Abortion is the act of interrupting a pregnancy by removing the fetus from the Uterus before the term. Lately, it has become a hot topic of debate among groups of interests.
Also, I insist to clearly specify that it’s consented because this word underlines the idea of choice – women can opt for this intervention.
*DISCLAIMER: the majority of references are scientific papers in English (link at the end of the article). Furthermore, the purpose of the present text is NOT to promote abortion, but to uphold the right to women’s choice and surmount preconceptions and stereotypes regarding this act.*
Abortion frequently happens, especially in developing countries, due to poor economic status, financial and psychological instability, or because of lack of information.
Poverty creates hundreds of cases where women choose to have an abortion. The main reason is that they are unable to meet their future child’s needs. From an objective and realistic point of view, this is a wise choice. At the end of the day, women aren’t just “child-producing factories”.
It’s pathetic that I need to underline this issue, but women are indeed rational human beings. Moreover, in this context, they are the only ones who can choose. A lot of women know that, instead of bringing into the world a child, maybe even unwanted, in pain and poverty, it’s better to consult a doctor.
Additionally, if sex ed were to be taught even before going to school, it would solve a lot of the problems of any society, regarding the issue at hand.
We live in a free world, where the woman is the master of her own body. Life puts us in critical situations, and we need to make delicate decisions that may have an extraordinary impact on us.
Financial and psychological instability represent part of the factors that influence the number of women who choose abortion as a solution. If you don’t have financial stability, as I said above, it’s clear that you won’t haste towards raising a child. It’s a materially and emotionally consuming process. Psychological instability, on the other hand, is something that needs to be corrected carefully. Before the time you decide you want to have a child.
Surprisingly, this emotional instability derives also from our increased access to a certain type of information, albeit not the correct one.
Future moms know in advance of the elements that hinder the healthy evolution of a child. This thing is essential to understand and is the key to solving the ethical side of this problem. Paradoxically, in some cases, abortion represents an act born out of empathy and the desire to not bring into the world a human who will suffer.
Raising a child can’t only mean giving him “lunch” money when they leave for school and dress them properly when it’s cold. Not at all… Raising a child means offering them a piece of yourself, teaching them how to be human and teaching them that, when their time comes, they’ll have to teach and help others be human.
An unstable person from a psychological point of view won’t resist the shock of becoming a parent, won’t perform and will lose the fight with reality, no matter how much love they would offer to the child. Further, abortion has been proven to be less traumatic than giving birth, for all the involved parties.
And if we didn’t teach the boys of yesterday to respect the body of women, we’ve woken up with the men of today who bully them and rape them.
Rape is the sexual act that the majority of society decides to put on the taboo list. Rape is a practice as old as society, but still, people continue to drown in degradation and practice this inhuman act. Women suffer major trauma following a rape, living in fear and bearing an excruciating emotional pain.
I don’t even want to believe I need to say that women AREN’T TO BLAME someone rapes them.
Clothes, attitude, drunkenness – none of these represent an excuse for rape. What’s even worse is that the children conceived through these acts of liberty deprivation and aggression, the victims more often than not, pressured by the church or society to come to the term and, basically, raise children conceived by hate and violence.
Women don’t want to bring into the world the descendants of those who’ve stolen their purity and dignity. Neither the children of those who’ve stolen their mental stability and cause them only pain and often, humiliation. Too often, the victims of rape are children, underage people, who haven’t even learned what life or love means. A child isn’t capable of raising another, a child needs to live their own childhood.
Ideally, these girls request the help of doctors, and implicitly, abortion. The reality… differs. Too few of them. Later they ask the help of psychologists. Even so, whose choice it is? No one makes a sport out of an abortion, because it is a traumatizing process EXCLUSIVELY for the mom.
The mother goes to the pain of the birth process. The mother confronts society as well as herself. Only she can choose if she wants to live holding a child’s hand or not. No one has the right to choose for her, no one has the right to judge. Why? Because it’s her womb where the fetus develops. Only she knows if the environment is proper for a child’s harmonious development.
But there exists another minority of people who put everyone’s life in danger. Doctors who refuse to operate due to their own beliefs (religiously speaking).
These monstrous specimens, egoistical, egocentric and self-entitled, that claim they are doing God’s work are a shame for the duty that they supposedly have. They’re a major risk for the safety of society. When becoming a medic, the graduates of medical schools say the oath known as “Hippocratic oath.” This has, in its original form, two contradictory parts: phrase three and four, that obligates the medic to do what’s right for the patient but forbid consented abortion and euthanasia.
And so, when the doctors realized that it’s infinitely worse to produce torment, pain and force a human to live a short life riddled by disease, another oath has been constituted. One that modern to doctors should abide by. But some of us remain in the Dark Ages… partly because we say the seed has already become a flower.
Does a fetus feel de pain of the process of abortion like an adult would feel when killed? In short, no.
Firstly, a human being is NOT defined by the heartbeat that appears during the fifth week of labor. Some may say that this remark is of an incredible cruelness. These people, equally, probably never loved high school biology.
Being a vegetative reaction, the cruel reality is that the heartbeat wouldn’t differentiate a fetus from any other living creature. Therefore, a heartbeat is NOT a human-specific trait.
However, it has been scientifically proven time and time again that the cortex of the fetus, the center of human conscience, develops only after six months of pregnancy.
In this context, American psychologist David Foulkes states that dreaming is a cognitive process, strongly linked to the capacity of visualizing and imagining things. The absence of cerebral activity specific to dreaming in fetuses demonstrates that it doesn’t experience anything while in the mother’s uterus.
Therefore, this feels like when adults experiment a long and deep sleep, but with no accompanying dream, images or memories. The conclusion is that the fetus doesn’t have any active sense, even if the respective organs exist. Plus, abortion is carried out by specialists in sterile and safe conditions. There is an active effort to make the process easier for the mother as well.
In other words, you could say that the only one who feels and understands what is happening, is the mom herself.
The brain of a newborn resets during natural birth. This act has an extremely high impact on the child, being even traumatizing.
“The birth doesn’t constitute more at the start of an individual’s life than the end of pregnancy. The birth represents a complex and very important series of functional changes that serve to prepare the newborn to bridge the gap between development inside the uterus and the development continued outside the uterus (Montagu, 1986, p.57).”
And what happens with the children who end up being born?
Simple. Either the mom chooses to keep them, more often than not due to social pressure. In most cases, she’s unstable or unprepared for this beautiful, yet extraordinarily difficult mission. In these kinds of situations, some end up regretting their decision. This leads to other dark situations such as child selling or infanticide. In happy cases, the only problem that remains is raising future adults in an unfavorable environment which can lead to numerous affections or improper manifestations of psychological origin.
Or, she chooses to take them to special centers, where they’re going to be taken into adoption. These children who arrive in orphanages feel alone and disoriented among strangers and will develop behavioral issues. Furthermore, it’s hard to integrate them into society and can start acting to the detriment of society’s evolution.
Why? Because of the shock during birth.
Many are abandoned right after birth, which activates in them an extremely powerful instinct of survival, which is extremely uncontrollable and will never disappear. There are, of course, extraordinary cases of children who develop, learn and have the possibility of an adequate education. They become exemplary members of society. These cases, however, are very rare. The parent job is a difficult one and filled with responsibility, and irreversible mistakes are very easily made.
In conclusion, why risk your life, the future of a child, and, most probably, the happiness of the few people around the adult they’ll become. It’s better to take a cruel but assumed decision, and consented as well, right? Abortion saves more than it destroys. We, the others, should learn to not take an uninformed guess about the lives of others. Everyone knows how heavy their shoulders are and how much pressure they have on their shoulders, choosing to act accordingly.
Democracy fundaments itself on the liberty of informed choices. Everything else is only lies and illusions that hurt millions of people.
Having this in mind, if you want to read more about freedom of choice and informed choices, you might want to check out this article.
Further reading: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-does-consciousness-arise/
https://www.humancondition.com/freedom-expanded-book1-how-and-when-humans-became-conscious/
Authors: Georgiana Badea, Laura Birgaoanu & Cornea Catalin