Abortion :: essays research papers

Abortion, which has been legal for over 23 years, is against the Constitution and the Supreme Court case that legalized, it should be overturned. In 1971 a pregnant single woman (Roe) brought a class action suit challenging the constitutionality of the Texas criminal abortion laws, which prohibited having or attempting an abortion except on medical advice for the purpose of saving the mother's life. This lawsuit was labeled Roe v. Wade. The Wade of Roe v. Wade was Henry Wade, one of the attorneys who argued the case for Texas. Roe v. Wade was first argued in the Supreme Court on December 13, 1971. Roe v. Wade was reargued October 11, 1972 and on January 22, 1973 Justice Blackmun delivered the opinion of the Court: "The [Supreme] Court declares the statutes void as vague and overbroadly infringing [the] plaintiff's ninth and fourteenth amendment rights." From then on an average of 4,100 abortions have been legally performed in this country daily. Abortion is defined by a decidedly objective source (the dictionary) as "a fatally premature expulsion of a fetus from the womb" (Webster 2). Abortions are performed in a variety of ways. The procedure depends on how long the woman has been pregnant and where she decides to have the abortion. The most common methods of abortion in the United States are: menstrual extraction, suction curettage, D&E, saline, prostaglandin, and hysterotomy. Menstrual extraction is a form of a suction curettage that doesn't use a curette and is sometimes performed even before a pregnancy test has confirmed pregnancy. A suction curettage is performed from six to 14 weeks after the "mother's" last period. A blunt suction tube is inserted into the uterus, which extracts the baby and the uterus lining. Then a narrow metal loop called a curette is used to scrape the walls of the uterus to make sure that it has been completely emptied. The saline method is used after the sixteenth week. It is an abortion where the baby is poisoned by a salt solution that is injected through the woman's abdomen into the amniotic sac. The baby is delivered, usually with an anesthetic that lessens the woman's pain to that of natural childbirth. Prostaglandin is used during the same timeframe as a saline abortion. Prostaglandin is a hormone that induces labor. In a prostaglandin abortion a synthetic version of the hormone is either injected into the amniotic sac or introduced as a vaginal suppository that causes violent labor and delivery of the baby, which is usually born alive because the drug doesn't kill it in the womb.