Why abortions are bad

The infection could spread to your fallopian tubes and ovaries — known as pelvic inflammatory disease PID. PID can increase the risk of infertility or ectopic pregnancy , where an egg implants itself outside of the womb. Talk to your doctor or an abortion advice service for more information if you're concerned about the possible risks of an abortion.

Page last reviewed: 24 April Next review due: 24 April Feinberg argues that infanticide is wrong, not because infants have the right to life, but because our society's protection of infants has social utility.

If we do not treat infants with tenderness and consideration, then when they are persons they will be worse off and we will be worse off also Feinberg, , p. These moves only stave off the difficulties with the pro-choice view; they do not resolve them. Consider Kant's account of our obligations to animals. Kantians certainly know the difference between persons and animals. Therefore, no true Kantian would treat persons as she would treat animals.

Thus, Kant's defense of our duties to animals fails to show that Kantians have a duty not to be cruel to animals. Consider Feinberg's attempt to show that infanticide is wrong even though no infant is a person. That is quite compatible with killing the infants we intend to discard. This point can be supported by an analogy with which any pro-choicer will agree. There are plainly good reasons to treat with care and consideration the fetuses we intend to keep.

This is quite compatible with aborting those fetuses we intend to discard. Thus, Feinberg's account of the wrongness of infanticide is inadequate. Accordingly, we can see that a contractarian defense of the pro-choice personhood syllogism fails.

The problem arises because the contractarian cannot account for our duties to individuals who are not persons, whether these individuals are animals or infants. Because the pro-choicer wishes to adopt a narrow criterion for the right to life so that fetuses will not be included, the scope of her major premise is too narrow. Her problem is the opposite of the problem the classic opponent of abortion faces.

The argument of this section has attempted to establish, albeit briefly, that the classic anti-abortion argument and the pro-choice argument favored by most philosophers both face problems that are mirror images of one another. A stand-off results. The abortion debate requires a different strategy. Why do the standard arguments in the abortion debate fail to resolve the issue? The general principles to which partisans in the debate appeal are either truisms most persons would affirm in the absence of much reflection, or very general moral theories.

All are subject to major problems. A different approach is needed. Opponents of abortion claim that abortion is wrong because abortion involves killing someone like us, a human being who just happens to be very young.

Supporters of choice claim that ending the life of a fetus is not in the same moral category as ending the life of an adult human being. Surely this controversy cannot be resolved in the absence of an account of what it is about killing us that makes killing us wrong. On the one hand, if we know what property we possess that makes killing us wrong, then we can ask whether fetuses have the same property. On the other hand, suppose that we do not know what it is about us that makes killing us wrong.

If this. Surely, we will not understand the ethics of killing fetuses, for if we do not understand easy cases, then we will not understand hard cases. Both pro-choicer and anti-abortionist agree that it is obvious that it is wrong to kill us. Thus, a discussion of what it is about us that makes killing us not only wrong, but seriously wrong, seems to be the right place to begin a discussion of the abortion issue.

Who is primarily wronged by a killing? The wrong of killing is not primarily explained in terms of the loss to the family and friends of the victim. Perhaps the victim is a hermit. Perhaps one's friends find it easy to make new friends.

The wrong of killing is not primarily explained in terms of the brutalization of the killer. The great wrong to the victim explains the brutalization, not the other way around. The wrongness of killing us is understood in terms of what killing does to us. Killing us imposes on us the misfortune of premature death. That misfortune underlies the wrongness.

Premature death is a misfortune because when one is dead, one has been deprived of life. This misfortune can be more precisely specified. Premature death cannot deprive me of my past life. That part of my life is already gone. If I die tomorrow or if I live thirty more years my past life will be no different. It has occurred on either alternative.

Rather than my past, my death deprives me of my future, of the life that I would have lived if I had lived out my natural life span. The loss of a future biological life does not explain the misfortune of death. Compare two scenarios: In the former I now fall into a coma from which I do not recover until my death in thirty years.

In the latter I die now. The latter scenario does not seem to describe a greater misfortune than the former. The loss of our future conscious life is what underlies the misfortune of premature death.

Not any future conscious life qualifies, however. Suppose that I am terminally ill with cancer. Suppose also that pain and suffering would dominate my future conscious life. Thus, the misfortune of premature death consists of the loss to us of the future goods of consciousness. What are these goods? Much can be said about this issue, but a simple answer will do for the purposes of this essay. The goods of life are whatever we get out of life.

The goods of life are those items toward which we take a "pro" attitude. They are completed projects of which we are proud, the pursuit of our goals, aesthetic enjoyments, friendships, intellectual pursuits, and physical pleasures of various sorts.

The goods of life are what makes life worth living. In general, what makes life worth living for one person will not be the same as what makes life worth living for another.

Nevertheless, the list of goods in each of our lives will overlap. The lists are usually different in different stages of our lives. What makes the goods of my future good for me? One possible, but wrong, answer is my desire for those goods now. This answer does not account for those aspects of my future life that I now believe I will later value, but about which I am wrong.

Neither does it account for those aspects of my future that I will come to value, but which I don't value now. What is valuable to the young may not be valuable to the middle-aged. What is valuable to the middle-aged may not be valuable to the old. Some of life's values for the elderly are best appreciated by the elderly. Thus it is wrong to say that the value of my future to me is just what I value now.

What makes my future valuable to me are those aspects of my future that I will or would value when I will or would experience them, whether I value them now or not. It follows that a person can believe that she will have a valuable future and be wrong.

Furthermore, a person can believe that he will not have a valuable future and also be wrong. This is confirmed by our attitude toward many of the suicidal. We attempt to save the lives of the suicidal and to convince them that they have made an error in judgment.

This does not mean that the future of an individual obtains value from the value that others confer on it. It means that, in some cases, others can make a clearer judgment of the value of a person's future to that person than the person herself.

This often happens when one's judgment concerning the value of one's own future is clouded by personal tragedy. Compare the views of McInerney, , and Shirley, Premature death is a misfortune. Premature death is a misfortune, in general, because it deprives an individual of a future of value. An individual's future will be valuable to that individual if that individual will come, or would come, to value it.

We know that killing us is wrong. What makes killing us wrong, in general, is that it deprives us of a future of value. Thus, killing someone is wrong, in general, when it deprives her of a future like ours. Her hair is brushed and shining, her nails are manicured, and she wears a wedding ring.

But her head is buried in her hands, and behind her loom the pages of a giant calendar. To be a woman is to bear the entire consequence of sex.

What could make a married woman living during the great postwar Baby Boom unable to face one more pregnancy? Start making a list of the possible reasons, and you might never stop. Maybe her husband was an angry or violent man; maybe he had a tendency to blame her when she got pregnant. Maybe she had finally reached the point in her life when her youngest was in school and she had a few blessed hours to herself each day, when she could sit in the quiet of her house and have a cup of coffee and get her thoughts together.

And maybe—just maybe—she was a woman who knew her own mind and her own life, and who knew very well when something was too much for her to bear.

From August An anonymous married woman describes terminating an unwanted pregnancy. The fictional woman with her head in her hands made me think of a real woman who died as a result of using Lysol to control her fertility: the year-old woman in the Arkansas report whose husband took her to the hospital, where she soon died.

And she paid for it with her life. It calls to mind something almost ancient, something that suggests the beginning of all things. It reminded me, both in color and somehow in meaning, of the earliest photographs of the bog people of Northern Europe, a phenomenon that had absorbed my attention when I was very young. Those ancient and particular faces, those people you could easily have picked out of a crowd, buried deep in the peat for more than 2, years, keeping their secrets, slumbering.

When farmers cutting turf began discovering them in the s, they were so perfectly preserved that the men assumed they had uncovered the remains of very recent murder victims, not the bodies of people who had lived before the time of Christ. And that was the shocking thing about the bog people: They were so clearly like us, so obviously human and individual.

These sonograms are so richly detailed that many expectant mothers pay to have one made in a shopping-mall studio, much in the spirit in which they might bring the baby to a portrait studio.

They are one thing and one thing only: baby pictures. Had they been available when I was pregnant, I would definitely have wanted one. For a long time, these images made me anxious. Obviously, it would take a profound act of violence to remove him from his quiet world and destroy him. And I held on to that comforting piece of information, until it occurred to me to look at one of those images taken at the end of the first trimester. A picture of a week fetus is a Rorschach test.

I envy them. When I see that image, I have the opposite reaction. I think: Here is one of us; here is a baby. J Child Psychol Psyc 47 1 Inadequate preabortion counseling and decision conflict as predictors of subsequent relationship difficulties and psychological stress in men and women. Traumatology 16 1 Medical Abortion, Risks. Long-Term Risks of Surgical Abortion. Carol J. Sexual dysfunction after a first trimester induced abortion in a Chinese population.

March CompassCare is a c 3 tax-exempt organization offering medical pregnancy confirmation, STD testing and treatment, pre-termination evaluations, abortion pill reversal and free abortion information in the greater Rochester and Buffalo regions. Disclaimer: This site, and all information contained herein, is designed to be an informational tool only.

It is not intended to provide medical advice or replace care from a qualified medical practitioner. Search for:. Call or Text: Abortion Risks and Side Effects We inform, you decide. Patient Reviews Blog. Common Side Effects Most women experience some of the following after an abortion: Bleeding — on average bleeding lasts 14 days, but can last as long as 21 days. Immediate Complications Damage to the womb or cervix Excessive bleeding Incomplete abortion, requiring a additional surgical abortion procedure Infection of the uterus or fallopian tubes Scarring of the inside of the uterus Sepsis or Septic shock Uterine perforation Death Future Health Risks.

Infants who are born before 37 weeks gestational age have a much lower chance of living to adulthood. Mental Health Research suggests that women who have had abortions may be at increased risk for mental health problems. Infertility and Future Childbearing Complications that can arise from induced abortion, such as infection and damage to the uterus, can lead to infertility and increased risks of future childbearing.