This report examines the pro-choice arguments supporting a woman's right to abortion. These arguments include women's rights to privacy, due process rights under the Fourteenth Amendment, rights of speech and association, and so forth. Issues considered in the report also include the morality of abortion law and the primary disagreements of the pro-choice and pro-life movements and their supporters. The report asserts that the pro-choice arguments upholding the morality and the legality of women's abortion rights have affirmed by numerous lower and Supreme Court decisions since the ruling establishing abortion rights in 1973's decision in Roe v. Wade. Though the Court has addressed the question of whose rights (those of the pregnant woman or those of the unborn fetus) should predominate, the forces on both sides of the issue continue to seek greater clarification of these rights from the Court.
Every year some 45 million pregnancies, out of a total of 175 million, are terminated by an abortion (Brown, 1999). Nearly one-half of these abortions are medically unsafe, resulting in the deaths of nearly 80,000 women a year and a much larger number suffering injury, infection, and trauma. Both the legality of abortion and the availability of medically safe abortions are public health issues. As Brown (1999) noted, criminalizing abortion or reducing the access of certain groups of women (i.e., poor, welfare-dependent women and women who lack adequate insurance of capacity to pay for an abortion out of their own funds) to safe and affordable abortion does not save babies: it kills mothers.
The Pro-life forces believe that abortion at any point during a pregnancy, whether a fetus is viable outside of the mother's uterus or not, is nothing more than murder and as such, is an immoral act that should be a criminal act (LACYO, 1990). Alternatively, the Pro-Choice movement and its supporters take the position that the Supreme Court ...