We have advanced greatly from when we first began forming our society's ethics. The majority has praised many of these advances as a good thing. However, when it comes to abortion, many people think that it is an advance that is purely bad and morally wrong. How could so many people find a medical procedure to be so objectionable? Well, this is one of the few procedures that involve two people, one of whom is incapable of communicating his or her wants and needs. Abortion has been around and been practiced a lot longer than most people like to admit. Only now, it is a perfectly legal practice, which many feel means the government is endorsing it. It's this legality issue that has brought abortion into the spotlight, and made it a public opinion, rather than a personal choice as it used to be.
Abortion is the act of killing a fetus before it can be born. It can legally be done up to 22 weeks into the pregnancy. This is the government's decision of when life truly starts in the womb. Most people's grief with abortion arises over this issue of declaring when that cluster of cells is considered a human. Many people believe that life begins at conception. As soon as that egg and sperm combine, you have an innocent life that must be protected. It has the possibility to become human therefore it must be protected. However, no one thinks we should protect the sperm or egg, even though they both have an equal chance of becoming a human. It's interesting that, many of these people still use a form of birth control, but they don't considered that to be wrong. After all, preventing the sperm and the egg from combining is total different than destroying them right after they do.
Clearly the major issue with abortion is the idea of choosing one life over another. Most people hold life to be precious, but we also hold our freedom of choice to be precious. So which is more important, the mother's choice or the babies life? What if the situation came down to having to choose between two lives, the mother's or the baby's? How can we make that decision? We are not omniscient, it is not our job, or right, to choose who lives and who dies.