Pro-Choice

Lawrence Ukenye

Pro Choice Argument

With abortion being a hot-topic discussion on a national level, the debate on whether the pro-choice or pro-life argument is right can sometimes detract from what the actual meaning of the debate is. That argument will be discussed completely to explain why the pro-choice side is the obvious choice.

To be one hundred percent clear, this argument is not saying that abortion should be the first option. When coming to how you handle a child that wasn’t planned, things other than abortion should be considered. Like adoption or actually keeping the child. But abortion is a thing and whether or not you’re too conservative to understand, I’m going to explain to you why it should remained legalized.

So when you say you’re pro-life, you basically believe that abortion is wrong and that the government should do something to get rid of it. Well if the government was to ban abortion then wouldn’t that mean that they’ve begun to tell women what they can and cannot do with their bodies. The government which is vastly composed of men is dictating the lives of women across the country by saying that abortion is the equivalent of murder, which it is absolutely not. A pregnancy should never be mandatory, and implying that once you’ve had sex you’ve made the choice to have a child is perhaps the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. According to the Guttmacher Institute, about 40% of pregnancies are unplanned. That’s 85 million people! So to say that sex is somehow something so sacred is not true considering people around the world aren’t necessarily choosing to get pregnant. Flat out denying women what to do with their bodies, is denying them of basic human liberty and it’s a shame that most people who aren’t educated on the matter just instantly take sides with them. Using your religious beliefs without gathering all the facts on the subject just makes for bad dialogue and leads to spreading a lot of rhetoric that turns out to be false.

Now to the idea of murder. There is no denying that a fetus is a living thing. Anything composed of cells, whether it’s a leaf hanging from a tree or an ant crawling on the ground, is alive. The fact that a fetus does not have fully developed body parts and organs means that terminating its life wouldn’t be considered murder. The idea of murder is killing a person, someone with human like qualities, feelings, and someone who is actually aware of the fact that they are bring killed. The fetus possesses none of that. They aren’t conscious of what is going on around them and they don’t have the necessary anatomic systems required for them to feel pain, which develops around 26 weeks. With all that being said around 89 percent of abortions occur around the 12 week mark. So technically speaking you aren’t necessarily killing a person, you were just ending the life of a premature human being.

My final argument for being pro-choice is that children are expensive. The cost of a pregnancy can range from $3,000 to $71,000. To force a couple to have to deal with such a massive financial undertaking is just no fair. Many would say that you could put the child up for adoption, but there are approximately 102,000 children in the U.S. foster care system waiting to be adopted. Organizations that promise to assist women in their pregnancies with the aim of adopting your child are effectively neglecting children in the foster care system. Many children are being neglected because of their race or disabilities that they may have.

At the end of the day I aim to remind people of the main argument of those who are pro-choice. That means that you should have the choice on whether or not you should keep the child. Bodily anatomy is a basic human right and it shouldn’t be the business of other people on what a women’s decisions are concerning her reproductive organs.