The word “murder” has almost lost its meaning and is being used as a way to convict innocent people. An example of this is the trial of Brittney Poolaw. In an article by CBS news titled “Manslaughter conviction of 21-year-old Oklahoma woman sparks outcry” published in October 2021, last year Poolaw, a native American woman living in Oklahoma, was convicted of first-degree manslaughter and sentenced to 4 years in prison. Who did she kill? Her 4-month-old fetus, before they were born. Poolaw had a miscarriage. Her case received widespread media coverage with people being outraged but that’s only the tip of a blood-red iceberg. Poolaw has not been the only woman arrested and charged for having a miscarriage. The National Advocates for Pregnant Women recorded 1,600 cases, 1,200 of which happened in the past 15 years, from 1973 to 2022. If Brittney Poolaw had gotten an abortion she would not have been arrested since in the state of Oklahoma abortion is legal, yet that can all too suddenly change. The Supreme Court has ruled a near-total ban on abortion in Texas. If abortion was banned throughout the US it would lead to destruction. This means that if a woman experiences a miscarriage or stillbirth they can be accused of having an induced abortion and sent to jail for up to 20 years over something that can be out of their control. Abortion is not just needed but can be beneficial to our society and if it is banned it can cause harmful consequences. The argument to show this is first to unpack the court cases and laws that currently surround abortion, then look into both of the arguments, pro-choice or pro-life, then look at what our country may look like if abortion is completely banned and finally give a solution that has been proven to work.

The fight over abortion has gone on for centuries. In England during the 1800s abortion was a criminal offense. The Offenses Against the Person Act enacted in 1861was used to keep others from causing bodily harm to another person but was quickly shifted to accusing women who had an abortion or a miscarriage of harming their baby. As said in the paper written by professor Sally Sheldon titled “The Decriminalization of Abortion: An argument for moderation” in 2015 “we may have access to abortion through the healthcare system but the legal framework is still very misguided rooting its ideals in outdated regulation.” These ideas from Europe were soon embedded in the US. The first and most well-known court case over abortion was Roe v Wade 1973. In this case, the Central Court ruled that a fetus is not a person and that women had a constitutional right to an abortion. The only problem that Roe v Wade had was that the court also ruled that states could regulate abortion but only when the woman is in her second trimester. The case following Roe v Wade was Doe v Bolton which modified it to where states no longer had a say over abortion. These early court cases supported a woman's right to have an abortion but that all too quickly started to spiral down with Planned Parenthood v Danforth 1976. This case made it to where a woman needed informed consent to be allowed to have an abortion. The case that shattered it all was of the Texas Supreme Court which ruled that abortion would be almost completely illegal in the state of Texas. Texas is a largely religious and republican state; the arguments for abortion are as split as our country's political atmosphere. 

The debate over whether abortion should be illegal or legal is at an even divide. Social media platforms created and adopted the labels pro-choice and pro-life. Pro-life is the side against abortion; they believe that a fetus inside a woman's stomach is considered a person and alive so by having an abortion the baby is being killed. Pro-choice is on the complete opposite side arguing that women should have a choice on what they do with their bodies. Both sides have used the abortion debate as a way to bring others down and then give real facts. The biggest distance both sides have is their definition of life. In the essay “Defining the Abortion Debate” by Mary Alexander, A professor at NYU, published in Fall 1993 by the Institute of General Semantics, she shows how the debate we never find an end if people aren’t open-minded. “The Pro-life movement lives in the future tense and the Pro-choice movement lives in the present tense.” What this means is that people on the pro-life spectrum are only concerned with the next doctor or lawyer the baby could be but people who are pro-choice are worried about the mother, not the baby. A big assumption is that anyone who is pro-life is a Christian catholic. While the Catholic Church’s are big advocates for an abortion ban anyone can be on either side. Once we make assumptions about one group and use those as a reason to invalidate them then it makes having a well-drawn debate harder. Of course, politicians have made it harder to respect both sides of the argument with Donald Trump saying in his campaign “There should be some form of punishment for women having abortions” In Wall Street journalist James Taranto's paper “The Roe Effect” from 1980 he talks about the two arguments as “Nexus between the practice of abortion and the politics of abortion.” The argument has become a political plot rather than helping women. Politicians have used the abortion debate to receive more liberal voters. People's opinions deserve to be heard and people should be educated on facts not be talked down to. Once one side overcomes and ignores the other, there can be huge consequences.

In the Americas, abortion is legal throughout the North but in Latin America, they have much stricter laws and regulations against abortion. It creates a great example of what might happen to the US if we did the same. In Latin America 18 countries have abortion banned, 2 of which don’t allow abortion even if it threatens the mother's life, yet in others, abortion is only legal if the woman needs it because of medical issues or if they were raped. Harvard professor Jocelyn Veteran sheds a light on abortion in Latin America and how abortion bans not only negatively affect reproductive care but criminalize women who need it. With such strict bans on abortion, people assume that their abortion rates must be low but that is extremely false. In an article written by the National Library of Medicine titled “illegal abortion in Latin America,” there was a survey done in Chile and Colombia. The survey found that 1 in 3 induced abortions require hospitalization and throughout Latin America, there is an average of 15 dangerous abortions per 1000 healthy women. An estimated 3.4 million illegal abortions are performed annually in Latin America. In other countries where abortion isn’t banned such as the US, there were only 0.1 million induced abortions. As the bans on abortion become stricter in Latin America the higher the percentage of induced abortions. In a study created by the Guttmacher Institute called “Abortion in Latin America and the Caribbean” in 1990 induced abortion rates were 40% but then rose to 44% in 2014. That does not seem to be a lot but if that number continues to increase millions of women are putting themselves in danger.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, in the past 8 years,70% of women have committed suicide because of their pregnancy, most of them being adolescents. Our society and even our world can not go on like this and have innocent women being killed and criminalized. We need a solution but that can be hard. The best way to figure out a solution is to find the root of the problem. The reason for bans on abortion is to prevent women from doing so and to protect women’s babies/fetus but the statistics in countries where abortion is banned shows that there are even more abortions being performed. The book My body My choice: The fight for abortion rights published in 2019 and written by Robin Stevenson discusses the fight women around the world have taken to have their right to an abortion. In places such as Poland where abortion was banned women went to the streets to protest and in 3 days the government lifted the ban, as a result, the number of abortions went down. Quoted by Rebecca Gomperts, activist and founder of Women's Wave an organization helping women around the world have access to safe reproductive care, “It all started when I was working at Greenpeace as the ship’s doctor in countries where abortion was illegal. I’d seen a lot of women brought in severely bleeding or in shock because of illegal abortions, I realized there was a connection between the law and the fact women are dying.” In a survey done by the Pew Research center the number of US adults correlating opinions on abortion and education level from high school to college graduate. Between 50% and 68% thought abortion should be legal and only 30% to 40% thought abortion. A clear solution is that people need to be educated on what's happening to women around the world and how by having abortions be legal we in turn have fewer of them and fewer women dying.