Abortion

11 Pages 2663 Words

Abortion

During the past century, abortion has been one of the most passionately debated subjects of controversy in the US. Since the early decades of the 20th century, abortion was used as a measure of limiting families to a manageable size. In the old times, a poor man's only luxury was sex, and he was not about to "mar his instant pleasure [by using condoms or withdrawal] with prudence for the future" (Douglas, 30). Abortion was abused in early times as an extreme measure of birth control to avoid further poverty to families. Today, more than 50% of all abortions are given to women under the age of 22. Only half of the teenage girls who have sex use protection the first time. The average time between when a woman first has sex and the times she consults a clinician is six months (Shapiro, 172). Impulsive, ignorant, and irresponsible behavior often lead to unwanted pregnancy. Forcing a woman to raise an unwanted child is the ultimate form of child abuse, for the child will receive less of the loving maternal relationship she or he deserves. We cannot consider ourselves to be a humane culture and let our children be raised in a hostile environment. Abortion is a sad but necessary part of today's society.
There are two types of early term abortion procedures, surgical and non-surgical. The surgical procedure for early term abortions is sometimes called menstrual extraction or vacuum aspiration. With new technology and equipment, a pregnancy can be detected within days, allowing for a very early abortion. The first step in a surgical abortion is to use a sonagram to see if the pregnancy sac, about the size of a match head, can be detected. A local anesthesia is used, then the surgeon proceeds to dilate the cervix to about seven millimeters, about the diameter of a pencil, by inserting a series of plastic rods. He then uses a syringe to gently suction out the products of conception. The tissue is then examined on a glass dish at thre...