In the past twenty years, abortion rates have climbed significantly. More and more women are exercising their choice, and with it their rights, to have what has become the most common surgical procedure American women undergo (Tompkins 145). The simple operation is undertaken by one out of every five women over the age of 15, a quarter of which are teenagers. These 1.6 million women come from many disparate backgrounds, from all races, creeds, and classes, but they share one common trait: for one reason or another, they feel unready for the burdens of motherhood. This bucking of the tradition of becoming a wife and mother alarms many conservatives, and so, as has any issue of import, abortion has become a highly political and emotionally charged topic. But though it is extremely controversial, when one takes into account the social, medical, and legal aspects it is strikingly apparent that women need the right to personally choose to have an abortion.

Abortion became an outrage in this country only after the Civil War. It was then that the American Medical Association, seeking to bolster the authority of physicians over that of midwives, pushed for anti-abortion legislati

New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998.

Rosenblatt, Roger. Life Itself: Abortion in the American Mind. New York: Random House, 1997.

All of these revolutionary decisions met with a mixture of relief from civil rights activists and shock from the right wing. Abortion clinics, the new bastions of freedom, were soon awash in a rising tide of backlash. Pro-lifers, as anti-abortion advocates now called themselves, surrounded and formed human walls around clinics to embarrass and keep away consulted women. Despite this opposition, the number of facilities offering abortion options grew tremendously until the Reagan-Bush era, when conservative politics crushed financial support and sought to nullify those rights guaranteed by Roe. Today, due mostly to pressure from anti-abortion groups, nine out of ten counties have no facilities that provide abortion services (Costa 98). In a 1987 Supreme Court case on abortion, George Bush even sent in United States lawyers to argue against the decision and ask to repeal Roe v. Wade (Tompkins 119). Luckily for civil rights, the bench valued Constitutionality over partisan politics. States will not be allowed to make abortion illegal again. Legal and physical barriers were not the only lanes conservatives took; the conflict frequently escalated into violence. From peaceful protests and sit-ins outside abortion clinics grew the threatening phone calls and bomb threats (real and fictitious) that hound pro-choice doctors to this day (Andreyszewski 12). Militant church groups have even slaughtered whole clinics full of doctors, nurses, and frightened women. Terrorism and fanaticism does not apply only to the Middle East. Why are these people so passionate about what should be a non-issue? To quote Roger Rosenblatt, “the woman who does not wish to become a wife or mother is an implicit threat to “normal” society… the vehemence with which pro-life advocates attack pro-choice women is, I believe, connected to that feeling of threat”(129).

Costa, Marie, ed. Abortion: A Reference Handbook. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 1997.

The court’s ruling in Roe could be foretold as a natural extension of women’s rights. As early as 1969 the Students for a Democratic Society’s (SDS) National Council in Austin concluded “women could not truly direct their own lives, control their physical and psychological health, or make education and career plans if they could not control the number and frequency of their pregnancies” (Tompkins 20). The civil rights guaranteed by this and subsequent cases are many: the rights to privacy and choice, the right of a married woman to end a pregnancy without her husband’s consent, the right of a teenager to keep an abortion secret from her parents, and the ability for abortion clinics to be paid for through state funds (Andreyszewski 34). The Supreme Court in Roe also cleared up one legal point: because people trained in medicine, philosophy, and theology could not reach a consensus on when life begins or what defines personhood, the Court also shied away from these issues, except to determine that the concept of “personhood” as used in the 14th amendment did not apply to the unborn (Terkel 32).

Terkel, Susan N. Abortion: Facing the Issues. New York: Franklin Watts, 1998.

Tompkins, Nancy. Roe v. Wade: The Fight Over Life and Liberty. Danbury: Franklin Watts, 1996.

Some topics in this essay:
Louise Smith, Court Roe, Medical Association, Abortion America, Drug Administration, George Patterson, Roger Rosenblatt, RU486 RU486, Supreme Court, Wade Tompkins, supreme court, abortion clinics, roe wade, abortion rights, civil rights, social medical legal, mid-nineteenth century, abortion arguments, fetus person, abortion legal, medical legal,