Why abortion should be legal

Each year prior to the s, more than women in the US died of abortion complications. In more than 1. In comparison, , hysterectomies and , tonsillectomy operations were performed the same year. The number of abortion-related deaths in the US decreased between and , from 90 to Most of this decrease resulted from the availability and safety of legal abortion.

Legal abortion carries an especially low risk of death, particularly when performed in the 1st trimester. For the period, the risk of death was 1. Touch to call us on 30 40 Toggle main menu Abortion care Abortion care Considering abortion? Pregnancy options discussion Advice and counselling What is abortion? Abortion treatments The abortion pill Surgical abortion.

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Contact us Find a clinic. Book an appointment. Yet little is done to make sterilization easily available on a voluntary basis, particularly to the poor and underprivileged. Despite the lack of legal strictures against it, it is often withheld by doctors and hospitals from those who need it and want it most. At the same time, there begins to appear on the part of some an alarming readiness to subordinate rights of freedom of choice in the area of human reproduction to governmental coercion.

Of these, studies indicate that almost one million are in the United States. Since, however, abortions are still so difficult to obtain, we force the birth of millions more unwanted children every year. If we really want to cut our population growth rate on a voluntary basis, we should make abortion available on a voluntary basis, at least in the early stages of pregnancy.

When Japan liberalized its abortion laws some years back, it halved its rate of population growth in a decade. I do not recommend abortion as a birth-control method of choice. I merely state that it is in fact the most important single method of birth control in the world today, and to cut down on population growth we should make abortion easy and safe while we continue to develop other and more satisfactory methods of family limitation.

In addition to the 5 million women in the United States without access to birth control for whom abortion would seem a matter of right when they want it, there are the uncounted thousands who after conception suffer some disease like German measles or discover some defect which makes the birth of a live and healthy baby unlikely, and the many, too, whose contraceptive methods occasionally don't work. There is no perfect contraceptive. The U.

Food and Drug Administration reports that the intrauterine devices, one of the most effective contraceptives available today, have a failure rate of 1. This means that if all married women in the United States could and did use these contraceptives, there would still be about , to , unwanted pregnancies a year among married women alone.

Therefore, in order to insure a complete and thorough birth control program, abortion must be made available as a legal right to all women who request it. Starting in the mids, some erosion of the anti-abortion laws began to take place. But these efforts have not been supported by many of the more vocal groups who are trying to do something about excess population growth; to them, compulsory birth control and compulsory sterilization are apparently more palatable than voluntary abortion.

The result is legal chaos—which has been the situation with reference to abortion since it was first made illegal in this country. Contrary to popular belief, the legal strictures against abortion are of comparatively recent origin.

Until the early nineteenth century—at common law both in England and in the United States—abortion before quickening was not illegal at all. It became so only in the early s. Abortions were made illegal for this reason except where they were necessary to save the life of the mother; that is, where the great risk of infection which every operation involved was outweighed by the risk of carrying that particular pregnancy to term.