Reasons for abortion

When is abortion legal?

Some societies ban abortion almost completely while others permit it in certain cases.

Such societies usually lay down a maximum age after which the foetus must not be aborted, regardless of the circumstances.

At various times some of the following have been allowed in some societies:

• abortion for the sake of the mother's health
  • including her mental health
• abortion where a pregnancy is the result of a crime
  • such as crimes like rape, incest, or child abuse
• abortion where the child of the pregnancy would have an ' unacceptable quality of life' such as cases where the child would have
  • serious physical handicaps,
  • serious genetic problems,
  • serious mental defects
• abortion for social reasons, including:
  • poverty,
  • mother unable to cope with a child (or another child),
  • mother being too young to cope with a child
• abortion as a matter of government policy
  • as a way of regulating population size
  • as a way of regulating groups within a population
  • as a way of improving the population

Most opponents of abortion agree that abortion for the sake of the mother's health can be morally acceptable if there is a real risk of serious damage to the mother.

Abortion for social reasons is usually least acceptable to opponents.

Birth control and disability

Abortion as a substitute for contraception

Some methods of contraception in fact amount to abortion during the very earliest stage of a pregnancy. This section only deals with abortion after the first week of pregnancy.

Some societies have used abortion as a substitute for adequate provision of contraception, or quite deliberately to regulate population size.

In 1965, a United Nations Conference on World Population in Belgrade said that abortion was the chief method of birth control in the world at that time.

Most western supporters of abortion rights do not support abortions carried out for such reasons - or at least not as explicit public policy.

However some doctors do argue that abortion should be part of a country's contraception policy.

They say that a society that believes that people should plan their families must allow women to end unwanted pregnancies, in order to deal with failures of birth control.

Abortion and disability

Some ethicists dislike the argument that abortion should be allowed where the baby, if born, would suffer from physical or mental handicaps.

They say that allowing this as a reason for abortion is offensive to disabled people; because it implies that they, and their lives, are less worthwhile than the lives of 'normal' people.

And some people with disabilities that could be put forward as grounds for abortion argue that they would much rather be alive than have been killed in the womb.

Section 1(1)d of the UK's 1967 Abortion Act allowed termination of a pregnancy at any time if there was a significant risk of the baby being born seriously disabled. Under other circumstances abortion has to take place during the first 6 months of the pregnancy.

The Disability Rights Commission criticised this section in the following words:

Other ethicists argue that whether or not people with disabilities are upset by this argument is irrelevant.

They say that the argument is wrong because it attacks the principle that all human beings are equally valuable in their own ways. They say that it is just plain wrong to say that one life is less valuable than another.

Other, pro-life, campaigners have objected to this argument on the grounds that it permits eugenic abortion - abortion to eliminate disabling genes from the human race.

Eugenics and gender selection

Abortion and eugenics

Abortion has been used in the past to stop the growth of population groups, or racial groups regarded as genetically 'inferior'. This is now regarded as a most serious breach of human rights and a criminal act.

Abortion has been used in the past to stop people with various genetic defects from having children. When this is done as a matter of public policy it is now regarded as a most serious breach of human rights and a criminal act.

Abortion and gender selection

In some countries, particularly India there is a major problem with female foeticide - deliberately aborting foetuses that would be born as girls.

For sociological and economic reasons parents in some cultures prefer to have boy babies. When parents can discover the gender of the foetus in advance, they sometimes request the termination of a pregnancy solely because the foetus is female.

While selective abortion for gender preference is illegal in India, the low proportion of female births relative to male births, together with other evidence, makes it certain that female foeticide is practised on a large scale.