Abortion is the taking of a human life, and this shouldn't be encouraged. Mothers who believe they cannot support or manage a child should use adoption as an alternative. However, there are very few cases in which abortion is justified and ought to be legal. As The American Law Institute's 1959 model statute allowed abortion in only three cases:.
If the continuation of the pregnancy "would gravely impair the .
physical or mental health of the mother"; If the doctor believed.
"that the child would be born with grave physical or mental defects,".
or if the pregnancy resulted from either rape or incest.
It should also be stressed that these three exceptions make up only a tiny percentage of all abortions. Former U.S. surgeon General C. Everett Koop, a physician, has said that he never once saw a case in which the abortion was necessary to save a woman's life. According to a 1988 study in the journal family Planning Perspectives, only three of every hundred abortions is performs because or worries about birth defects, and rape and incest victims together account for only 1 percent of all U.S. abortions. .
The most obvious of these cases would be the ones where the fetus was created as a result of sexual crime: rape or incest. The woman did not consent to sex and did not have the choice to use birth control, so she should therefore be given the choice on whether to abort the child or to bear her attackers child when it's very existence brings back terrible memories. This is even more true to a twelve year-old child who is impregnated by her stepfather, that she has to have the baby violated her a second time. There is a moral distinction between women who purposely had sexual intercourse, knowing it could make them pregnant, and women who were not seeking sex.
A pregnancy in which the baby suffers from a congenital birth defect is just as tragic as one caused by rape or incest. These children are condemned to live out short lives in pain or virtual unconsciousness; or their lives are long and hard and place unfair burdens on their parents and society.
