Abortion Should be Illegalized

Yes, murder is illegal. However, abortion is not murder. The legal definition of murder is the killing of a human being by a sane person, with intent, malice aforethought (prior intention to kill the particular victim or anyone who gets in the way) and with no legal excuse or authority. (1) Abortion meets none of those qualifications. The first of these qualifications is that the victim would have to be a human being. Now, there is a difference between a human, a human being, and a person. Human is the biological definition of our species. A human being, however, denotes sentience, or things like empathy and interactions with the world -- something a fetus does not have. Simply having the same body parts as a human being does not prove anything. Secondly, abortion is not done out of malice. Malice being spite, more or less. There are a variety of reasons that people choose to get abortions, usually because they have no other option. Rape, incest, or if the mother's life is at risk... Many people are not able -- whether it be financially, physically, or mentally -- to carry a child to term. "But adoption is an option!' you may say. However, that still leaves the physical and mental criteria. Sometimes abortions are performed on very young girls who have been raped. Take, for example, the case of a 9-year-old girl from Nicaragua, where abortion is completely illegal. She was raped by a 22-year-old man and found to be pregnant. She then had an abortion, causing a huge debate in the country. Often at these points in their lives, young girls who are able to get pregnant are still too small to deliver a full term baby, nor are they mentally capable of understanding what is happening to them. Many anti-choice people avoid this topic in favour of the common "irresponsible teens having sex" argument. (2) Another topic not many consider is mental ability to carry a child. This strikes a bit of a nerve for me, as I at one point in my life had a pregnancy scare. I have something called tokophobia, which is the extreme fear of pregnancy/childbirth. Tokophobia is divided into two groups, primary and secondary. Primary tokophobia is the fear and deep-seated dread of childbirth which pre-dates pregnancy and can start in adolescence. This often relates back to their own mother's experience or something they learned in school. Secondary is due to previous experience of traumatic birth, poor obstetric practice or medical attention, postpartum depression or other such upsetting events. (3) I have the former, and I honestly sometimes have a hard time looking at a pregnant woman. The fear and anxiety I had during the time I thought I might have been pregnant is nearly indescribable. I cried myself to sleep for two nights straight. I thought I was going to die, because I knew that if I could not get an abortion I would rather take myself than be pregnant. I have since met others who share the same feelings. (4) (5) The third qualification is that the killing would be done without legal excuse or authority. Abortion does not meet this qualification, seeing as how the pregnant person has legal authority over their body. In your argument you mention that pro-choice people don't take the baby's right into consideration with this point. Well, that's because it doesn't have any rights. In order to have rights, one would have to be a person, or, a human being. Whether you classify a fetus as a person or not, they do not meet the legal definition of a person and therefore do not have any rights. And even if it did have rights, it still would not have the right to use the person's body without explicit, ongoing consent. If you want to bring fairness into this, saying that it's not fair because the baby can't do anything about being aborted, then is it fair to force a woman to carry a child? Is it fair to care more about the unborn than the living? Is it fair to allow a child to be born into poverty, into a home where it will not be loved? Is it fair to help a pregnant person up until they give birth and then blame them for being in poverty? Is it fair to stigmatize abortion AND teen pregnancy/parenthood? No matter which option the mother chooses, people will look down on her. If you want abortion to be completely criminalized, there wouldn't be any exceptions to it. We would live in a country live El Salvador, where a little girl who was raped and abused was forced to have a C-Section, and where 57% of pregnant teenagers kill themselves. (6) Or what about Ireland, where a dead woman is being kept on life support against the wishes of her and her family because she was pregnant? (7) Just saying, it seems a bit totalitarian to take away the rights of someone who already is a human being in favour of something that only has the potential to become a person. (1) http://dictionary.law.com... (2) http://www.cbsnews.com... (3) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov... (4) http://pro-choice-or-no-voice.tumblr.com... (5) http://pro-choice-or-no-voice.tumblr.com... (6) http://www.amnesty.org... (7) http://www.independent.ie...