Disease: Legal abortion not only protects women's lives, it also protects their health. For tens of thousands of women with heart disease, kidney disease, severe hypertension, sickle-cell anemia and severe diabetes, and other illnesses that can be life-threatening, the availability of legal abortion has helped avert serious medical complications that could have resulted from childbirth. Before legal abortion, such women's choices were limited to dangerous illegal abortion or dangerous childbirth.
Finance: It is very expensive to raise a child. The parents must provide medical care, food, educational costs, living costs….many families are unable to afford such a heavy burden.
Circumstances: If a woman is raped should she have to have the baby? Rape victims suffer from immense emotional and in many cases physical trauma. Should such patients be forced to endure a very demanding 9 months of pregnancy.
Safety: To prohibit abortions does not stop them. When women feel it is absolutely necessary, they will choose to have abortions, even in secret, without medical care, in dangerous circumstances. In the two decades before abortion was legal in the U.S., it's been estimated that nearly a million women per year sought out illegal abortions. Thousands died. Tens of thousands were mutilated.
Age: The most common reasons that teens and young women choose to have an abortion include:
- Awareness that they are not mature enough to have a child.
- Knowledge that they are financially not able to support or care for a child.
- Concern that having a baby would change their lives and compromise their (and a child's) future-many young mothers don't ever manage to get the education and employment necessary to raise their child above the poverty line.
About 30% of pregnant teens in the USA choose to have an abortion. Either one or both of the parents are aware of the abortions in only 60% of these teens.
Forty percent of 14-year-old girls will become pregnant before they turn 20. Here are the critical questions: Should the penalty for lack of knowledge or even for a moment's carelessness be enforced pregnancy and childrearing? Or dangerous illegal abortion? Should we consign a teenager to a life sentence of joblessness, hopelessness, and dependency?