In this blog post, we take an in-depth look at which is more important: the right to life of the fetus or the mother’s right to self-determination in cases of abortion.
Carrying a life inside you and giving birth to a child who resembles you seems to be one of the most precious and happiest things in the world. However, the question of when a baby in the womb can be considered a living being has been a never-ending debate for a long time. Therefore, there are various opinions on when it is justified to have an abortion. In addition, there are persistent arguments that abortion should be justified in certain cases. Since I was young, I have believed that no life is insignificant and that abortion is not the right choice. However, after reading Jonathan Glover’s “Eugenics and Human Rights” in Hillary Putnam’s book, “The Genetic Revolution and Bioethics,” I began to think about abortion from a different perspective. I realized that there are situations in which abortion should not be condemned. Based on the book mentioned above, I would like to discuss the topic of abortion using the cases of Down syndrome and EB patients as examples to show that it is not a black-and-white issue. A fetus in the womb is a living being and has the right to be born, but that does not mean that we should oppose abortion. However, we should not support abortion based on the mother’s rights.
Unlike natural abortion, abortion is the termination of pregnancy by artificially opening the cervix. There are three main methods of abortion: curettage, manual vacuum aspiration, and suction curettage, which remove the conceptus from the uterus. Curettage is a surgical procedure in which the surface of the uterus is scraped with a curette, manual vacuum aspiration is a surgical procedure in which the conceptus is sucked out with a syringe using weak suction, and suction curettage is a surgical procedure in which a tube is connected to a suction machine to suck out the conceptus, which is more intense than manual vacuum aspiration and requires more equipment. Just hearing the names and descriptions of these procedures sounds cruel and horrific. So what are the reasons for abortion being permitted in our society today?
According to the Public Health Act, abortion is permitted in the following cases: 1. When there is a 10% or higher probability of the child being born with a hereditary physical illness or mental disorder with a tendency toward crime; 2. When there is an infectious disease; 3. When the pregnancy is the result of rape; 4. When the pregnancy is the result of a relationship that is not legally permitted to marry; 5. When the child would harm the health of the mother. Those who oppose abortion may be angered by the mere existence of such laws. This is because abortion, for whatever reason, is tantamount to killing a living being. Glover says that those who support abortion argue that mothers have the right to terminate their pregnancies, but if you think about it the other way around, the child in the womb also has the right to be born. Realizing that the issue of abortion must be viewed from the perspective of both the mother and the fetus, I began to change my mind about abortion.
I had always been against abortion, so I thought that a child in the womb should be born into this world no matter what. For example, even if prenatal testing revealed that a child would be born with a physical disability, I thought it was selfish to abort that child because the parents were the ones who created it and the child was not at fault. However, we should not simply oppose abortion. In “Eugenics and Human Rights,” there are two examples of couples who had children with disabilities. One child was born with Down syndrome, and the other was born with EB, an incurable disease, and died at 19 weeks after birth. In the former case, the couple had their child, but in the latter case, they considered abortion if there was even the slightest possibility of EB based on prenatal testing. I thought deeply about why one child was criticized for being aborted while the other was not, even though both children were born with diseases. Down syndrome is now well supported by welfare facilities, so there are no major obstacles to living with it. Recently, there are even women with Down syndrome who have overcome their condition and become models. However, EB patients live in pain every second of their lives from the moment they are born and die within a short time. Although they are born with the same disease, it is clearly different from children born with Down syndrome, who are born and learn only pain and suffering without seeing much light. It is also unbearable for parents who have no choice but to watch this situation. However, people with Down syndrome are also born with disabilities and face many difficulties. Therefore, it is very difficult to draw a clear line between cases where abortion is acceptable and cases where it is not, as some diseases are worth living with despite being congenital.
Nowadays, there are appropriate abortion procedures depending on the stage of pregnancy, and abortion is permitted in certain cases under the law, so abortion is no longer unconditionally opposed in our society. As we can see from the cases of EB and Down syndrome above, there are many factors to consider before deciding on abortion. Many factors must be considered, such as the mother and the fetus, and the value of the fetus’s life after birth. We cannot simply say that abortion is right or wrong. There are many shades of gray between black and white.
