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Essay on Abortion and Women's Movement
The right to abortion is especially necessary in a society that ultimately expects women to bear the financial and emotional responsibilities of raising children, but pays women much lower wages than men. The decision to carry a pregnancy to term must be the woman's and no one else's - not the church's, government's, parents', husband's, or boyfriend's.
More than any other contemporary issue, the debate over abortion illustrates the potential for conflict in American society. The fierce and public discourse about abortion leaves our country bitterly divided, with reasonable people weighing in strongly on both sides of the issue. In an era when public apathy has been well chronicled and lamented, the issue of abortion remains highly salient; studies show that almost everyone has a firm belief about abortion. Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that effectively guaranteed the right of women to have abortions, was rendered back in 1973, but the years since have done little to weaken the resolve of those opposed to the procedure.
The women's liberation movement of the 1960s and '70s reached its peak when women won the right to choose an abortion and the Supreme Court legalized the procedure in the 1973 Roe v. Wade case. Women made the right to abortion a central demand of their movement because they understood that women could never be equal with men without control over their reproductive lives (Howard, 1995).When abortions were outlawed before Roe v. Wade, it did not stop them from happening at all. It just made them humiliating, unsafe, and too often fatal.
It is estimated that approximately one million women had illegal abortions annually before the procedure was legalized in 1973, which directly resulted in the deaths of some 5,000 women every year. Women who made the agonizing decision to have an illegal abortion were desperate, often because they simply could not afford to raise a child......
