Abortion in America is a controversial issue in which both sides have valid arguments at face value. The pro-choice side has many arguments to support it belief in keeping abortion legal. Many of these are faulty, and argue points irrelevent to the issue as I will attempt to illustrate, thereby eliminating the main pro-choice arguments.
The pro-life position has somewhat different ideas. The most popular of these is: The unborn entity is fully human from the moment of conception. Abortion results in the intentional death of the unborn entity. Therefore, abortion can be defined the intentional killing of a human being. This killing is in most cases unjustified, since the unborn human being has a full right to life. If, however, there is a high probability that a woman’s pregnancy will result in her death (such as tubal pregnancy, for example), then abortion is justified.
For it is a greater good that one human should live (the mother) rather than two die (the mother and her child). Or, in such cases the intent is not to kill the unborn but to save the life of the mother. With the exception of such cases, abortion is an act in which an innocent human being is intentionally killed; therefore, abortion should be made illegal, as are all other such acts of killing. One argument made by people in favor of abortion is an appeal to pity. When one fallaciously argues by appealing to pity, one is arguing that certain actions should be permitted or tolerated out of pity for those performing them when in fact the basis for showing them pity is not a legitimate basis for the action.
For example, a woman who argues that she should not receive a parking ticket because her child was crying and she took her child to a candy store to cheer her up is appealing to pity. The following abortion rights arguments are examples. Anyone who goes to pro-choice demonstrations in the United States will see on pro-choice buttons a drawing of a coat hanger. This is the symbol of the pro-choice movement representing the many women who were harmed or killed because they either performed illegal abortions on themselves (i. e.
, the surgery was performed with a “coat hanger”) or went to physicians. That means, if abortion is made illegal, then women will once again be harmed. This argument does sound true. Although the thought of finding a dead young woman with a bloody coat hanger dangling between her legs is unpleasant,and powerful, it does not make a good argument. The reason this argument doesn’t work is because it is begging the question.
In fact, this lie hides behind a good percentage of the popular arguments for the pro-choice position. One begs the question when one assumes what one is trying to prove is correct. The question-begging of the coat-hanger argument is very obvious: but only by assuming that the unborn are not fully human does the argument work. If the unborn are not fully human, then the pro-choicer has a legitimate concern, just as one would have in overturning a law forbidding appendicitis operations if countless people were needlessly dying of both appendicitis and illegal operations.
But if the unborn are fully human, this pro-choice argument is the same as saying that because people die or are harmed while killing other people, the state should make it safe for them to do so. Even some pro-choicers, who argue for their position in other ways, admit that thecoat hanger/back-alley argument is crap. Although statistics cant establish a particular moral position, there has been arguments over both the actual number of illegal abortions and the number of women who died as a result of them before legalization. Prior to Roe vs Wade, pro-choicers used saying that nearly a million women every year obtained illegal abortions performed with rusty coat hangers in back-alleys that resulted in thousands of fatalities. Given the seriousness of the issue at hand, these statements are more than exaggerations, because several proven facts establish that the pro-choice movement was lying. Another argument by people in support of pro-choice say that before abortion was legalized, rich pregnant women were able to travel to other countries to get abortions.
