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| Yes | 71% | 3960 votes | Total: 5599 votes | |
| No | 29% | 1639 votes |
Yes
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Add to Favorites"[...] I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife or the chemist's drug.
"[...] I will respect the privacy of my patients, for their problems are not disclosed to me that the world may know. Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.
"[...] I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm. [...]"
Written in 1964 by Louis Lasagna, Academic Dean of the School of Medicine at Tufts University, and used in medical schools today as an oath that graduating medical students must take.
Physicians are instructed to take the Hippocratic Oath before they begin their medical practice. You can tease apart the letter of the oath and just like any law, you can probably find a way to use the letter of it to defeat the spirit of it. Technicalities can be found in anything. The spirit of it, however, is to do no harm and not to play God. The Oath instructs you to ease the suffering of those around you and become a pillar of society.
Not all of us share the same morals but we do all live by the same ethical codes. Even if some of us think it might be immoral to have an abortion we can still all agree that it's unethical to treat someone who asks for help and is in danger of getting hurt, even if the risked injury will be self-inflicted.
We also know that killing people is wrong, right? Right. In almost every culture, murder is a crime, sometimes punishable by death. Not even death justifies death, which is why capital punishment is often questioned as ethically objectionable.
One of the foremost issues to take into consideration is whether or not an unborn child is a living human being. If a fetus is not alive in its own right but is an outgrowth of a woman's body, it's easy to conclude that in questioning abortion, we question the decision of a pregnant woman and how she treats her own body. If a fetus is independent life and does have rights, the issue becomes complicated. A fetus is an unborn person. Saying a fetus isn't human is a shabby attempt at easing the guilt of killing or at least of preventing life, even if the fetus isn't yet currently independently alive.
We know pain is bad. We know suffering is bad and we do what we can to alleviate suffering in others. We don't know if death is bad. If someone wants to live then yes, death is bad but in many cases (those taking advantage of physician assisted suicide, for example) life is bad. Some people don't want to live and don't want to suffer for whatever personal reasons they may have. Rather than get off-topic and discuss whether or not suicide is right or wrong, even if it's physician-assisted, I want to simply acknowledge that some people don't want to be alive.
Based on that, killing someone before they've experienced life isn't good or bad. Since they have never experienced being alive, it's impossible for them to have a desire for it. Is life better than not being alive? That's something we can never know because the very moment we can make the comparison, we're unable to reflect on it because we're dead.
Under some circumstances, death is merciful and in other ways, it's tragic. What can't be determined is whether or not the child wants to live. Just because you value something doesn't mean others must share this value and it also doesn't mean it's wrong not to value it. It should then be up to the mother whether or not to keep the child. Would you force a child to be born and grow up unwanted? Perhaps put into a state foster care system or feeling unloved and unwanted or perhaps living a life of misery? How is that better than ending a life of misery early? Who can say how it would turn out?
We also need to take into consideration is the question of how much a human life is worth. Is it worth money? Is it worth love? Is one person's life worth that of another? Is one person's life worth another's happiness? A life is worth the happiness it will experience. Are we sacrificing a mother's happiness for the happiness a baby might experience?
Forcing people to suffer is wrong. In preventing women from having legal, safe abortions, we force women to suffer. We can boil this whole discussion down to one question: Is it justified, from the position of a physician, to think abortions should be illegal? Abortions should be kept safe because if they're made illegal and some women still try to perform them, they could end up doing more harm to themselves than they otherwise would. If it has to be legal for it to be safe, make it legal. Keep it legal.
Learn more about this author, Sarah Parrish.
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No
The fundamental question here is what is an abortion? Is it the removal of a clump of cells with the potential to become human at some future point of time or is it a human being, with a soul, entitled to the most basic right of all, the right to life?
When is a human being formed? When are we entitled to life and the protection of the State? Is it immediately after birth or, as some have argued, at some later point? Can a baby be a non-human before birth and a human being afterward? If so, how? Hardly from passing through the birth canal, as babies are often born via Cesarean section. It can't be decided by the time factor IE nine months spent in the womb as premature babies surely attest to (aren't they human?). New born babies are not capable of survival on their own, so capacity in this regard cannot be the decider.
To be considered human, do we need the ability to feed ourselves? Do we have to have two healthy lungs, a fully developed brain, or a healthy heart? Clearly not, as we have seen adult human beings in various states of health, and most people would not deny them the right to life.
Sometimes people argue in favor of abortions being carried out early in the pregnancy when the baby does not resemble a typical healthy (born) human being. Is that to be our criteria the right to live or die is to be decided by our appearance? An embryo develops and grows into a baby as a child develops into an adult, and an adult continues to change physically as they grew old. Arguably, anyone up to seventy, eighty or older, is still in the process of change and development and therefore not fully human.
Scientifically and logically, the moment of conception is the point when a human being is created. It is at this point that every person's genetic makeup is decided and on a physical level, isn't that what distinguishes us from one another? On another level, it is at the point of conception that the growth and development and change of our cells begins, which continues to the day we die.
Nobody knows the pain a baby goes through when it is aborted though being poisoned by saline solution or having your brains sucked out can hardly be pleasant. However, there have been many studies of post-abortion women suffering greatly, not just from guilt but also physiologically and psychologically. Although I am sure not every woman feels like this, there are heart-rending stories of women wondering what their child would have been like, five, ten, twenty years later, had they been given the opportunity to live.
With abortion, there is no going back.
People often argue abortion on "hard case" grounds IE rape or incest. However, why do they generally advocate the death of one of the innocent victims (the conceived child) yet usually oppose with horror the suggestion of death penalty for the perpetrator? It seems unfair.
If a woman is entitled to kill her unborn child, surely she should also have the right to kill her born child. Why don't the same arguments hold up bad timing, too much to handle in my life right now, ruin my career, it's inconvenient, I can't afford it, my boyfriend doesn't want the child, etc with born children?
Women have for centuries been at a disadvantage in society. However, the feminist movement, by insisting on, and lobbying for, the right of a woman to have an abortion has instead betrayed women they have convinced society that it is alright for women to kill their babies, and have fooled women into thinking abortion is a woman's right.
What woman, knowing that a human life was growing within her, could willingly chose abortion? How could any woman, other than a desperate one, kill her own child?
The origin of a human life is a matter of fact, not of opinion. Scientifically the evidence points to the moment of conception. As a society, we need to need to protect all human beings, particularly those most vulnerable.
Who is more vulnerable, more voiceless, than the unborn child?
Learn more about this author, Valerie Murphy.
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