Abortion.wps

LA 9-4

4-2-97

Persuasive essay:

Abortion

Abortion is a topic that has sparked controversy for years. It seems there is no one who doesn't have a strong feeling one way or another. That controversy has been the cause of thousands of debates, countless persuasive essays, letters to the president, and even deaths. In this persuasive essay, I hope to present my opinion and also the facts.

Ha! The ‘even deaths’ part reads like a satire of this kind of essay. The entire abortion debate hinges on whether abortions are morally equivalent to deaths. That’s the whole point.

There are thousands of experts on the topic of abortion, but the one I thought was most interesting was Polly Rothstein, a columnist for the Miami Herald. She attacks right-to-lifers by saying "Stop confusing embryos with children", and "A woman's right to have an abortion does not infringe on your right not to."

This is clearly the entirely of the research I did for this essay. A column in the Miami Herald. That was probably printed in the Seattle newspaper like two days before this essay was due.

I agree with her. No one is asking any Pro-Lifer to have an abortion, we just think there should be a choice. If you think abortions are immoral, then don't get one.

Ahhh, if only life was that uncomplicated, kiddo.

There are thousands of rapes across this great country every day.

Should I maybe have saved the phrase ‘great country’ for a sentence that didn’t also include the phrase ‘thousands of rapes’?

Some of them, obviously, result in pregnancy. Imagine if you were carrying the baby of the jerk that raped you and had no way to get rid of it.

Ha!: ‘no way to get rid of it’.

Imagine raising a child that had some of the physical traits of someone who violated the most sacred part of you. Imagine if every time you looked into the eyes of your child, you were reminded of the attack that you were a victim of.

‘The most sacred part of you’ just oozes empathy, no?

Every 31 seconds in this country, a teenager gets pregnant. What if all of them had to keep their babies? That would mean every 31 seconds, a teenager would have to drop out of school to raise their child. The sound of a baby crying would symbolize a promising future being flushed down the toilet. Every dollar spent on diapers and baby food would have to come from a dead-end job flipping burgers or sweeping floors.

And now that we’ve resolved rape, we’re on to teen pregnancy.

I like the economic analysis at the end there. I was a bagboy at Safeway the year I wrote this, and it was my first extended experience with service-economy lifers. The moral wounds of this were clearly still fresh.

It would be easy to say that a fetus is a valuable life life, and that killing it is murder. It's also easy to say that a spider is a valuable life and stepping on it is murder. Where do we draw the line?

Somewhere closer to fetus than spider, I hope.

It all comes down to whether something immoral should be illegal.

Um, no it doesn’t. Abortion comes down to a lot of principled issues, but that’s not one of them.

But would illegalizing abortions solve anything? Prohibiting alchohol didn't make people stop drinking. All it did was make alchohol sleezier, dirtier, and more dangerous. That is what it would do to abortions. People would do it to themselves with coathangers, or get one illegally, and not get the care they need. That would result in infections, deaths, and a sense of helplessness for would-be mothers.

And here we are at the ‘prohibition doesn’t work’ argument! It’s the Abortion Debate Greatest Hits Tour in less than 300 words.

Where did I get the coathangers thing? Are normal 15-year-olds familiar with black-market abortion methodologies?

It is my humble opinion that abortions should be legal. If something is immoral, it should not necessarily become illegal. Cheating on a girlfriend or spouse is immoral, but should that be illegal? Some people consider birth control immoral, should that be illegal? The great thing about this country is the fact that we have the freedom to chose our own actions and beliefs. Illegalizing abortion would take that freedom away.

God bless America!