What makes abortion an ethical issue

To do this, some of the philosophic and historic approaches to abortion and how a position can be logically argued are examined. At the outset some emotion-laden terms are defined. Abortion is defined as the expulsion of a fetus from the uterus before 28 weeks' gestation, the arbitrarily established time of viability. This discussion is concerned only with induced abortion. Since the beginning of recorded history women have chosen to have abortions.

Early Jews and Christians forbade abortion on practical and religious grounds. A human life was viewed as valuable, and there was also the practical consideration of the addition of another person to the population, i. The interviews took place in rooms where privacy was ensured and all the recordings were kept safe on a closed file in the authors computer.

In cases where the participants had to travel to be part of the study, compensation for the travel was provided. All participants signed a consent form. The study revealed that health workers providing abortion services experienced diverse and numerous challenges in their work. Ethical dilemmas were reported concerning abortions and related decision-making.

How the abortion service providers perceived and interpreted the abortion law seemed to influence the way they handled and coped with these dilemmas. The current abortion law and clinical guidelines were well-known among the health workers. They all stated that they followed the recommendations and often referred to them during our interviews, but they also explained that they experienced a gap between the law and the working reality at the clinic, which continuously forced them into ethically challenging situations.

Three main dilemmas were described by the participants; 1 should abortion be provided or not 2 should they accept lies or not, and 3 should they accept all kinds of reasons or not. Each of these scenarios is discussed below. The health workers in the study described various dilemmas arising when a woman is not eligible for an abortion according to the grounds stipulated in the law.

They worried that if they refused the woman a safe abortion, she would end up trying to self-induce the abortion or seek abortion from an unskilled provider.

Health workers were aware, and some had personal experiences, of how refusing care to a desperate woman seeking abortion could have harmful and even deadly implications.

A health worker explained this dilemma as follows:. This became an obstacle for me of whether to conduct an abortion or not If I refused to assist her, I knew she would take desperate measures. One health worker had experienced a case where refusal led to the patient dying from unsafe abortion and recalled how such the experience had transformative impact on his attitude towards abortion. Three days later I was on a night shift and she came to the health station with an ambulance after having tried to abort on her own.

She was bleeding badly when she arrived and soon her life passed away. The feeling of being responsible for her death made him see abortions differently. Similar experiences were reported by several health workers who reflected on the situation before the law was implemented. They presented detailed memories of how emergency rooms were filled with women suffering serious and life-threatening complications from unsafe abortions. Another challenge arose when health-care workers believed that the woman was lying about her reason for having an abortion.

Yet many found this unpleasant and upsetting, which in turn made them confused about the ethically correct way to handle the challenge. They explained that they felt the women were trying to trick them into getting an abortion. We use such doors to help the clients, but if medical problems happen I will be courted [sent to jail]. So even if the door is slightly open it is challenging for us. We will try to help them, but lifesaving is not easy. Sometimes we do take a risk to help them.

Many of the abortion service providers felt particularly sympathetic towards young women, especially students and poor young women. They expressed that they felt responsible for helping such women as an abortion could prevent them from dropping out of school, being ostracized by their communities, or falling into even deeper poverty. Confronted with such scenarios, the large majority of the abortion service providers in the study found it difficult to refuse assistance to these women despite their not being considered as legally eligible.

For some clients, maybe they are very poor, the poorest. Most people with unwanted pregnancy are the poorest ones. In contrast were the women whom the abortion service providers often did not perceive to have a good enough reason for an abortion.

These were, in particular, married women as well as women thought to be wealthy. They were described as women trying to cheat the system by saying that they had been raped or who were untruthful about their age. Such women were commonly described as liars or cheaters.

Some abortion service providers tried to convince them to go on with their pregnancy with counselling sessions, while others refused altogether to provide them with the service. If they are not reasonable, I have to reassure them to continue the pregnancy. Then sometimes we ignore her. Health workers who viewed the law as being too restrictive often found that women had good and reasonable reasons for an abortion.

They would often question women thoroughly in attempts to uncover whether or not they were lying about the reason for seeking an abortion. Some of these participants felt strongly that the existing law was too liberal and thought that abortions should only be accepted to save the life of a woman, as was the case prior to the change in the law. Religious arguments of abortion being a sin were strongly present within this line of reasoning.

Even though most health workers accepted that some women were eligible for an abortion, many felt that the very act of carrying out the abortion was difficult. Standing in front of a woman and administering the drugs, or using the surgical devices to remove the fetus, provoked dilemmas related to their religious beliefs, perceptions about life, and local societal norms.

They questioned whether abortion was ethically right or not. However, the mothers who come here seeking abortion would probably go to a much worse place if I told them that I would not provide them with the abortion services due to my feelings or my religion.

All the participants described themselves as religious, and this influenced their perception of abortion. The religious teaching that abortion is sinful made it difficult for many to fully accept the nature of their work.

Some health workers explained that they would pray after having conducted an abortion and were worried that their God would not forgive them. Though we do it to help mothers who are in need, it makes us feel bad towards ourselves. I was taught in school to do no harm. Furthermore, the health workers explained that, according to the cultural norms in Ethiopian society, abortion is taboo and is viewed as a crime by many. As community dwellers and participants in the society, they thus had to strike a balance between the social norms surrounding them and their work.

Some may say that professionals are killing the baby. So you may feel this when you are interacting with religion and society. Many felt that they were standing alone with difficult decision-making and missed a support network. The negative perceptions of health workers providing abortion services caused many to hide the nature of their work from family and friends.

Some said they could be kicked out of their home if their family heard that they performed abortions. Others said they were likely to lose dear friends. Many, therefore, came to disguise their work.

I don't tell them that I conduct abortions. My family members are church people so if I tell them that I conduct abortions they will be very angry. I even fear that they might expel me from the house if they find out that I conduct abortions. In such difficult work-related contexts, the large majority of the study participants found strength in religion and in the perception that they were doing good by helping the women. Several referred to the conviction that they were sure that God would understand or forgive them, given their underlying motive of saving lives.

If we provide a safe and sound abortion, we are rectifying their lives. For these reasons, I don't see being engaged in abortion-related services as a sinful job. It should be noted that, for a small minority of our study participants, working with abortion services did not emerge as particularly problematic. It was perceived as a job that would bring money to the table or as part of the right of a woman to decide over her own body.

One health worker particularly mentioned an example of having helped a young student who had been raped. Because she was provided with an abortion, the student managed to finish her education. Such experiences helped the health workers to justify the day-to-day challenges of their work. Our findings indicate that the abortion service providers made a substantial effort to follow the abortion law and that they attempted to slightly stretch the interpretation of the law in certain instances and to make such bending of the law ethically justifiable to themselves.

Women who were perceived as rich or married were, more often than the young, poor, and students, seen to have unreasonable or illegitimate reasons for an abortion. The example of married women is particularly noteworthy as marital rape is not recognized in the Ethiopian law, thus creating a sense of ineligibility for abortion among these women [ 25 ].

With the increasing demands at both the individual and health system level for the spacing of pregnancies, combined with the still high unmet demands for contraception in the married population in Ethiopia [ 20 ], the limited acceptance for and access to safe abortion for married women emerges as ethically challenging.

At one end of the debate over this practice are those who regard abortion as murder—a despicable and heinous crime. Most Americans are somewhere in the middle. The central philosophical question in the abortion debate concerns the moral status of the embryo and fetus. If the fetus is a person, with the same right to life as any human being who has been born, it would seem that very few, if any, abortions could be justified, because it is not morally permissible to kill children because they are unwanted or illegitimate or disabled.

However, the morality of abortion is not necessarily settled so straightforwardly. Thus, the morality of abortion depends not only on the moral status of the fetus, but also on whether the pregnant woman has an obligation to continue to gestate the fetus.

Public opinion on abortion falls into three camps—conservative, liberal, and moderate or gradualist —each of which draws on both science and ethical thinking. Conservatives regard the fetus as a human being, with the same rights as any human being who has been born, from the beginning of pregnancy onward. Some conservative groups—such as the Catholic Church—consider the fetus to be a human being with full moral rights even earlier than the beginning of pregnancy, which occurs when the embryo implants in the uterus.

The Church regards the embryo as a full human being from conception the conjoining of sperm and egg. This is because at conception the embryo receives its own unique genetic code, distinct from that of its mother or father.

Therefore, Catholic doctrine regards conception, not implantation, as the beginning of the life of a human being. Although conservatives concede that the fetus changes dramatically during gestation, they do not accept these changes as relevant to moral standing. Conservatives argue that there is no stage of development at which we can say, now we have a human being, whereas a day or a week or a month earlier we did not.

Any attempt to place the onset of humanity at a particular moment—whether it is when brain waves appear, or when the fetus begins to look human, or when quickening, sentience, or viability occur —is bound to be arbitrary because all of these stages will occur if the fetus is allowed to grow and develop. If so, then killing them is also wrong. This raises two questions about what it is to have a future like ours. First, what precisely is involved in this notion? Does it essentially belong to rational, future-oriented, plan-making beings?

If so, then killing most nonhuman animals would not be wrong, but neither would killing those who are severely developmentally disabled. Second, at what point does the life of a being with a future like ours start? Marquis assumes that we are essentially human animals, so our lives start with the beginning of our organisms. But Jeff McMahan denies this, arguing that we are essentially embodied minds, and not human organisms. The rights of the mother Women's rights Arguments in favour of abortion Arguments against abortion Pregnancy rights Safety of women Early feminists Responsibility of the mother.

Rights of the unborn child Moral personhood When is the foetus 'alive'? Historical status of the embryo Potential human, potential rights. The rights of the father Fathers' rights. See also.