

Edited by John Woo

Original music by Aaron Esposito

Engineered by Corey Schreppel and Steven Szczesniak

Listen and follow The Daily Apple Podcasts | Spotify

At the center of the criminal case against former President Donald Trump in Manhattan is the accusation that Trump took part in a scheme to turn The National Enquirer and its sister publications into an arm of his 2016 presidential campaign. The documents detailed three “hush money” payments made to a series of individuals to guarantee their silence about potentially damaging stories in the months before the election. Because this was done with the goal of helping his election chances, the case implied, these payments amounted to a form of illegal, undisclosed campaign spending. And because Trump created paperwork to make the payments seem like regular legal expenses, that amounted to a criminal effort at a coverup, argued Alvin Bragg, the district attorney of Manhattan. Trump has denied the charges against him.

For Lachlan Cartwright, reading the indictment was like stepping through the looking glass, because it described a three-year period in his own professional life, one that he has come to deeply regret. Now, as a former president faces a criminal trial for the first time in American history, Cartwright is forced to grapple with what really happened at The Enquirer in those years — and whether and how he can ever set things right.

There are a lot of ways to listen to ‘The Daily.’ Here’s how.

We want to hear from you. Tune in, and tell us what you think. Email us at [email protected] . Follow Michael Barbaro on X: @mikiebarb . And if you’re interested in advertising with The Daily, write to us at [email protected] .

Additional production for The Sunday Read was contributed by Isabella Anderson, Anna Diamond, Sarah Diamond, Elena Hecht, Emma Kehlbeck, Tanya Pérez, Frannie Carr Toth and Krish Seenivasan.

Corey Schreppel leads the technical team that supports all Times audio shows, including “The Daily,” “Hard Fork,” “The Run-Up,” and “Modern Love.” More about Corey Schreppel

Advertisement