Kaitlyn M. Niek
AP United States Government Pd. #3
05/22/17
National Issues Paper
Why Pro-Choice is the Right Choice Abortion is a hot topic in United States politics as of late, and rightly so. Though religion, costs, maternal psychological damage, and societal morality are often cited as reasons to oppose abortion, a woman’s right to make her own decisions should always prevail. Abortion should be nationally legalized during the first trimester of pregnancy because Roe V. Wade has declared abortion a “fundamental right” to women, fetuses are incapable of feeling pain during the period when most abortions take place, women should be given the right to choose what happens with their body, and access to legal abortions decreases the
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The code went on to say that even the attempt of an abortion, successful or otherwise, should be punished in the same sense. The only stipulation was that an abortion may be performed if done with medical advice to save the life of the mother. Roe believed that these statutes were unconstitutionally vague, and challenged them in the Supreme Court on grounds of Constitutionality.
Using the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Fourteenth amendments, Roe set out to get the laws struck down. The most important of her arguments were in the fourteenth and ninth amendments, where she argued that all people had a right to privacy under the fourteenth amendment’s concept of personal liberty and restrictions on state action, and the ninth amendment’s concept of reserved rights to the people. The court ruled in Roe’s favor, voiding Texas’s abortion laws. The official decision of the court, written by Justice Harry Blackmun, cites reasons of vagueness, and using precedent set by 1891 case Union Pacific R. Co. v. Botsford, where the supreme court upheld and recognized a right of personal privacy. In justifying this decision, Blackmun stated that, “In varying contexts, the Court or individual Justices have, indeed, found at least the roots of that right in the First Amendment; in the Fourth and